An integrated microfluidic system for fast, automatic detection of C-reactive protein

C-reactive protein (CRP) is a well-known inflammation marker in human beings. This study reports a new microfluidic system for fast, automatic detection of CRP. It contains pneumatic micropumps, a vortex-type micromixer, a pneumatic micro-injector and several microvalves to automatically perform the entire protocol for CRP detection. This includes sample/reagent transportation, incubation between the target CRP and a CRP-specific aptamer, washing processes, and the chemiluminescence development process. In addition, the chemiluminescence signal is measured by using a custom-made optical system which consists of a photomultiplier tube, a portable air compressor and eight electronic magnet valves to quantify the concentration of CRP. When compared to previous works, not only can this new microfluidic system automatically perform the entire process via a new integrated micro-injector and new micropumps, but a new CRP-specific DNA aptamer with a higher affinity and specificity is also used for CRP measurement. Experimental data show that the developed system can automatically complete the entire protocol within 30 min with a detection limit of 0.0125 mg/L, which is superior to previous published results. Moreover, this study also measures CRP concentration from clinical samples to verify the performance of the developed microfluidic system. The results indicate that the measured CRP concentrations from human serums are consistent with those using a benchtop system. The developed system can also detect CRP concentrations from human whole blood without any external sample pretreatment process. This microfluidic system may be promising for point-of-care applications for CRP detection in the future.     

An integrated microfluidic system for the determination of microalbuminuria by measuring the albumin-to-creatinine ratio

This study presents an integrated microfluidic system for the determination of microalbuminuria (MAU) through the measurements of the albumin-to-creatinine ratios in patients’ urinary samples. Albumin concentrations are determined based on a non-immunological dye binding assay in which the dyes react specifically with albumin to undergo a strong fluorescence enhancement. Creatinine concentrations are determined based on the Jaffé reaction in which the reagents react specifically with creatinine to form orange–red colored complexes. Two calibration curves for determining the concentrations of urinary albumin and creatinine are constructed with assay ranges of 5–220 and 1–100 mg/l, respectively. Using this system to determine the ACRs of collected clinical urine samples, statistical tools including Bland–Altman bias plot and Passing–Bablok regression analysis show that the results obtained by the proposed microfluidic system are in good agreement with those obtained by conventional methods. This simple, automatic, inexpensive, and microchip-based platform demonstrates a promising alternative to the conventional assays for determining MAU and may be suited for clinical applications.     

An integrated microfluidic system using mannose-binding lectin for bacteria isolation and biofilm-related gene detection

Molecular diagnosis of biofilm-related genes (BRGs) in common bacteria that cause periprosthetic joint infections may provide crucial information for clinicians. In this study, several BRGs, including ica, fnbA, and fnbB, were rapidly detected (within 1 h) with a new integrated microfluidic system. Mannose-binding lectin (MBL)-coated magnetic beads were used to isolate these bacteria, and on-chip nucleic acid amplification (polymerase chain reaction, PCR) was then performed to detect BRGs. Both eukaryotic and prokaryotic MBLs were able to isolate common bacterial strains, regardless of their antibiotic resistance, and limits of detection were as low as 3 and 9 CFU for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus and Escherichia coli, respectively, when using a universal 16S rRNA PCR assay for bacterial identification. It is worth noting that the entire process including bacteria isolation by using MBL-coated beads for sample pre-treatment, on-chip PCR, and fluorescent signal detection could be completed on an integrated microfluidic system within 1 h. This is the first time that an integrated microfluidic system capable of detecting BRGs by using MBL as a universal capturing probe was reported. This integrated microfluidic system might therefore prove useful for monitoring profiles of BRGs and give clinicians more clues for their clinical judgments in the near future.     

An integrated silicon sensor with microfluidic chip for monitoring potassium and pH

We present ion-sensitive field effect transistor-based sensors, integrated with a microfluidic chip, for monitoring pH and potassium cations. The sensor is strategically located at the base of a well so that the response time of the device depends both on the mean flow through the device and the diffusion coefficient of the analyte being monitored. This would enable monitoring of ions in the presence of larger molecules. The dependence of the device response time on diffusive transport of analytes was examined through a numerical study of the flow field and the passive diffusion of a chemical species. The predicted device response time was compared with the experimental measurements and reasonable agreement found. The general dependence of device response time on geometry, flow rate, and analyte diffusion coefficient was derived. These devices can be used with biological fluids where monitoring of pH and cations provide vital information about the well-being of patients.     

