New Releases by Hoang Nguyen

A concise introduction to the core concepts in digital communication, providing clarity and depth through examples, problems and MATLAB exercises.

Hair occlusion often causes automated melanoma diagnostic systems to fail. We present a new method to segment hair in dermoscopic images. First, all possible dark and light hairs are amplified without prejudice with a universal matched filtering kernel. We then process the filter response with a novel tracing algorithm to get a raw hair mask. This raw mask is skeletonized to contain only the centerlines of all the possible hairs. Then the centerlines are verified by applying a model checker on the response and the original images. If a centerline indeed corresponds to a hair, the hair is reconstructed; otherwise it is rejected. The result is a clean hair mask which can be used to disocclude hair. Application on real dermoscopic images yields good results for thick hair of varying colours. The algorithm also performs well on skin images with a mixture of both dark and light hair.

Economists, industry practitioners, and government officials have failed to observe the significance of mortgage fraud as an inherent problem related to the subprime mortgage crisis. Relying on intensive interviews with 23 subjects, previously and currently employed in the subprime lending industry, government reports, media accounts, and a variety of secondary sources, this study traces the exponential growth of mortgage fraud to loose underwriting standards, alternative loan products, and inadequate regulation and regulatory oversight of the subprime mortgage industry. The research findings detail and describe various types of financial crimes that constitute a modern form of mortgage fraud; unlike their traditional counterpart, contemporary mortgage fraud contain elements of both fraud for profit and fraud for property. Various types and patterns of mortgage fraud - "data manipulation," "data fabrication," and "concerted ignorance"--Completely altered the function of the subprime industry. Toward this end, the industry operated not only to provide bad loans to bad credit borrowers but also to provide bad loans to bad credit borrowers who fully lacked the ability to repay the loans. The social and economic implications of fraud are also explored in light of the findings. From a policy perspective, future fraud prevention and intervention strategies should incorporate a multi-faceted approach that includes strict underwriting standards, regulatory oversight, accountability, and mandatory continuous education for loan practitioners.

Purpose: To evaluate the changes in retention of pink Locator attachments after exposure to various denture cleansers...

From Illustrator, Character Designer and Comic Artist Hoang Nguyen. Hoang''s gorgeously evocative paintings are on display here in all their glory, as well as his comic book artwork.

When developing new techniques to analyze neuro-chemical microenvironments, it is important to realize the incredible variability in the cellular content and the response to stimulation between cells and within a single cell. Conventional analysis techniques yield an average result to describe the content and function of cells. This approach often misses important information since the onset of pathological conditions is always initiated in a small number of cells. New minimally invasive single cell analysis techniques are required for single cell studies in order to gain new insights and understanding of cells2 functions. The objective of my Ph. D. study was to fabricate, characterize, and apply submicrometric fluorescence sensors for the analysis of neuron cells. This dissertation will report the fabrication of miniaturized fluorescence sensors for Ca2+, pH and Zn2+ analysis. In the first approach, liposomes (phospholipid vesicles) were used as miniaturized containers for fluorescent sensing reagents. Liposome-based fluorescence sensing technology offers several advantages over commonly used fluorescence sensing techniques including high spatial resolution, protection of the sensing dye from quenchers and high biocompatibility. However, liposome based sensors were found to be unstable in the cellular environment. The second approach was to synthesize submicrometric particle-based fluorescence sensors named lipobeads to replace the fluorescent liposomes in cellular studies. Lipobeads are polystyrene particles that are coated with a phospholipid membrane. One unique advantage of fluorescent sensing lipobeads is the ability to immobilize hydrophobic indicator molecules in the phospholipid membrane. This enables the use of these indicators in aqueous media since the lipobeads are fully water miscible. The lipobeads also proved to be highly biocompatible in cellular studies. This is attributed to their phospholipid bilayer membrane, which is similar in structure to cell membranes. The dissertation will describe the analytical properties of fluorescence sensing lipobeads and their application in studying zinc ion release and pH changes near neuron cells under physiological conditions, conditions of neuronal injury and stress and acidic cortical spreading depression during stroke like conditions.