Abstract
Optical properties of biological tissues are unique and may be used for tissue identification, tissue discrimination or even to identify pathologies. Early stage colorectal cancer evolves from adenomatous polyps that arise in the inner layer of the colorectal tube - the mucosa. The identification of different optical properties between healthy and pathological colorectal tissues might be used to identify different tissue components and to develop an early stage diagnosis method using optical technologies. Since most of the biomedical optics techniques use light within the visible and near infrared wavelength ranges, we used the inverse adding-doubling method to make a fast estimation of the optical properties of colorectal mucosa and early stage adenocarcinoma between 400 and 1000 nm. The estimated wavelength dependencies have provided information about higher lipid content in healthy mucosa and higher blood content in pathological tissue. Such data has also indicated that the wavelength dependence of the scattering coefficient for healthy mucosa is dominated by Rayleigh scattering and for pathological mucosa it is dominated by Mie scattering. Such difference indicates smaller scatterer size in healthy mucosa tissue. Such information can now be used to develop new diagnosis or treatment methods for early cancer detection or removal. One possibility is to use optical clearing technique to improve tissue transparency and create localized and temporary tissue dehydration for image contrast improvement during diagnosis or polyp laser removal. Such techniques can now be developed based on the different results that we have found for healthy and pathological colorectal mucosa.

Abstract
Colorectal carcinoma is a major health concern worldwide and its high incidence and mortality require accurate screening methods. Following endoscopic examination, polyps must be removed for histopathological characterization. Aiming to contribute to the improvement of current endoscopy methods of colorectal carcinoma screening or even for future development of laser treatment procedures, we studied the diffusion properties of glucose and water in colorectal healthy and pathological mucosa. These parameters characterize the tissue dehydration and the refractive index matching mechanisms of optical clearing (OC). We used ex vivo tissues to measure the collimated transmittance spectra and thickness during treatments with OC solutions containing glucose in different concentrations. These time dependencies allowed for estimating the diffusion time and diffusion coefficient values of glucose and water in both types of tissues. The measured diffusion times for glucose in healthy and pathological mucosa samples were 299.2 +/- 4.7 s and 320.6 +/- 10.6 s for 40% and 35% glucose concentrations, respectively. Such a difference indicates a slower glucose diffusion in cancer tissues, which originate from their ability to trap far more glucose than healthy tissues. We have also found a higher free water content in cancerous tissue that is estimated as 64.4% instead of 59.4% for healthy mucosa. (C) 2017 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE)

Abstract
The optical dispersion and water content of human liver were experimentally studied to estimate the optical dispersions of tissue scatterers and dry matter. Using temporal measurements of collimated transmittance [T-c(t)] of liver samples under treatment at different glycerol concentrations, free water and diffusion coefficient (D-gl) of glycerol in liver were found as 60.0% and 8.2 x 10(-7) cm(2)/s, respectively. Bound water was calculated as the difference between the reported total water of 74.5% and found free water. The optical dispersion of liver was calculated from the measurements of refractive index (Rl) of tissue samples made for different wavelengths between 400 and 1000 nm. Using liver and water optical dispersions at 20 degrees C and the free and total water, the dispersions for liver scatterers and dry matter were calculated. The estimated dispersions present a decreasing behavior with wavelength. The dry matter dispersion shows higher Rl values than liver scatterers, as expected. Considering 600 nm, dry matter has an Rl of 1.508, whereas scatterers have an Rl of 1.444. These dispersions are useful to characterize the Rl matching mechanism in optical clearing treatments, provided that [T-c(t)] and thickness measurements are performed during treatment. The knowledge of D-gl is also important for living tissue cryoprotection applications. (C) 2017 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE)

Abstract
We present the disparity map computation core of a hardware system for isolating foreground objects in stereoscopic video streams. The operation is based on the computation of dense disparity maps using block-matching algorithms and two well-known metrics: sum of absolute differences and Census transform. Two sets of disparity maps are computed by taking each of the images as reference so that a consistency check can be performed to identify occluded pixels and eliminate spurious foreground pixels. Taking advantage of parallelism, the proposed architecture is highly scalable and provides numerous degrees of adjustment to different application needs, performance levels and resource usage. A version of the system for 640 x 480 images and a maximum disparity of 135 pixels was implemented in a system based on a Xilinx Virtex II-Pro FPGA and two cameras with a frame rate of 25 fps (less than the maximum supported frame rate of 40 fps on this platform). Implementation of the same system on a Virtex-5 FPGA is estimated to achieve 80 fps, while a version with increased parallelism is estimated to run at 140 fps (which corresponds to the calculation of more than 5.9 x 10(9) disparity-pixels per second).

Abstract
Smart grids aim at ensuring a secure, reliable and efficient operation of power systems and for that purpose they need communications infrastructures capable of meeting different requirements. Current and emerging wireless multi-hop solutions based on standard technologies are strong candidates for communications networks associated and integrated with electric distribution grids but a suitable methodology to evaluate and deploy them is missing. This paper presents a holistic methodology supported by contextual information used to generate different scenarios of distribution grids and to evaluate and deploy wireless communications networks for smart grids. Simulation results show that the methodology is suitable for the evaluation of wireless multi-hop networks in the smart grid context and prove that the performance of such networks meets the expected requirements of different applications.

Abstract
Autonomous Underwater Vehicles and Remotely Operated Vehicles are useful in industries such as offshore Oil and Gas, deep sea mining, and aquaculture, where inspection missions are frequent. While underwater communications are mainly done using acoustic links, retrieving data from these devices to shore is still an open issue, especially when we consider the high cost of satellite communications. In this paper, using ns-3 simulations, we evaluate the ability of the communications solution being developed in the BLUECOM+ project to enable real-time marine data transfer at remote ocean areas. Through the usage of tethered balloons, TV white spaces frequencies, and multi-hop communications, the BLUECOM+ solution enables cost-effective, broadband connectivity to the Internet at remote ocean areas, using standard access technologies such as GPRS/UMTS/LTE and Wi-Fi. Simulation results show an expected range exceeding 100 km from shore using only two nodes at sea, with bitrates over 1 Mbit/s.