An integrated fine-grain runtime system for MPI

Fine-grain MPI (FG-MPI) extends the execution model of MPI to allow for interleaved execution of multiple concurrent MPI processes inside an OS-process. It provides a runtime that is integrated into the MPICH2 middleware and uses light-weight coroutines to implement an MPI-aware scheduler. In this paper we describe the FG-MPI runtime system and discuss the main design issues in its implementation. FG-MPI enables expression of function-level parallelism, which along with a runtime scheduler, can be used to simplify MPI programming and achieve performance without adding complexity to the program. As an example, we use FG-MPI to re-structure a typical use of non-blocking communication and show that the integrated scheduler relieves the programmer from scheduling computation and communication inside the application and brings the performance part outside of the program specification into the runtime.     

An integrated decision system for inventory management

Decision rules for inventory control parameters are combined in a microcomputer based information and decision system. Decision rules implemented in IDSIM cover a wide variety of models for deterministic and stochastic demand cases. The system consists of four modules: The determination of economic order and production quantities and the evaluation of any arbitrary ordering rule in terms of carrying and ordering costs are accomplished in the first module. The second module deals with aggregate level decisions for deterministic demand systems, generates Total Cycle Stock curves, and addresses the problems of group replenishment and group discounts for deterministic systems. The third module calculates the optimum safety stock levels and optimum values of control parameters for order/point quantity as well as periodic review/order-up-to-level parameters in stochastic systems with normal and Laplace distributions. Other sophisticated algorithms, which utilize iterative procedures and yield near optimal solutions, are incorporated in the fourth module for the allocation of total safety stock to minimize either the expected number of stockouts or the total value of shortages.     

An integrated form-feature-based design system for manufacturing

Much of the knowledge that is applied in or communicated between design and manufacturing activities is primarily shape based or shape indexed. Previous attempts to acquire and organize shape knowledge have been mostly concentrated on feature recognition from solid models, group technology (GT) coding schemes, and feature-based modeling. This paper presents the development of an efficient form-feature-based modeling system, and addresses the important issue of utilizing feature information for manufacturing, which has not been extensively discussed by previous work. In this paper we first present a Euler operator-based approach for efficient and effective form-feature encoding and manipulation in a feature-based design environment. Subsequently, a hybrid representation scheme called enhanced CSG tree of feature (ECTOF), which integrates feature model with solid model in a tree structure, is discussed. A feature interference resolution methodology to maintain the correct and consistent feature information in an ECTOF is also deliberated. Finally, we present a machinability-checking module, which employs global accessibility criteria to analyze a feature's machinability on a three-axis machining center. By developing feature interference resolving and machinability testing techniques and integrating with an efficient feature-based design system, this research makes the development of an integrated feature-based design and manufacturing system possible.     

基于重排序融合的社会图书检索系统

用图书的出版信息和用户生成的社会信息从社会媒体中搜索出相关的图书已成为信息检索系统的一个研究热点。然而大部分的信息检索系统都是由单一的检索方法构成,随着用户需求的不断增加,这些系统难以满足用户需求。针对上述问题,提出了一种基于重排序融合的图书检索系统。首先,使用伪相关反馈技术对用户查询内容进行扩展,并将检索结果作为初排序结果;其次,使用用户生成的社会信息特征对初排序结果进行重排序;最后,采用排序学习模型对多种重排序策略得到的结果进行融合。在INEX 2012-2014 Social Book Search公开数据集上针对其它先进检索系统进行了对比实验,实验结果表明,系统的性能（NDCG@10）优于其它方法构成的图书检索系统。     

An integrated microfluidic system for live bacteria detection from human joint fluid samples by using ethidium monoazide and loop-mediated isothermal amplification

Periprosthetic joint infection (PJI) is one of the severe complications of prosthetic joint replacement. Delayed PJI diagnosis may anchor bacteria in periprosthetic tissues, and removal of the prosthesis might be inevitable. The diagnosis of PJI depends on the identification of microorganisms by standard microbiological cultures or more advanced molecular diagnostic methods for detection of bacterial genes. However, these methods are relatively time-consuming, labor-intensive and not human error-free. Moreover, it is challenging to distinguish live from dead bacteria by using DNA-based molecular diagnostics since bacterial DNA will be remained in the tissue even after the death of the bacteria. In this work, an integrated microfluidic system has been developed to perform the entire molecular diagnostic process for the PJI diagnosis in a single chip. We combined the loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP) with ethidium monoazide (EMA) in an integrated microfluidic system to identify live bacteria with reasonable sensitivity and high specificity. All the diagnostic processes including bacteria isolation, cell lysis, DNA amplification and optical detection can be automatically performed on the integrated microfluidic system by using a compact custom-made control system. The integrated system can accommodate four primers complementary to six regions of the target genes and improve the detection limit by using LAMP. The limit of detection in this multiple EMA-LAMP assay could be as low as 5 fg/reaction (~1 CFU/reaction) when choosing an optimized primer set as we demonstrated in mecA gene detection. Thus, the developed system for PJI diagnosis has great potential to become a point-of-care device.     

