Electron microscopic visualization of collagen aggregates without chemical staining.

Lateral, uni-directional aggregates of collagen, segment-long-spacing crystallites (SLS), were made by dialyzing collagen solutions against acetic acid containing ATP, and were examined by transmission electron microscopes without electron staining. There detected were at least 20 dark (electron dense) cross-striations within SLS. The banding pattern was compared with the biochemical and biophysical properties of the amino acid side chains along the collagen molecule. The banding pattern of unstained SLS was mostly correlated with the intramolecular distribution of basic amino acid residues. Since basic amino acids have relatively large side chains, the distribution of mass (molecular weight of amino acids) along the molecule (local density profile) partially explained the cross-striation. Addition of fractions of molecular weight of ATP to basic residues made the local density profile much better correlate to the banding pattern. We conclude that the electron microscopic banding pattern of unstained SLS was generated by the local amount of material or local density profile along the collagen aggregates, which was enhanced by ATP bound to positively charged basic residues. The concept that the electron density correlates with the amount of material is fundamental in electron microscopy, and it has been proven with biological materials in this paper.     

Tech-ware: Bioinformatics and computational biology resources [Best of the Web]

In this issue, "Best of the Web" presents online resources related to bioinformatics and computational biology. According to Wikipedia, bioinformatics is the application of information technology to the field of molecular biology. It was applied in the creation and maintenance of a database to store biological information such as nucleotide and amino acid sequences. The actual process of analyzing and interpreting data is referred to as another common term, computational biology.     

Concentric-Ring and Sector-Vortex Phased-Array Applicators for Ultrasound Hyperthermia

Concentric-ring phased arrays subdivided into sectors (radial slices) can, with appropriate phasing, produce power absorption patterns useful for hyperthermia cancer therapy. The ability of a concentric-ring array to move a focal region along the central axis of the transducer is well known. Less well known is the ability of such an array to produce variable diameter annular (or ring) focal regions. Such focal rings can be effective in heating some tumors if directed around the tumor periphery. These focal rings have been produced in the past by fixed annular focus lenses, or effectively by mechanical scanning of "point" focus ultrasonic transducers. Production of these focal rings by a concentric-ring phased array has the advantage of allowing the focal ring diameter and focal length to be easily changed and scanned by phasing providing much greater heating flexibility. However, under some conditions such arrays produce very large secondary focus effects along the central axis of the amay. Concentric-ring arrays can also provide only patterns of circular symmetry. These problems can be partially solved by dividing the disk of the array into sectors. By appropriate phasing of the sectors, the intensity along the central axis can be greatly reduced. Moreover, appropriate phasing of the rings and sectors can produce patterns that are circularly asymmetric. By controlling these asymmetries, nonspherical tumors can be heated more optimally. Power absorption patterns in Iossy media for this class of applicators are analyzed numerically allowing a quantitative evaluation of both advantages and limitations of this approach. A thermal model based on the bioheat equation is also used to predict temperature distributions in volumes where important thermal parameters, particularly blood flow, are varied.     

Region filling and object removal by exemplar-based image inpainting

A new algorithm is proposed for removing large objects from digital images. The challenge is to fill in the hole that is left behind in a visually plausible way. In the past, this problem has been addressed by two classes of algorithms: 1) "texture synthesis" algorithms for generating large image regions from sample textures and 2) "inpainting" techniques for filling in small image gaps. The former has been demonstrated for "textures"--repeating two-dimensional patterns with some stochasticity; the latter focus on linear "structures" which can be thought of as one-dimensional patterns, such as lines and object contours. This paper presents a novel and efficient algorithm that combines the advantages of these two approaches. We first note that exemplar-based texture synthesis contains the essential process required to replicate both texture and structure; the success of structure propagation, however, is highly dependent on the order in which the filling proceeds. We propose a best-first algorithm in which the confidence in the synthesized pixel values is propagated in a manner similar to the propagation of information in inpainting. The actual color values are computed using exemplar-based synthesis. In this paper, the simultaneous propagation of texture and structure information is achieved by a single, efficient algorithm. Computational efficiency is achieved by a block-based sampling process. A number of examples on real and synthetic images demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm in removing large occluding objects, as well as thin scratches. Robustness with respect to the shape of the manually selected target region is also demonstrated. Our results compare favorably to those obtained by existing techniques.     

