<p>At the Skoghall pappermill, sulphatepaper pulp is produced in a continuous digester originally from 1969. To be able to maintain a high level of production there is a need for a process with few disturbances. Variations in how well the wooden chips are packed in the digester is one form of disturbance. Today there are no available measurements on how well the chips are packed. Instead this is regarded as being constant. </p><p>The variation in the so called bulk density of the chips is mainly due to variations in the percentage with small dimensions. Chips are classified in relation to their size and one of the smallest classes is referred to as pin chips. These are believed to have a big impact on the bulk density. The amount of pin chips fluctuate more then the other classes, there by causing disturbances. </p><p>The Skoghall pappermill has invested in a ScanChip. This is an instrument that measures the dimensions of the chips optically. ScanChip presents figures on chip quality, including a measurement of the bulk density. However, it has been shown that this measurement is not valid for the Skoghall pappermill. By using data from ScanChip a model that predicts how well the chips are packed has been devised. This value is the bulk density divided by the basic density. The model has proved to yield good results, despite a relatively small amount of data. </p><p>A theoretical value of the amount of produced pulp has been computed based on the revolutions of the production screw that feeds chips into the digester. This value takes in consideration how well the chips are packed. The value has shown great similarities with the empirical measurements that are used today. A simulation during one month has shown that differences in the mixture of chips have effected the measurement of produced pulp with up to 7 ton/h. </p><p>Chips are stored in open pile storages before they are being used in the process of transforming them into pulp. Four screws are used to move chips from the piles to conveyer belts. It has been shown in work done previously, that the movement of the screws contributes to variations in the amount of pin chips measured by ScanChip. </p><p>During the work with this master’s thesis I have found that there are variations in the piles that make it difficult to predict the amount of pin chips accordingly. However by filtering the measurements of pin chips to remove these variations, the results are improved. A new way of controlling the movements of the screws was operational on the 10 of March and this improved the results. </p><p>The direction in which the screws are moving influence the speed of the screws, mainly in the pile with the so called sawmill chips. By changing the amount of chips that each screw puts out, the differences in speed have been reduced. The mixtures found in the two piles are not completely homogenous. There are a greater amount of pin chips in the northern parts compared with the southern parts. This could be an effect of the wind direction, and will still cause variations.</p>

<p>Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) is a neuroimaging technique used to study brain functionality to enhance our understanding of the brain. This technique is based on MRI, a painless, noninvasive image acquisition method without harmful radiation. Small local blood oxygenation changes which are reflected as small intensity changes in the MR images are utilized to locate the active brain areas. Radio frequency pulses and a strong static magnetic field are used to measure the correlation between the physical changes in the brain and the mental functioning during the performance of cognitive tasks.</p><p>This master thesis presents approaches for the analysis of fMRI data. The constrained Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA) which is able to exploit the spatio-temporal nature of an active area is presented and tested on real human fMRI data. The actual distribution of active brain voxels is not known in the case of real human data. To evaluate the performance of the diagnostic algorithms applied to real human data, a modified Receiver Operating Characteristics (modified ROC) which deals with this lack of knowledge is presented. The tests on real human data reveal the better detection efficiency with the constrained CCA algorithm.</p><p>A second aim of this thesis was to implement the promising technique of constrained CCA into the software environment SPM. To implement the constrained CCA algorithms into the fMRI part of SPM2, a toolbox containing Matlab functions has been programmed for the further use by neurological scientists. The new SPM functionalities to exploit the spatial extent of the active regions with CCA are presented and tested.</p>

<p>This thesis investigates the possibility of improving black box fault diagnosis by a process called manifold learning, which simply stated is a way of finding patterns in recorded sensor data. The idea is that there is more information in the data than is exploited when using simple classification algorithms such as k-Nearest Neighbor and Support Vector Machines, and that this additional information can be found by using manifold learning methods. To test the idea of using manifold learning, data from two different fault diagnosis scenarios is used: A Scania truck engine and an electrical system called Adapt. Two linear and one non-linear manifold learning methods are used: Principal Component Analysis and Linear Discriminant Analysis (linear) and Laplacian Eigenmaps (non-linear).Some improvements are achieved given certain conditions on the diagnosis scenarios. The improvements for different methods correspond to the systems in which they are achieved in terms of linearity. The positive results for the relatively linear electrical system are achieved mainly by the linear methods Principal Component Analysis and Linear Discriminant Analysis and the positive results for the non-linear Scania system are achieved by the non-linear method Laplacian Eigenmaps.The results for scenarios without these special conditions are not improved however, and it is uncertain wether the improvements in special condition scenarios are due to gained information or to the nature of the cases themselves.</p>

