The objective of this study was to evaluate the combined effect of xanthan gum (XG) on physicochemical, rheological and textural properties of gluten-free batter and bread. To prepare gluten-free batter, different levels of XG (1.5, 2.5 and 3.5%) and water (90, 100 and 110%) were added to a base formula of rice (50%), maize (30%) and quinoa flours (20%); and the batters were evaluated in a factorial design. Several properties on both batter (stickiness and back extrusion) and its corresponding bread (loaf specific volume, baking loss, water activity and pH, texture profile, mean cell area, mean cell density, cell size uniformity, void fraction, mean cell compactness and mean cell aspect ratio) were then evaluated. Higher XG doses (p < .001) tended to produce batters of lower stickiness, adhesion and cohesive-strength, yet, of higher firmness, consistency, cohesiveness and viscosity index. After baking, these loaves presented lower specific volume; lower crumb a, pH, hardness, springiness, mean cell area and void fraction; and higher (p < .001) chewiness, resilience, mean cell density, cell size uniformity and mean cell compactness. The sticker and less consistent batters produced with higher WC rendered larger bread loaves of softer and more springy/resilient crumbs with greater mean cell size and void fraction. Gluten-free loaves of good appearance in terms of higher specific volume, lower crumb hardness, higher crumb springiness, and open grain visual texture were obtained in formulations with 110% WC and XG doses between 1.5 and 2.5%.

Abstract. In spite of significant advances in image segmentation techniques, evaluation of these methods thus far has been largely subjective. Typically, the effectiveness of a new algorithm is demonstrated only by the presentation of a few segmented images that are evaluated by some method, or it is otherwise left to subjective evaluation by the reader. We propose a new approach for evaluation of segmentation that takes into account not only the accuracy of the boundary localization of the created segments but also the under-segmentation and over-segmentation effects, regardless to the number of regions in each partition. In addition, it takes into account the way humans perceive visual information. This new metric can be applied both to automatically provide a ranking among different segmentation algorithms and to find an optimal set of input parameters of a given algorithm.

This paper proposes a new framework to image segmentation which combines edge-and region-based information with spectral techniques through the morphological algorithm of watersheds. A pre-processing step is used to reduce the spatial resolution without losing important image information. An initial partitioning of the image into primitive regions is set by applying a rainfalling watershed algorithm on the image gradient magnitude. This initial partition is the input to a compu-

The objective of this study was to assess the combined effect of guar gum (GG) and water content (WC) on the rheological properties of batter, and the physicochemical and textural properties of bread. Batches of gluten-free bread used a base formulation of rice (50%), maize (30%) and quinoa flour (20%), with different levels of GG (2.5, 3.0 or 3.5%) and water (90, 100 or 110%) in a full factorial design. Higher GG doses (p < 0.001) tended to produce batters of lower stickiness, work of adhesion and cohesive strength; yet, of higher firmness, consistency, cohesiveness and viscosity index. These batters yielded loaves of lower (p < 0.001) specific volume and baking loss; and crumbs of lower (p < 0.001) a w , pH, mean cell area, void fraction, mean cell aspect ratio; and higher (p < 0.001) hardness, adhesiveness, springiness, cohesiveness, chewiness, resilience, mean cell density, cell size uniformity and mean cell compactness. The sticker and less consistent batters produced with higher WC rendered larger bread loaves of softer and more cohesive and springy/resilient crumbs with greater mean cell size and void fraction. Gluten-free loaves of good appearance in terms of higher specific volume, lower crumb hardness, higher crumb springiness, and open grain visual texture were obtained in formulations with 110% WC and GG doses between 2.5 and 3.0%.

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Over the last three decades, several despeckling filters have been developed by researchers to reduce the speckle noise inherently present in ultrasound B-scan images without losing the diagnostic information. This paper compiles and compares well-known techniques mostly used in the smoothing or suppression of speckle noise in ultrasound images. A comparison of the methods studied is done based on an experiment, using quality metrics, texture analysis and interpretation of row profiles to evaluate their performance and show the benefits each one can contribute to denoising and feature preservation. To test the methods, a noise-free image of a kidney is used and then the Field II program simulates a B-mode ultrasound image. This way, the smoothing techniques can be compared using numeric metrics, taking the noise-free image as a reference. In this study, a total of seventeen different speckle reduction algorithms have been documented based on spatial filtering, diffusion filtering and wavelet filtering, with fifteen qualitative metrics estimation. We use the tendencies observed in our study in real images. A new evaluation metric is proposed to evaluate the despeckling results.

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Rehabilitation robotics aims to facilitate the rehabilitation procedure for patients and physical therapists. This field has a relatively long history dating back to the 1990s; however, their implementation and the standardisation of their application in the medical field does not follow the same pace, mainly due to their complexity of reproduction and the need for their approval by the authorities. This paper aims to describe architecture that can be applied to industrial robots and promote their application in healthcare ecosystems. The control of the robotic arm is performed using the software called SmartHealth, offering a 2 Degree of Autonomy (DOA). Data are gathered through electromyography (EMG) and force sensors at a frequency of 45 Hz. It also proves the capabilities of such small robots in performing such medical procedures. Four exercises focused on shoulder rehabilitation (passive, restricted active-assisted, free active-assisted and Activities of Daily Living (ADL)) were carried out and confirmed the viability of the proposed architecture and the potential of small robots (i.e., the UR3) in rehabilitation procedure accomplishment. This robot can perform the majority of the default exercises in addition to ADLs but, nevertheless, their limits were also uncovered, mainly due to their limited Range of Motion (ROM) and cost.