In the medical field, the identification of skin cancer (Malignant Melanoma) in dermoscopy images is still a challenging task for radiologists and researchers. Due to its rapid increase, the need for decision support systems to assist the radiologists to detect it in early stages becomes essential and necessary. Computer Aided Diagnosis (CAD) systems have significant potential to increase the accuracy of its early detection. Typically, CAD systems use various types of features to characterize skin lesions. The features are often concatenated into one vector (early fusion) to represent the image. In this paper, we present a novel method for melanoma detection from images. First the lesions are segmented by combining Particle Swarm Optimization and Markov Random Field methods. Then the K-means is applied on the segmented lesions to separate them into homogeneous clusters, from which important features are extracted. Finally, an Artificial Neural Network with Radial Basis Function is applied for the detection of melanoma. The method was tested on 200 dermoscopy images. The experimental results show that the proposed method achieved higher accuracy in terms of melanoma detection, compared to alternative methods.

Abstract—Early detection of malignant melanoma skin cancer is crucial for treating the disease and saving lives. Many computerized techniques have been reported in the literature to diagnose and classify the disease with satisfactory skin cancer detection performance. However, reducing the false detection rate is still challenging and preoccupying because false positives trigger the alarm and require intervention by an expert pathologist for further examination and screening. In this paper, an automatic skin cancer diagno- sis system that combines different textural and color features is proposed. New textural and color features are used in a bag-of-features approach for efficient and accurate detection. We particularly claim that the Histogram of Gradients (HG) and the Histogram of Lines (HL) are more suitable for the analysis and clas- sification of dermoscopic and standard skin images than the conventional Histogram of Oriented Gradient (HOG) and the Histogram of Oriented Lines (HOL), respectively. The HG and HL are bagged separately us- ing a codebook for each and then combined with other bagged color vector angles and Zernike moments to exploit the color information. The overall system has been assessed through intensive experiments using different classifiers on a dermoscopic image dataset and another standard dataset. Experimental results have shown the superiority of the proposed system over state-of-the-art techniques.

Leishmania pyrimidine salvage is replete with opportunities for therapeutic intervention with enzyme inhibitors or antimetabolites. Their uptake into cells depends upon specific transporters; therefore it is essential to establish whether various Leishmania species possess similar pyrimidine transporters capable of drug uptake. Here, we report a comprehensive characterization of pyrimidine transport in L. major and L. mexicana. In both species, two transporters for uridine/adenosine were detected, one of which also transported uracil and the antimetabolites 5-fluoruracil (5-FU) and 5F,2'deoxyuridine (5F,2'dUrd), and was designated uridine-uracil transporter 1 (UUT1); the other transporter mediated uptake of adenosine, uridine, 5F,2'dUrd and thymidine and was designated Nucleoside Transporter 1 (NT1). To verify the reported L. donovani model of two NT1-like genes encoding uridine/adenosine transporters, and an NT2 gene encoding an inosine transporter, we cloned the corresponding L. major and L. mexicana genes, expressing each in T. brucei. Consistent with the L. donovani reports, the NT1-like genes of either species mediated the adenosine-sensitive uptake of [3H]-uridine but not of [3H]-inosine. Conversely, the NT2-like genes mediated uptake of [3H]-inosine but not [3H]-uridine. Among pyrimidine antimetabolites tested, 5-FU and 5F,2'dUrd were the most effective antileishmanials; resistance to both analogs was induced in L. major and L. mexicana. In each case it was found that the resistant cells had lost the transport capacity for the inducing drug. Metabolomics analysis found that the mechanism of action of 5-FU and 5F-2'dUrd was similar in both Leishmania species, with major changes in deoxynucleotide metabolism. We conclude that the pyrimidine salvage system is highly conserved in Leishmania species - essential information for the development of pyrimidine-based chemotherapy.

Malignant melanoma is one of the most rapidly increasing cancers globally and it is the most dangerous form of human skin cancer. Dermoscopy is one of the major imaging modalities used in the diagnosis of melanoma. Early detection of melanoma can be helpful and usually curable. Due to the difficulty for dermatologists in the interpretation of dermoscopy images, Computer Aided Diagnosis systems can be very helpful to facilitate the early detection. The automated detection of the lesion borders is one of the most important steps in dermoscopic image analysis. In this paper, we present a fully automated method for melanoma border detection using image processing techniques. The hair and several noises aredetected and removed by applying a bank of directional filters and Image Inpainting method respectively. A hybrid method is developed by combining Particle Swarm Optimization and Markov Random Field methods, in order to delineate the border of the lesion area in the images. The method was tested on a dataset of 200 dermoscopic images, and the experimental results show that our method is superior in terms of the accuracy of drawing the lesion borders compared to alternative methods.

The current paper proposes a novel scheme for non-blind watermarking of images, making use of discrete wavelet transform (DWT), discrete time Fourier transform (DTFT), as well as singular value decomposition, or SVD. During the process of embedding, 1-level DWT is used to decompose the host image into its various frequency sub-bands. After this, the high-frequency sub band receives an application of DTFT. This is followed then by SVD, after which the watermark becomes embedded into the now-transformed host image's singular matrix. Then, the inverses of 1-level DWT, DTFT and SVD are applied in order to obtain a watermarked final image. This paper evaluates the performance of the proposed method of watermarking against a number of attacks, including sharpening, salt and pepper noise, AWGN, gamma correction, histogram equalisation, flipping and cropping. Results obtained during experiments have found that the scheme as proposed does provide high levels of robustness and imperceptibility against various signal processing attacks.

With regard to oil production in Libya, the following instruments are particularly important:

- Sustainability guidelines

- Risk analyses

- Eco-efficiency analyses

- Balanced scorecards -

Key sustainability criteria (KPI)

- Certification systems

Sustainability consists of the balance between economic efficiency/economics on the one hand and ecology/environmental compatibility on the other. 15 Sustainable energy systems are always geared to demand. Energy is just one resource among many.

Employees, raw materials, knowledge, etc. are also important resources that need to be managed sustainably and a balance found. A system that is only one-sidedly focused on profit maximization or social compatibility