Mohammad Alshraideh

Skin Cancer Recognition by Using a Neuro-Fuzzy System

Skin cancer is the most prevalent cancer in the light-skinned population and it is generally caused by exposure to ultraviolet light. Early detection of skin cancer has the potential to reduce mortality and morbidity. There are many diagnostic technologies and tests to diagnose skin cancer. However many of these tests are extremely complex and subjective and depend heavily on the experience of the clinician. To obviate these problems, image processing techniques, a neural network system (NN) and a fuzzy inference system were used in this study as promising modalities for detection of different types of skin cancer. The accuracy rate of the diagnosis of skin cancer by using the hierarchal neural network was 90.67% while using neuro-fuzzy system yielded a slightly higher rate of accuracy of 91.26% in diagnosis skin cancer type. The sensitivity of NN in diagnosing skin cancer was 95%, while the specificity was 88%. Skin cancer diagnosis by neuro-fuzzy system achieved sensitivity of 98% and a specificity of 89%.

A multiple-population genetic algorithm for branch coverage test data generation

The software testing phase in the software development process is considered a time-consuming process. In order to reduce the overall development cost, automatic test data generation techniques based on genetic algorithms have been widely applied. This research explores a new approach for using genetic algorithms as test data generators to execute all the branches in a program. In the literature, existing approaches for test data generation using genetic algorithms are mainly focused on maintaining a single-population of candidate tests, where the computation of the fitness function for a particular target branch is based on the closeness of the input execution path to the control dependency condition of that branch. The new approach utilizes acyclic predicate paths of the program’s control flow graph containing the target branch as goals of separate search processes using distinct island populations. The advantages of the suggested approach is its ability to explore a greater variety of execution paths, and in certain conditions, increasing the search effectiveness. When applied to a collection of programs with a moderate number of branches, it has been shown experimentally that the proposed multiple-population algorithm outperforms the single-population algorithm significantly in terms of the number of executions, execution time, time improvement, and search effectiveness.

Using program data-state scarcity to guide automatic test data generation

Finding test data to cover structural test coverage criteria such as branch coverage is largely a manual and hence expensive activity. A potential low cost alternative is to generate the required test data automatically. Search-based test data generation is one approach that has attracted recent interest. This approach is based on the definition of an evaluation or cost function that is able to discriminate between candidate test cases with respect to achieving a given test goal. The cost function is implemented by appropriate instrumentation of the program under test. The candidate test is then executed on the instrumented program. This provides an evaluation of the candidate test in terms of the “distance” between the computation achieved by the candidate test and the computation required to achieve the test goal. Providing the cost function is able to discriminate reliably between candidate tests that are close or far from covering the test goal and the goal is feasible, a search process is able to converge to a solution, i.e., a test case that satisfies the coverage goal. For some programs, however, an informative cost function is difficult to define. The operations performed by these programs are such that the cost function returns a constant value for a very wide range of inputs. A typical example of this problem arises in the instrumentation of branch predicates that depend on the value of a Boolean-valued (flag) variable although the problem is not limited to programs that contain flag variables. Although methods are known for overcoming the problems of flag variables in particular cases, the more general problem of a near constant cost function has not been tackled. This paper presents a new heuristic for directing the search when the cost function at a test goal is not able to differentiate between candidate test inputs. The heuristic directs the search toward test cases that produce rare or scarce data states. Scarce inputs for the cost function are more likely to produce new cost values. The proposed method is evaluated empirically for a number of example programs for which existing methods are inadequate.

Evaluating Various Quality Factors for Splitting Nodes in Tree-Structured Spatial Indices

The massive increase of multi-dimensional (spatial) data collected, either in size or veracity, has demanded better spatial index techniques able to handle efficient storing and fast retrieval of spatial objects. No matter how big the data are, eventually it will reside on physical storage media arranged as a series of logical blocks with prefixed sizes resembling nodes in tree-structured spatial indices. Good node splitting strategy is essential since it affects; the final shape of the index, the overlap area between nodes, and the overall index performance. Better node splitting process results will be obtained if multiple splitting strategies (quality factors) were combined to govern the split decision, and it will eliminate the need for dynamic or static tree packing.

Applying Genetic Algorithms to Test JUH DBs Exceptions

Database represents an essential part of software applications. Many organizations use database as a repository for large amount of current and historical information. With this context testing database applications is a key issue that deserves attention. SQL Exception handling mechanism can increase the reliability of the system and improve the robustness of the software. But the exception handling code that is used to respond to exceptional conditions tends to be the source of the systems failure. It is difficult to test the exception handling by traditional methods. This paper presents a new technique that combines mutation testing and global optimization based search algorithm to test exceptions code in Jordan University Hospital (JUH) database application. Thus, using mutation testing to speed the raising of exception and global optimization technique in order to automatically generate test cases, we used fitness function depends on range of data related to each query. We try to achieve the coverage of three types of PL/SQL exceptions, which are No_Data_Found (NDF), Too_Many_Rows (TMR) and Others exceptions. The results show that TMR exception is not always covered this due to existence of primary key in the query, also uncovered status appear in nested exceptions.