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One of the major areas of medical research is the design and implementation of intelligent decision support systems for medical professionals. In this context, digital medical image analysis plays an important role in building computational tools to assist physicians in quantification and visualization of pathology and anatomical structures. Such tools will help the medial community to diagnose disorders and treat patients more effectively than before. Digital fundus images are the images of the fundus occuli acquired using a fundus camera where the optic system of the camera is connected to a CCD. The visible part of the image consists of the retina with its vascular network and the optic nerve head. Study of digital fundus images is important in relation to the diagnosis of diabetic retinopathy (DR), a leading cause of blindness among diabetic patients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Locating the Optic Disc (OD) is of critical importance in a retinal analysis system. This paper presents a fast algorithm for the automatic localization of OD in digital fundus retinal images. OD localization follows the Blood Vessel Detection (BVD). A morphology based approach is proposed for BVD. OD is localized by exploiting the property that it is a bright region and the density of blood vessels is high in this region. The algorithm has been tested on 100 normal and 480 diseased retinal images achieving success rates 100% and 93.75% with average execution times of 9 seconds and 17 seconds respectively, thereby demonstrating the speed, robustness and accuracy of the proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the major efforts for standardising of service capabilities rather than standardising the services in UMTS is to achieve service differentiation and system continuity. While pre-UMTS systems thrived on the ability to access services in a same manner when user roamed, these new deregulation efforts of services will pose some problems in provisioning of services across networks. The concept of the virtual home environment (VHE) addresses problems like this but does not rigidly specify how services can be deployed. This contribution will discuss how agent technology can be applied for designing a service provisioning architecture based on the VHE concept. More importantly, the paper will focus on the importance of service inter-working for supplementing service functionality and discuss how agent communication based on FIPA2 ACL standard can be used to overcome this issue. Finally, the paper will discuss the design and implementation of a middleware known as a common communication module (CCM) used by service components on the network and the mobile nodes to perform ACL communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]