<p>The thesis presents an investigation of the potential of measuring plant condition from hyperspectral reflectance data. To do this, some linear methods for embedding the high dimensional hyperspectral data and to perform regression to a plant condition space have been compared. A preprocessing step that aims at normalized illumination intensity in the hyperspectral images has been conducted and some different methods for this purpose have also been compared.A large scale experiment has been conducted where tobacco plants have been grown and treated differently with respect to watering and nutrition. The treatment of the plants has served as ground truth for the plant condition. Four sets of plants have been grown one week apart and the plants have been measured at different ages up to the age of about five weeks. The thesis concludes that there is a relationship between plant treatment and their leaves' spectral reflectance, but the treatment has to be somewhat extreme for enabling a useful treatment approximation from the spectrum. CCA has been the proposed method for calculation of the hyperspectral basis that is used to embed the hyperspectral data to the plant condition (treatment) space. A preprocessing method that uses a weighted normalization of the spectrums for illumination intensity normalization is concluded to be the most powerful of the compared methods.</p>

<p>This thesis aims at building a system capable of automatically extracting and parameterizing the position of a face and its features in images acquired from a low-end monocular camera. Such a challenging task is justified by the importance and variety of its possible applications, ranging from face and expression recognition to animation of virtual characters using video depicting real actors. The implementation includes the construction of Active Appearance Models of the human face from training images. The existing face model Candide-3 is used as a starting point, making the translation of the tracking parameters to standard MPEG-4 Facial Animation Parameters easy.</p><p>The Inverse Compositional Algorithm is employed to adapt the models to new images, working on a subspace where the appearance is "projected out" and thus focusing only on shape.</p><p>The algorithm is tested on a generic model, aiming at tracking different people’s faces, and on a specific model, considering one person only. In the former case, the need for improvements in the robustness of the system is highlighted. By contrast, the latter case gives good results regarding both quality and speed, with real time performance being a feasible goal for future developments.</p>

<p>The field of autonomous vehicle navigation and localization is a highly active research</p><p>topic. The aim of this thesis is to evaluate the feasibility to use outdoor visual navigation in a semi-structured environment. The goal is to develop a visual navigation system for an autonomous golf ball collection vehicle operating on driving ranges.</p><p>The image feature extractors SIFT and PCA-SIFT was evaluated on an image database</p><p>consisting of images acquired from 19 outdoor locations over a period of several weeks to</p><p>allow different environmental conditions. The results from these tests show that SIFT-type</p><p>feature extractors are able to find and match image features with high accuracy. The results also show that this can be improved further by a combination of a lower nearest neighbour threshold and an outlier rejection method to allow more matches and a higher ratio of correct matches. Outliers were found and rejected by fitting the data to a homography model with the RANSAC robust estimator algorithm. </p><p>A simulator was developed to evaluate the suggested system with respect to pixel noise from illumination changes, weather and feature position accuracy as well as the distance to features, path shapes and the visual servoing target image (milestone) interval. The system was evaluated on a total of 3 paths, 40 test combinations and 137km driven. The results show that with the relatively simple visual servoing navigation system it is possible to use mono-vision as a sole sensor and navigate semi-structured outdoor environments such as driving ranges.</p>

