BioLink Life Sciences

Within the recent years, the concept of Digital Twins (DT) emerged to support digital engineering physical-systems design in the processing and analysis of device components, data flows, and networked systems. As an element of systems engineering, the DT serves as a method for life cycle management for operations and maintenance through monitoring, diagnostics, and prognostics. Key to DT methods is the use of distributed sensors to monitor the system and determine the functioning with the use of physical design information, such as a series of distributed edge sensors and the layout of a physical electrical grid. While industries like industrial manufacturing, electrical power, space systems, and healthcare maintenance have embraced DT; other groups are utilizing the concept for analysis. Given that a large number of sensors are used to gather data on the health of system, it is natural that data fusion, estimation theory, and signals processing support digital twin fusion (DTwF); but there are a variety of challenges such as big data, distribution fusion, and edge analytics. The panel will discuss areas in which data and information fusion techniques enhance DT applications.

During the 2015 SPIE DSS conference, nine panelists were invited to highlight the trends and use of context for information fusion. This paper highlights the common issues and trends presented from the panel discussion. The different panelists highlighted methods of filtering methods, data aggregation, and the importance of context for realtime analytics. Using the panelist perspectives, the review organizes the common issues and themes as well areas of future analysis of content and context enrichment from information fusion.

A two-year-old intact female collie presented with a tentative diagnosis of systemic blastomycosis based on compatible clinical signs and history and a positive urine Blastomyces antigen enzyme immunoassay. The dog was subsequently correctly diagnosed with protothecosis based on ocular and paw pad histopathology and in vitro culture of Prototheca wickerhamii from paw pad tissue. Histopathology revealed organisms in deep tissue samples as well as in the epidermis and superficial keratin layers of the paw pad. Serum (1→3)-β-d-glucan testing was negative. The dog was treated with terbinafine based on in vitro susceptibility results. There are no previous reports of terbinafine use for the treatment of canine protothecosis. Neurological and gastrointestinal symptoms remained stable with terbinafine. While there was an overall improvement in cutaneous lesions and attitude over the course of eight weeks on treatment, the animal did not survive despite therapy.

Even though the definition of the Joint Director of Laboratories (JDL) were established in 1987, published 1991, revised in 1999 and 2004, the meaning, effects, control and optimization of interactions among the fusion levels have not as yet been fully explored and understood. Specifically, this is apparent from the abstract JDL definitions of 2/3 Fusion - situation and threat assessment (SA/TA), which involve deriving relations among entities, e.g., the aggregation of object states (i.e., classification and location) in SA, while TA uses SA products to estimate/predict the impact of actions/interactions effects on situations taken by the participant entities involved. Given all the existing knowledge in the information fusion and human factors literature, (both prior to and after the introduction of in 1987) there are still open questions remaining in regard to implementation of knowledge representation and reasoning methods under uncertainty to afford SA/TA. Therefore, to promote exchange of ideas and to illuminate the historical, current and future issues associated with Levels 2/3 implementations, leading experts were invited to present their respective views on various facets of this complex problem. This paper is a retrospective annotated view of the invited panel discussion organized by Ivan Kadar (first author), supported by John Salerno, in order to provide both a historical perspective of the evolution of the state-of-the-art (SOA) in higher-level 2/3 information fusion implementations by looking back over the past ten or more years (before JDL), and based upon the lessons learned to forecast where focus should be placed to further enhance and advance the SOA by addressing key issues and challenges. In order to convey the panel discussion to audiences not present at the panel, annotated position papers summarizing the panel presentation are included.

Sensor Resource Management (or process refinement) is a element of any information fusion system. Common Level 4 sensor management (SM) inter-relations to Level 1 target tracking and identification have been developed in the literature. During Fusion06, a panel discussion was held to explore the challenges and issues pertaining to the interaction between SM and situation and threat assessment. This paper summarizes the key tenants of the discussion to filter vast experiences of the invited panel experts. The common themes were: (1) Addressing the user in system management / control, (2) Determining a standard set of metrics for optimization, (3) Optimizing / evaluating fusion systems to deliver timely information needs, (4) Dynamic updating for planning mission time-horizons, (5) Joint optimization of objective functions at all levels (6) L2/3 situation entity definitions for knowledge discovery, modeling, and information projection (7) Addressing constraints for resource planning and scheduling

This paper serves both as introduction to and motivation for the panel, and as a position paper to highlight retrospectives and perspectives on issues and challenges of levels 2/3 fusion implementations by presenting an independent annotated point of view.

We propose the definition and analysis of the optimal integral similarity score criterion for large scale multmodal civil ID systems. Firstly, the general properties of score distributions for genuine and impostor matches for different systems and input devices are investigated. The empirical statistics was taken from the real biometric tests. Then we carry out the analysis of simultaneous score distributions for a number of combined biometric tests and primary for ultiple fingerprint solutions. The explicit and approximate relations for optimal integral score, which provides the least value of the FRR while the FAR is predefined, have been obtained. The results of real multiple fingerprint test show good correspondence with the theoretical results in the wide range of the False Acceptance and the False Rejection Rates.

The Multi-source Report-level Simulator (MRS) is a tool developed by Veridian Systems as part of its Model-adaptive Multi-source Track Fusion (MMTF) effort under DARPA's DTT program. MRS generates simulated multisensor contact reports for GMTI, HUMINT, IMINT, SIGINT, UGS, and video. It contains a spatial editor for creating ground tracks along which vehicles move over the terrain. Vehicles can start, stop, speed up, or slow down. The spatial editor is also used to define the locations of fixed sensors such as UGS and HUMINT observers on the ground, and flight paths of GMTI, IMINT, SIGINT, and video sensors in the air. Observation models characterize each sensor at the report level in terms of their operating characteristics (revisit rate, resolution, etc.) measurement errors, and detection/classification performance (i.e., Pd, Nfa, Pcc, and Pid). Contact reports are linked to ground truth data to facilitate the testing of track/fusion algorithms and the validation of associated performance models.© (2003) COPYRIGHT SPIE--The International Society for Optical Engineering. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.