80.00.00 INTERDISCIPLINARY PHYSICS AND RELATED AREAS OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
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We present a level of detail method for trees based on ellipsoids and lines. We leverage the Expectation Maximization algorithm with a Gaussian Mixture Model to create a hierarchy of high-quality leaf clusterings, while the branches are simplified using agglomerative bottom-up clustering to preserve the connectivity. The simplification runs in a preprocessing step and requires no human interaction. For a fly by over and through a scene of 10k trees, our method renders on average at 40 ms/frame, up to 6 times faster than billboard clouds with comparable artifacts.
This thesis firstly presents a nonlinear extended deterministic model for the transmission dynamics of tuberculosis, based on realistic assumptions and data collected from the WHO. This model enables a comprehensive qualitative analysis of various aspects in the outbreak and control of tuberculosis in Sub-Saharan Africa countries and successfully reproduces the epidemiology of tuberculosis in Cameroon for the past (from 1994-2010). Some particular properties of the model and its solution have been presented using the comparison theorem applied to the theory of differential equations. The existence and the stability of a disease free equilibrium has been discussed using the Perron-Frobenius theorem and Metzler stable matrices.
Furthermore, we computed the basic reproduction number, i.e. the number of cases that one case generates on average over the course of its infectious period. Rigorous qualitative analysis of the model reveals that, in contrast to the model without reinfections, the full model with reinfection exhibits the phenomenon of backward bifurcation, where a stable disease-free equilibrium coexists with a stable endemic equilibrium when a certain threshold quantity, known as the basic reproduction ratio (R0), is less than unity. The global stability of the disease-free equilibrium has been discussed using the concepts of Lyapunov stability and bifurcation theory.
With the help of a sensitivity analysis using data of Cameroon, we identified the relevant parameters which play a key role for the transmission and the control of the disease. This was possible applying sophisticated numerical methods (POEM) developed at ZIB. Using advanced approaches for optimal control considering the costs for chemoprophylaxis, treatment and educational campaigns should provide a framework for designing realistic cost effective strategies with different intervention methods. The forward-backward sweep method has been used to solve the numerical optimal control problem. The numerical result of the optimal control problem reveals that combined effort in education and chemoprophylaxis may lead to a reduction of 80\% in the number of infected people in 10 years.
The mathematical and numerical approaches developed in this thesis could be similarly applied in many other Sub-Saharan countries where TB is a public health problem.
Quantitative photoacoustic tomography aims to recover maps of the local concentrations of tissue chromophores from multispectral images. While model-based inversion schemes are promising approaches, major challenges to their practical implementation include the unknown fluence distribution and the scale of the inverse problem. This paper describes an inversion scheme based on a radiance Monte Carlo model and an adjoint-assisted gradient optimization that incorporates fluence-dependent step sizes and adaptive moment estimation. The inversion is shown to recover absolute chromophore concentrations, blood oxygen saturation and the Grüneisen parameter from in silico 3D phantom images for different radiance approximations. The scattering coefficient was assumed to be homogeneous and known a priori.