Colloidal Particles that Rapidly Change Shape via Elastic Instabilities

The fabrication and properties of pH‐responsive colloidal particles are reported, which change shape rapidly (less than 200 ms), nearly independent of the diffusion of the pH altering species that trigger their actuation, and far more rapid than their Brownian motion. These particles are mechanically bistable, as revealed by their hysteretic shape response. Finite element analysis (FEA) shows that mechanical hysteresis and bistability derives from the colloids' spherical curvature. Mechanical characterization of the bilayered polymers comprising the colloidal particles shows that viscoelastic relaxation plays a non‐negligible role in limiting the shape switching rate; however, energy landscapes obtained from FEA simulations suggest that by tuning the elastic moduli and thicknesses of the constituent polymer layers, microparticles of the size shown here may be fabricated to actuate on timescales as fast as 1 μs.     

Reconfigurable Morphological Image Processing Accelerator for Video Object Segmentation

Video object segmentation is an important pre-processing task for many video analysis systems. To achieve the requirement of real-time video analysis, hardware acceleration is required. In this paper, after analyzing existing video object segmentation algorithms, it is found that most of the core operations can be implemented with simple morphology operations. Therefore, with the concepts of morphological image processing element array and stream processing, a reconfigurable morphological image processing accelerator is proposed, where by the proposed instruction set, the operation of each processing element can be controlled, and the interconnection between processing elements can also be reconfigured. Simulation results show that most of the core operations of video object segmentation can be supported by the accelerator by only changing the instructions. A prototype chip is designed to support real-time change-detection-and-background-registration based video object segmentation algorithm. This chip incorporates eight macro processing elements and can support a processing capacity of 6,200 9-bit morphological operations per second on a SIF image. Furthermore, with the proposed tiling and pipelined-parallel techniques, a real-time watershed transform can be achieved using 32 macro processing elements.     

Virtual surgeries in patients with congenital heart disease: a multi-scale modelling test case

The objective of this work is to perform a virtual planning of surgical repairs in patients with congenital heart diseases--to test the predictive capability of a closed-loop multi-scale model. As a first step, we reproduced the pre-operative state of a specific patient with a univentricular circulation and a bidirectional cavopulmonary anastomosis (BCPA), starting from the patient's clinical data. Namely, by adopting a closed-loop multi-scale approach, the boundary conditions at the inlet and outlet sections of the three-dimensional model were automatically calculated by a lumped parameter network. Successively, we simulated three alternative surgical designs of the total cavopulmonary connection (TCPC). In particular, a T-junction of the venae cavae to the pulmonary arteries (T-TCPC), a design with an offset between the venae cavae (O-TCPC) and a Y-graft design (Y-TCPC) were compared. A multi-scale closed-loop model consisting of a lumped parameter network representing the whole circulation and a patient-specific three-dimensional finite volume model of the BCPA with detailed pulmonary anatomy was built. The three TCPC alternatives were investigated in terms of energetics and haemodynamics. Effects of exercise were also investigated. Results showed that the pre-operative caval flows should not be used as boundary conditions in post-operative simulations owing to changes in the flow waveforms post-operatively. The multi-scale approach is a possible solution to overcome this incongruence. Power losses of the Y-TCPC were lower than all other TCPC models both at rest and under exercise conditions and it distributed the inferior vena cava flow evenly to both lungs. Further work is needed to correlate results from these simulations with clinical outcomes.     

A cost-effective three axis CMOS accelerometer combining micromachining and digital technology

In this paper, a three axis accelerometer is successfully developed by a mixing-mode chip design using CMOS surface-micromachining technology. The chip consists of mass-spring, the analog core and the digital circuit. The vibration sensor is implemented with micro-spring to change the capacitance between two metals. The analog core detects the capacitance differential to the frequency shifting using an oscillator. The digital control is to compute the amount of acceleration to the form of digital bit. The chip can detect the acceleration to 140 g for x axis and y axis with 10-bit resolution, and from 110 g for z axis with 9 bits. The detected speed is about 4 k bits per second, for three-axis output in parallel. The chip size is about 1,400 × 1,400 um², when TSMC 0.18 um 1P6 M process is employed. This 3D accelerometer can directly connect to the digital interface with three serial-port output for the information of X, Y and Z axis.     