<p>The genus <i>Arnica</i> (Asteraceae) was investigated for phylogenetic relationships and sesquiterpene lactone (STL) content with the aims to trace the evolutionary history of the genus and to investigate possible congruencies between DNA sequence data, secondary chemistry, and biological activity. </p><p>Complex evolutionary patterns in <i>Arnica</i> are evident from phylogenetic analyses of chloroplast regions (the <i>rpl16</i> and <i>rps16</i> introns and the <i>psbA–trnH</i>, <i>ycf4–cemA</i>, and <i>trnT–L</i> spacers), nuclear ribosomal regions (the internal and external transcribed spacers) and the nuclear low-copy DNA region coding for the second largest subunit of RNA polymerase II (<i>RPB2</i>) between exons 17 and 23. Polymorphism was detected in nuclear ribosomal and low-copy regions<i>,</i> likely caused by polyploidy and agamospermy. Lineage sorting and/or hybridization is a possible explanation for incongruencies between topologies of the different DNA regions. None of the five subgenera in <i>Arnica</i> constitute a monophyletic group according to any of our analyses. </p><p>Sesquiterpene lactone profiles were compared to nuclear ribosomal DNA data using phylogenetic inference and principal component analysis for 33 accessions of 16 species. Clusters supported by both STL chemistry and ribosomal DNA sequence data consist of multiple accessions of the same species (e.g.<i> A montana </i>and<i> A. longifolia</i>), indicating that these species are well defined both genetically and chemically, based on our sampling. Support for subspecies classification of <i>A. chamissonis</i> and <i>A. parryi</i> was found in chemical data. For the first time STLs are reported from subtribe Madiinae, sister to Arniciinae.</p><p>Anti-inflammatory properties, as measured by inhibition of human neutrophil elastase release from neutrophils and inhibition of the binding of transcription factor NF-κB to DNA, were investigated for extracts of 12 <i>Arnica</i> species. <i>Arnica montana</i>, <i>A. chamissonis</i> and <i>A. longifolia</i> accessions show high inhibitory effects in both bioassays. Generally, species with a more diverse STL chemistry also possess the strongest inhibitory activity in the bioassays.</p>

Every year approximately 2800 Swedes are diagnosed with malignant melanoma, the form of cancer that is most rapidly increasing in incidence in the Western world. The earlier we can identify and diagnose a malignant melanoma, the better is the prognosis. In Sweden, 155 000 benign naevi, harmless skin tumours or moles, are surgically excised each year, many of them because melanoma cannot be dismissed by non-invasive methods. The excisions result in substantial medical costs and cause unrest and suffering of the individual patient. For untrained physicians, it is often difficult to make an accurate diagnosis of melanoma, thus a tool that could help to strengthen the diagnosis of suspected melanomas would be highly valuable. This thesis describes the development and assessment of a non-invasive method for early skin cancer detection. Using near infrared (NIR) and skin impedance spectroscopy, healthy and diseased skin of various subjects was examined to develop a new instrument for detecting malignant melanoma. Due to the complex nature of skin and the numerous variables involved, the spectroscopic data were analysed multivariately using Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and partial leas square discriminant analysis (PLS-DA). The reproducibility of the measurements was determined by calculating Scatter Values (SVs), and the significance of separations between overlapping groups in score plots was determined by calculating intra-model distances. The studies indicate that combining skin impedance and NIR spectroscopy measurements adds value, therefore a new probe-head for simultaneous NIR and skin impedance measurements was introduced. Using both spectroscopic techniques it was possible to separate healthy skin at one body location from healthy skin at another location due to the differences in skin characteristics at various body locations. In addition, statistically significant differences between overlapping groups of both age and gender in score plots were detected. However, the differences in skin characteristics at different body locations had stronger effects on the measurements than both age and gender. Intake of coffee and alcohol prior to measurement did not significantly influence the outcome data. Measurements on dysplastic naevi were significantly separated in a score plot and the influence of diseased skin was stronger than that of body location. This was confirmed in a study where measurements were performed on 12 malignant melanomas, 19 dysplastic naevi and 19 benign naevi. The malignant melanomas were significantly separated from both dysplastic naevi and benign naevi. Overall, the presented findings show that the instrument we have developed provides fast, reproducible measurements, capable of distinguishing malignant melanoma from dysplastic naevi and benign naevi non-invasively with 83% sensitivity and 95% specificity. Thus, the results are highly promising and the instrument appears to have high potential diagnostic utility.

