For personalized search, a user must provide her personal information. However, this sometimes includes the user's sensitive information about individuals such as health condition and private lifestyle. It is not sufficient just to protect the communication channel between user and service provider. Unfortunately, the collected personal data can potentially be misused for the service providers' commercial advantage (e.g. for advertising methods to target potential consumers). Our aim here is to protect user privacy by filtering out the sensitive information exposed from a user's query input at the system level. We propose a framework by introducing the concept of query generalizer. Query generalizer is a middleware that takes a query for personalized search, modifies the query to hide user's sensitive personal information adaptively depending on the user's privacy policy, and then forwards the modified query to the service provider. Our experimental results show that the best-performing query generalization method is capable of achieving a low traffic overhead within a reasonable range of user privacy. The increased traffic overhead varied from 1.0 to 3.3 times compared to the original query.

Parametric images can help investigate disease mechanisms and vital functions. To estimate parametric images, it is necessary to obtain the tissue time activity curves (tTACs), which express temporal changes of tracer activity in human tissue. In general, the tTACs are calculated from each voxel's value of the time sequential PET images estimated from dynamic PET data. Recently, spatio-temporal PET reconstruction methods have been proposed in order to take into account the temporal correlation within each tTAC. Such spatio-temporal algorithms are generally quite computationally intensive. On the other hand, typical algorithms such as the preconditioned conjugate gradient (PCG) method still does not provide good accuracy in estimation. To overcome these problems, we propose a new spatio-temporal reconstruction method based on the dynamic row-action maximum-likelihood algorithm (DRAMA). As the original algorithm does, the proposed method takes into account the noise propagation, but it achieves much faster convergence. Performance of the method is evaluated with digital phantom simulations and it is shown that the proposed method requires only a few reconstruction processes, thereby remarkably reducing the computational cost required to estimate the tTACs. The results also show that the tTACs and parametric images from the proposed method have better accuracy.