This letter presents a method to extract vascular structures from magnetic resonance angiography (MRA) volumes based on the geometric variational principle. A minimal function is coupled with flux maximizing geometric flows and the geodesic active surface model while the geometrical description of vessel structure is added. Furthermore, the level set method represents the surface evolution as it is intrinsic and topologically flexible.

Routing efficiency is the critical issue when constructing peer-to-peer overlay. However, Chord has often been criticized on its careless of routing locality. A routing efficiency enhancement protocol on top of Chord is illustrated in this paper, which is called PChord. PChord aims to achieve better routing efficiency than Chord by exploiting proximity of the underlying network topology. The simulation shows that PChord has achieved lower RDP per message routing.

Changes in recent business and scientific environment have created a necessity for more efficient and effective workflow infrastructure. With increasing emphasis on Service-oriented architecture, service composition becomes a hot topic in workflow research. This paper proposes a novel approach of using ECA rules to realize the workflow modeling and implementation for service composition. First of all, the concept and formalization of ECA rule-based workflow is presented. Special activities and data structures are customized for the purpose of service composition. Second, an automatic event composition and decomposition algorithm is developed to ensure the correctness and validness of service composition at design time. Finally, the proposed ECA rule-based approach for service composition is illustrated through the implementation of a workflow prototype system.

The computational grid provides a promising platform for the deployment of various high-performance computing applications. Problem in implementing computational grid environments is how to effectively use various resources in the system, such as CPU cycle, memory, communication network, and data storage. There are many effective heuristic algorithms for scheduling in the computational grid, however most scheduling strategies have no theoretical guarantee at all. In this paper, a cost-based online scheduling algorithm is presented for job assignment in the grid environment with theoretical guarantee. Firstly, a scheduling framework is described, where the grid environment is characterized, and the online job model is defined. Secondly, the cost-based online scheduling algorithm is presented where costs of resources are exponential functions of their loads, and the performance of this algorithm is theoretically analyzed against the performance of the optimal offline algorithm. Finally, we implement the algorithm in the grid simulation environment, and compare the performance of the presented algorithm with the other three algorithms, and experimental results indicate that the cost-based online scheduling algorithm can outperform the other three online algorithms.