垃圾邮件分类的偏依赖特性研究

由于相对于漏报,误报会对邮件过滤性能造成更负面的影响,因此有必要研究如何让邮件过滤器对误报代价表现出更高的敏感性.本文通过引入具有偏依赖特征的权值系数函数,提出了一种能够实现非对称训练学习的改进拟合Logistic Regression邮件分类算法模型.根据在实际邮件样本集上所作测试试验,在分类精度性能没有降低的条件下,验证了新分类模型在误报率和漏报率两项指标之间存在较明显的偏依赖特性,同时对扰动特征数据表现出较强鲁棒特性.     

A uniform GTD solution for the radiation from sources on a convex surface

A compact approximate asymptotic solution is developed for the field radiated by an antenna on a perfectly conducting smooth convex surface. This high-frequency solution employs the ray coordinates of the geometrical theory of diffraction (GTD). In the shadow region the field radiated by the source propagates along Keller's surface diffracted ray path, whereas in the lit region the incident field propagates along the geometrical optics ray path directly from the source to the field point. These ray fields are expressed in terms of Fock functions which reduce to the geometrical optics field in the deep lit region and remain uniformly valid across the shadow boundary transition region into the deep shadow region. Surface ray torsion, which affects the radiated field in both the shadow and transition regions, appears explicitly in the solution as a torsion factor. The radiation patterns of slots and monopoles on cylinders, cones, and spheroids calculated from this solution agree very well with measured patterns and with patterns calculated from exact solutions.     

Oxidation Prevention and Electrical Property Enhancement of Copper-Filled Isotropically Conductive Adhesives

This paper describes the development and characterization of isotropically conductive adhesives (ICAs) incorporating copper (Cu) powders as electrically conductive fillers, along with a silane coupling agent for oxidation protection of copper powders, for environmentally friendly, low cost and high thermal reliability applications in microelectronics packaging. The effect of silane coupling agent materials and concentration on the electrical conductivity, thermal stability and reliability of Cu-filled ICAs was investigated for potential alternatives of conventional silver-filled ICAs. The surface characteristics of silane thin films on copper surfaces, such as their hydrophobicity and thermal stability, were also evaluated to compare the performance of antioxidant behaviors of different silane coupling agents for Cu-filled ICAs. The low contact resistance and high thermal stability of the contact resistance of Cu-filled ICAs were achieved by addition of an optimized silane coupling agent. Greater thermal stability and improved reliability of Cu-filled ICAs under high temperature and humidity conditions were achieved with a silane coupling agent of high molecular weight and hydrophobicity. The bulk resistivity of ∼10⁻⁴ Ωcm of Cu-filled ICAs was achieved with bimodal filler loading.     

Affinity‐Based Protein Surface Pattern Formation by Ligand Self‐Selection from Mixed Protein Solutions

Photolithographically prepared surface patterns of two affinity ligands (biotin and chloroalkane) specific for two proteins (streptavidin and HaloTag, respectively) are used to spontaneously form high‐fidelity surface patterns of the two proteins from their mixed solution. High affinity protein‐surface self‐selection onto patterned ligands on surfaces exhibiting low non‐specific adsorption rapidly yields the patterned protein surfaces. Fluorescence images after protein immobilization show high specificity of the target proteins to their respective surface patterned ligands. Time‐of‐flight secondary ion mass spectrometry (ToF‐SIMS) imaging further supports the chemical specificity of streptavidin and HaloTag for their surface patterned ligands from mixed protein solutions. However, ToF‐SIMS did detect some non‐specific adsorption of bovine serum albumin, a masking protein present in excess in the adsorbing solutions, on the patterned surfaces. Protein amino acid composition, surface coverage, density, and orientation are important parameters that determine the relative ToF‐SIMS fragmentation pattern yields. ToF‐SIMS amino acid‐derived ion fragment yields summed to produce surface images can reliably determine which patterned surface regions contain bound proteins, but do not readily discriminate between different co‐planar protein regions. Principal component analysis (PCA) of these ToF‐SIMS data, however, improves discrimination of ions specific to each protein, facilitating surface protein pattern identification and image contrast.     

