A SELF-ADAPTABLE DISTRIBUTED CBR VERSION OF THE EQUIVOX SYSTEM

Abstract

Three dimensional (3D) voxel phantoms are numerical representations of human bodies, used by physicians in very different contexts. In the controlled context of hospitals, where from 2 to 10 subjects may arrive per day, phantoms are used to verify computations before therapeutic exposure to radiation of cancerous tumors. In addition, 3D phantoms are used to diagnose the gravity of accidental exposure to radiation. In such cases, there may be from 10 to more than 1000 subjects to be diagnosed simultaneously. In all of these cases, computation accuracy depends on a single such representation. In this paper, we present EquiVox which is a tool composed of several distributed functions and enables to create, as quickly and as accurately as possible, 3D numerical phantoms that fit anyone, whatever the context. It is based on a multi-agent system. Agents are convenient for this kind of structure, they can interact together and they may have individual capacities. In EquiVox, the phantoms adaptation is a key phase based on artificial neural network (ANN) interpolations. Thus, ANNs must be trained regularly in order to take into account newly capitalized subjects and to increase interpolation accuracy. However, ANN training is a time-consuming process. Consequently, we have built Equivox to optimize this process. Thus, in this paper, we present our architecture, based on agents and ANN, and we put the stress on the adaptation module. We propose, next, some experimentations in order to show the efficiency of the EquiVox architecture.