Contamination of pistachio nuts by aflatoxigenic strains of Aspergillus species is the greatest constraint to production and export of pistachio nuts in Iran, the leading producer of pistachio nuts in the world. Kerman province is the main region in Iran where 85%, of pistachio nuts are produced. Determining the population density of Aspergillus spores in the orchards and terminals which are th...

In this paper we propose a modified morphological corner detection method which finds convex and concave significant points using simple integer computation. We use the morphological peak extractor to detect convex corners and use a modified valley extractor to detect concave corners. Moreover, information of the distances between pixels on the boundary segment determined by two contiguous sign...

There is no generally accepted procedure for identifying ultradian pulsations in hormonal time series. We suggest an approach based on removing long-term trends, such as diurnal rhythms, from the series of observations; identifying peaks in the residual series; and resolving each peak, if appropriate, into overlapping secretory episodes. The first step uses a robust smoothing technique to gener...

AIM Intervention fidelity refers to the degree to which an experimental manipulation has been implemented as intended, but simple, robust methods for quantifying fidelity have not been well documented. Therefore, we aim to illustrate a rigorous quantitative evaluation of intervention fidelity, using data collected during a high-intensity interval training intervention. DESIGN Single-group mea...

In this work, the use of binary amplitude holography is investigated as a mechanism to focus broadband acoustic pulses generated by high peak-power pulsed lasers. Two algorithms are described for the calculation of the binary holograms; one using ray-tracing, and one using an optimization based on direct binary search. It is shown using numerical simulations that when a binary amplitude hologra...

BACKGROUND Although acupuncture is effective for treating several conditions, its site specificity is questionable. OBJECTIVE To investigate whether acupuncture influences the brainstem auditory evoked potentials (BAEP). METHODS 10 healthy volunteers were enrolled according to inclusion criteria. One of four acupuncture points-TE3, GB43 (both auditory system-specific, according to tradition...

In this paper a novel multilevel thresholding method is proposed based on selecting the consistent peak of correlation function over the interested histogram region. The histogram is separated into two more regions up to the cost function is reached minimum. In the separation process of the histogram, a novel dichotomisation method is used. In general, correlation function of an image histogram...