Real-Time Video Compression Algorithm for Hadamard Transform Processing

A real-time digital video processor using Hadamard transform techniques to reduce video bandwidth is described. The processor can be programmed with different parameters to investigate various algorithms for bandwidth compression. The processor is also adaptive in that it can select different parameter sets to trade-off spatial resolution for temporal resolution in the regions of the picture that are moving. Algorithms used in programming the system are described along with results achieved at various levels of compression. The algorithms relate to spatial compression, temporal compression, and the adaptive selection of parameter sets.     

基于负染－电镜的Aβ体外聚集表征测试要点分析

本文应用电镜负染色技术,对阿尔茨海默病（ Alzheimer′s disease, AD）中所涉及的β淀粉样肽（β?amyloid peptide,Aβ）的聚集规律进行了分析。通过对样品的浓度、pH值、温度和时间等设置系列梯度,以及调整负染试剂的种类、浓度和染色时间,优化了Aβ寡聚体样品制备以及电镜观察的最佳条件,获得了清晰的Aβ纤维图像并用以估算纤维长度。实验结果表明：经过六氟异丙醇给予单体化处理,并溶于无水二甲基亚砜（ DMSO）的Aβ（100μmol·L－1）,在pH7?2的PBS中4℃孵育24 h,Aβ寡聚体形态清晰,且Aβ42寡聚体比Aβ40寡聚体聚集趋势更明显。在pH 8?0的硼酸缓冲液中,Aβ42（40μmol·L－1）在37℃孵育72 h后,纤维形成明显;而Aβ纤维样品经过煮沸后再制备负染样品,所得电镜图像更为清晰,便于对纤维长度和结构进一步分析。因此电镜负染色技术,可作为一种快捷,直观的Aβ体外聚集形貌表征的质控方法。     

民用渔船雷达动态组网的避障连通恢复方法

为了有效地整合海域内数目众多却各自分散的民用渔船雷达资源,提出了一种利用动态组网对不同区域渔船的避障连通恢复方法。首先,从数据融合的角度简单论证了民用渔船雷达动态组网的可能性和必要性;然后,将每艘渔船视为一个配置有传感器的节点,通过改进图论中最小生成树的方法,同时考虑海洋中障碍物的存在,将分布在各个区域的“小渔船群”进行动态组网,让它们实现避障连通。该方法能够实现个体数据的有效整理和融合,大大地扩展了对相关海域的探测、监控及态势分析的能力。该设计模型符合海域实际情况,能够较好地为实际工作提供理论支撑,仿真结果证明了算法的有效性。     

Integrated method for boundary delineation of agricultural fieldsin multispectral satellite images

Most agricultural statistics are calculated per field, and it is well known that classification procedures for homogeneous objects produce better results than per-pixel classification. In this study, a multispectral segmentation method for automated delineation of agricultural field boundaries in remotely sensed images is presented. Edge information from a gradient edge detector is integrated with a segmentation algorithm. The multispectral edge detector uses all available multispectral information by adding the magnitudes and directions of edges derived from edge detection in single bands. The addition is weighted by edge direction, to remove "noise" and to enhance the major direction. The resulting edge from the edge detection algorithm is combined with a segmentation method based on a simple ISODATA algorithm, where the initial centroids are decided by the distances to the edges from the edge detection step. From this procedure, the number of regions will most likely exceed the actual number of fields in the image and merging of regions is performed. By calculating the mean and covariance matrix for pixels of neighboring regions, regions with a high generalized likelihood-ratio test quantity will be merged. In this way, information from several spectral bands (and/or different dates) can be used for delineating field borders with different characteristics. The introduction of the ISODATA classifier compared with a previously used region growing procedure improves the output. Some results are compared with manually extracted field boundaries     

Computer-aided tumor detection in endoscopic video using color wavelet features

We present an approach to the detection of tumors in colonoscopic video. It is based on a new color feature extraction scheme to represent the different regions in the frame sequence. This scheme is built on the wavelet decomposition. The features named as color wavelet covariance (CWC) are based on the covariances of second-order textural measures and an optimum subset of them is proposed after the application of a selection algorithm. The proposed approach is supported by a linear discriminant analysis (LDA) procedure for the characterization of the image regions along the video frames. The whole methodology has been applied on real data sets of color colonoscopic videos. The performance in the detection of abnormal colonic regions corresponding to adenomatous polyps has been estimated high, reaching 97% specificity and 90% sensitivity.     