Interaction of rabbit lipoproteins and red blood cells with liposomes of egg yolk phospholipids

After intravenous injection of liposomes prepared from egg yolk phospholipids into rabbits, the phospholipids were readily assimilated by the lipoproteins, and there were increases in the circulating levels of cholesterol and phospholipids. The increases in cholesterol level were mainly due to increases of free cholesterol. Gradient ultracentrifugation showed that the lipoproteins decreased in density, and gel filtration chromatography showed that they increased in particle size. Upon electrophoresis, they exhibited slower mobility. Liposomes recovered from rabbits 3 hr after the injection contained free cholesterol, apolipoproteins A-I, E and traces of C. The apolipoprotein may target the liposomes for uptake by hepatocytes. Incubation of the liposomes with rabbit red blood cell membranes in vitro caused a decrease in cholesterol content of the membranes. However, the cholesterol/phosphate ratio in red blood cells isolated from the rabbits after the injection of liposomes did not change significantly, suggesting rapid replenishment of red blood cell cholesterol in vivo, possibly by equilibration with lipoprotein cholesterol or tissue cholesterol. These results suggest that the injection of phospholipid liposomes may have an antiatherogenic effect by the removal of tissue cholesterol and enhancing hepatic disposal of cholesterol through the reverse cholesterol transport mechanism.     

Type III secretion in Chlamydia: a case of déjà vu?

Rhabdomyolysis results from skeletal muscle injury and release of muscle cell contents into plasma. A number of etiologic factors have been reported for the condition, including strenuous exercise, weight lifting, trauma, seizure, sepsis, and alcohol and drug abuse. Hundreds of drugs also reportedly cause rhabdomyolysis. A 24-year-old body builder developed the disease after ingesting 1200 microg of chromium picolinate (6-24 times the daily recommended allowance of 50-200 microg) over 48 hours. We believe this to be the first reported case of chromium-induced rhabdomyolysis.     

Radiation damage effects on bipolar and MOS devices in X-Ray lithography

Radiation damage effects of bipolar and MOS transistors have been investigated using the vacuum ultraviolet (VUV) storage ring of the national synchrotron light source (NSLS). The devices under investigation were exposed to x-ray radiation and electrical measurements were performed to determine the radiation effects on device parameters. It was found for bipolar devices that the current gain is the parameter that is most sensitive to x-ray irradiation. The current gain decreases as the dose increases and the degradation reaches saturation at 1000 mJ/cm². Upon annealing in forming gas at 400° C for 30 min, the current gain recovered its pre-irradiation value and stress test did not show any reliability problem. Bothn-channel andp-channel MOS devices with polysilicon gates were investigated. Host of the relevant device parameters were measured before and after irradiation and after annealing. Upon irradiation the threshold voltage shows the most obvious shift, which was more negative in both cases. However, thep- channel devices experienced a much larger shift than then-channel ones. The transconductance of the devices also experienced a shift.     

Robust independent joint controller design for industrial robotmanipulators

A novel approach is presented for the design of simple robust independent joint controllers for industrial robot manipulators. In this approach, each joint actuator is treated as a simple inertial system plus a disturbance torque representing all the unmodeled dynamics. By a very simple algorithm, the disturbance is instantly estimated and rejected, thus allowing a simple proportional-derivative (PD) control scheme to be used. The stability of the proposed control law is analyzed. Experimental evaluations of the controller on a microcomputer-controlled PUMA 560 arm were performed. It is shown that the control scheme is simple and practical and that it can be easily implemented on an industrial manipulator presently in use     

Software requirements and acceptance testing

In this paper we 1) review industry acceptance testing practices and 2) present a systematic approach to scenario analysis and its application to acceptance testing with the aim to improve the current practice. It summarizes the existing practice into categories and identifies the serious weakness. Then, a new approach based on the formal scenario analysis is presented. It is systematic, and easily applicable to any software or system. A simple, yet realistic example is used to illustrate its effectiveness. Finally, its benefits and its applicability are summarized.     

Object-oriented specification and formal verification of real-time systems

An object-oriented approach for specification and verification of real-time systems is described in this paper. It is motivated by taking advantage of object-oriented techniques to produce real-time software that is easy to understand, maintain, and reuse. The approach specifies the structural, behavioral, and control aspects of objects in one model with a textual representation as well as a graphical representation. For ease to comprehend and use, the model encapsulates object states and allows an analyst to focus on specifying object operations one at a time. System behavior from individual objects can be deduced and analyzed. For safety considerations, the approach supports specification of failures to object behavior and their resultant faults. The approach also supports modeling of timed temporal constraints for specifying and verifying desirable real-time properties. An object timed temporal logic OTTL is defined for expressing the syntax and semantics of these constraints. Decision procedures for their verification are also presented.