基于EPM240T100的步进电机综合系统设计

在分析步进电机内部结构和工作原理的基础上,介绍了步进电机控制器逻辑设计思路.控制芯片选用ALTERA公司的高性价比、专用大规模集成电路芯片EPM240T100,实现了步进电机控制系统.     

An integrated system for publishing environmental observations data

Over the next decade, it is likely that science and engineering research will produce more scientific data than has been created over the whole of human history. The successful use of these data to achieve new scientific breakthroughs will depend on the ability to access, integrate, and analyze these large datasets. Robust data organization and publication methods are needed within the research community to enable data discovery and scientific analysis by researchers other than those that collected the data. We present a new method for publishing research datasets consisting of point observations that employs a standard observations data model populated using controlled vocabularies for environmental and water resources data along with web services for transmitting data to consumers. We describe how these components have reduced the syntactic and semantic heterogeneity in the data assembled within a national network of environmental observatory test beds and how this data publication system has been used to create a federated network of consistent research data out of a set of geographically decentralized and autonomous test bed databases.     

An integrated expert system for fast disaster assessment

Most of the existing disaster assessment models are based on single method, such as expert system, or one of the multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) methods. This paper proposes an efficient disaster assessment expert system, which integrates fuzzy logic, survey questionnaire, Delphi method and MCDM methods. Two simulation experiments on typhoon and earthquake are introduced to validate the integrated expert system. The satisfaction degrees of the proposed model in both cases are 75% and 74.5%, respectively, which are close to the ideal rate (78%) of the proposed model. The experimental results show that the proposed expert system is not only efficient, fast and accurate, but also robust through self-adaptive study and has strong adaptability to different environments.     

An integrated data system for airborne remote sensing

This paper outlines the rationale and design for an enhanced Airborne Remote Sensing (ARS) facility, being implemented by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) in the U.K., to support environmental research and monitoring. It is based on the provision of a suite of optical remote sensing instruments, available for year-round deployment, and the development of an on-board integrated data acquisition, and ground-based data processing, system. Acquisition of the remotely sensed data will be synchronized with attitude/position information from a global positioning satellite (GPS) system to enable an accurate geometric rectification to be performed. A strategy has been devised for the endto-end ground processing of this data to enable the production of standard data products and distribution in a sensor-independent data format. The facility has been fully operational from Spring 1997 and is ready to support the needs of environmental scientists and organizations requiring high quality, and immediately usable, airborne remotely sensed data products.     

An integrated materials information system for infrastructure planning

The vitality of a nation or region is based on the effective use of material resources for public and private infrastructure. There are an abundance of technological options and policy choices that can be defined. A value chain approach based on the Reference Material System, using state-of-the-art information systems, can be used to provide an integrated framework for information on material resources and finished materials markets to support planning and analysis of the physical infrastructure that is essential to social and economic development. This framework also provides a model for tracking annual flows and stock levels for the capital account of a region or nation.     

An automatic microfluidic system for rapid screening of cancer stem-like cell-specific aptamers

This study reports a microfluidic system which automatically performs the systematic evolution of ligands by exponential enrichment (SELEX) process for rapid screening of aptamers which are specific to cancer stem-like cells. The system utilizes magnetic bead-based techniques to select DNA aptamers and has several advantages including a rapid, automated screening process, and less consumption of cells and reagents. By integrating a microfluidic control module, a magnetic bead-based aptamer extraction module, and a temperature control module, the entire Cell-SELEX process can be performed in a shorter period of time. Compared with the traditional Cell-SELEX process, this microfluidic system is more efficient and consumes fewer sample volumes. It only takes approximately 3 days for an entire Cell-SELEX process with 15 screening runs, which is relatively faster than that of a traditional Cell-SELEX process (1 week for 15 rounds). The binding affinity of this resulting specific aptamer was measured by a flow cytometric analysis to have a dissociation constant (K _d) of 15.32 nM. The capture rate for cancer stem-like cells using the specific aptamer-conjugated bead is better than that using Ber-EP4 antibody-conjugated bead. This microfluidic system may provide a powerful platform for the rapid screening of cell-specific aptamers.     

An integrated music video browsing system for personalized television

In this paper, we propose an integrated music video browsing system for personalized digital television. The system has the functions of automatic music emotion classification, automatic theme-based music classification, salient region detection, and shot classification. From audio (music) tracks, highlight detection and emotion classification are performed on the basis of information on temporal energy, timbre and tempo. For video tracks, shot detection is fulfilled to classify shots into face shots and color-based shots. Lastly automatic grouping of themes is executed on music titles and their lyrics. With a database of international music videos, we evaluate the performance of each function implemented in this paper. The experimental results show that the music browsing system achieves remarkable performances. Thus, our system can be adopted in any digital television for providing personalized services.