The genus Arnica (Asteraceae) was investigated for phylogenetic relationships and sesquiterpene lactone (STL) content with the aims to trace the evolutionary history of the genus and to investigate possible congruencies between DNA sequence data, secondary chemistry, and biological activity. Complex evolutionary patterns in Arnica are evident from phylogenetic analyses of chloroplast regions (the rpl16 and rps16 introns and the psbA–trnH, ycf4–cemA, and trnT–L spacers), nuclear ribosomal regions (the internal and external transcribed spacers) and the nuclear low-copy DNA region coding for the second largest subunit of RNA polymerase II (RPB2) between exons 17 and 23. Polymorphism was detected in nuclear ribosomal and low-copy regions, likely caused by polyploidy and agamospermy. Lineage sorting and/or hybridization is a possible explanation for incongruencies between topologies of the different DNA regions. None of the five subgenera in Arnica constitute a monophyletic group according to any of our analyses. Sesquiterpene lactone profiles were compared to nuclear ribosomal DNA data using phylogenetic inference and principal component analysis for 33 accessions of 16 species. Clusters supported by both STL chemistry and ribosomal DNA sequence data consist of multiple accessions of the same species (e.g. A montana and A. longifolia), indicating that these species are well defined both genetically and chemically, based on our sampling. Support for subspecies classification of A. chamissonis and A. parryi was found in chemical data. For the first time STLs are reported from subtribe Madiinae, sister to Arniciinae. Anti-inflammatory properties, as measured by inhibition of human neutrophil elastase release from neutrophils and inhibition of the binding of transcription factor NF-κB to DNA, were investigated for extracts of 12 Arnica species. Arnica montana, A. chamissonis and A. longifolia accessions show high inhibitory effects in both bioassays. Generally, species with a more diverse STL chemistry also possess the strongest inhibitory activity in the bioassays.

This thesis deals with methological issues in the study of chemical exposure and sick building syndrome (SBS). SBS is a combination of general, mucosal and skin symptoms that some people experience when staying in specific buildings. The aim was to find chemical patterns associated with SBS, but also to address methological problems in such study. The plan was to conduct a case-control study comparing the two groups’ chemical exposure, where cases were defined as those having at least one general, one mucosal and one skin symptom each week the last three months. For the planning it was necessary to know if cases and controls could be selected from the same building. If everyone in a building have the same chemical exposure it is no use to compare exposure between two persons at the same workplace. In the first paper exposure to more than 100 compounds is compared between 79 participants working in eight buildings. It was found that for the majority of compounds the variation in exposure was larger within buildings than between buildings, which means that cases and controls could be allowed to work in the same building. The second paper is a comparison of three adsorbents usability in finding differences in chemical exposure between SBS cases and controls. This was done by using chemometrical methods but comparisons of sampled amounts, blank values and reproducibility were also done. Tenax TA was found to be the best adsorbent, hence used in the case-control study. In recent years ozone and ozone reaction products with unsaturated volatile organic compounds (VOCs) has been in focus. Nitrogen dioxide is another gas affecting oxidation of reactive VOCs. Formaldehyde is an irritant formed when unsaturated VOCs are oxidised, and in some studies a relation with SBS has been found. In paper three the relation between personal exposure to formaldehyde, nitrogen dioxide, ozone, terpenes and SBS has been investigated among more than 200 office workers in a case control study in Umeå and Vasa. Cases (based on symptoms during the week of measurements) had lower ozone exposure than controls. No further associations were found at present exposure levels. A planed analysis of relations to VOCs could not be done due to analytical problems, and problems due to difficulties with consistent identification of compounds in a very large data set. These problems are further discussed in the thesis. In the case-control, study participants answered questionnaires about symptoms during "the past three months", "right now" (when answering the questionnaire), and during the week of exposure measurements. In the fourth paper the stability of symptoms were compared by answers at different occasions. It was found that the case/control concept was as stable as individual symptoms. More participants with atopic disease and those 41 years old or younger changed class compared with those without atopic disease and older participants. Measurement activities appeared to make participants report more symptoms. Fatigue, dry eyes and dry skin are suggested to be symptoms with strongest, and illness/dizziness to be weakest association with IAQ. / KLUCK-projektet