Physical Vapor Deposition of Molecular Glass Photoresists: A New Route to Chemically Amplified Patterning

A negative tone photoresist film, consisting of a molecular glass, a photoacid generator, and an acid labile crosslinker, was prepared by physical vapor deposition, a solvent‐free process. Subsequent to deposition, the coevaporated monomers were exposed using 365 nm radiation, subjected to a post exposure bake step, and developed in aqueous base to produce sub‐micron patterns. Combinatorial techniques were used to aid optimization of the photoresist by systematic variations in composition and exposure dose. Development factors such as concentration and time were also optimized.     

Fabrication of Biofunctionalized Quasi‐Three‐Dimensional Microstructures of a Nonfouling Comb Polymer Using Soft Lithography

This paper describes a simple set of patterning methods that are applicable to diverse substrates and allow the routine and rapid fabrication of protein patterns embedded within a background that consists of quasi‐three‐dimensional microstructures of a cell‐resistant polymer. The ensemble of methods reported here utilizes three components to create topographically nonfouling polymeric structures that present cell‐adhesive protein patterns in the regions between the microstructures: the first component is an amphiphilic comb polymer that is comprised of a methyl methacrylate backbone and pendant oligo(ethylene glycol) moieties along the side chain, physically deposited films of which are protein‐ and cell‐resistant. The second component of the fabrication methodology involves the use of different variants of soft lithography, such as microcontact printing to create nonfouling topographical features of the comb polymer that demarcate cell‐adhesive regions of the third component: a cell‐adhesive extracellular protein or peptide. The ensemble of methods reported in this paper was used to fabricate quasi‐three‐dimensional patterns that present topographical and biochemical cues on a variety of substrates, and was shown to successfully maintain cellular patterns for up to two months in serum‐containing medium. We believe that this, and other such methods under development that allow independent and systematic control of chemistry, topography and substrate compliance will provide versatile “test‐beds” for fundamental studies in cell biology as well as allow the discovery of rational design principles for the development of biomaterials and tissue‐engineering scaffolds.     

Quantum-well resonant tunneling bipolar transistor operating at room temperature

The first resonant tunneling bipolar transistor (RBT) is reported. The AlGaAs/GaAs wide-gap emitter device, grown by molecular beam epitaxy (MBE), contains a GaAs quantum well and two AlAs barriers between the emitter and the collector. In the common emitter configuration, when the base current exceeds a threshold value, a large drop in the collector current (corresponding to a quenching of the current gain β) is observed at room temperature, along with a pronounced negative conductance as a function of the collector-emitter voltage. These striking characteristics are caused by the quenching of resonant tunneling through the double barrier as the conduction band edge in the emitter is raised above the bottom of the first quantized subband of the well. Single-frequency oscillations are observed at 300 K. The inherent negative transconductance of these new functional devices is extremely valuable for many logic and signal processing applications.     

Design of minimum-error optimal classifiers for patterns from distributions with Gaussian tails

Adaptive algorithms for designing two-category linear pattern classifiers have been developed and studied in recent years. When the pattern sets are nonseparable, the adaptive algorithms do not directly minimize the number of classification errors, which is the usual goal in pattern classifier design: furthermore, they also are not minimum-error optimal, i.e., they do not generally minimize the probability of error for the classifier. However, the least-mean-square (LMS) adaptive algorithm has been shown to yield classifiers that are asymptotically minimum-error optimal for patterns from Gaussian equal-covariance distributions. A technique is also known for designing asymptotically minimum-error optimal linear classifiers for patterns from Gaussian distributions with unequal covariance matrices. This paper shows that classifiers designed with the "error-correction" algorithms have these same asymptotic properties: the error-correction algorithms are asymptotically minimum-error optimal for patterns drawn from Gaussian equal-covariance distributions and they can be used to design asymptotically minimum-error optimal linear classifiers for patterns from Gaussian distributions with unequal covariance matrices. In addition, because the error-correction algorithms use only part of the patterns in determining the classifier weights, they are asymptotically minimum-error optimal for patterns from distributions that have only Gaussian tails in the regions where their patterns are misclassified or close to misclassified, and that are almost arbitrary elsewhere.     

Segmenting object with ambiguous boundary using information theoretic rough sets

In image segmentation, image is divided into regions of similar pixels that satisfy a defined notion of similarity. The complexity of image segmentation is further increased when the separation between neighboring regions is ambiguous. In this paper, we propose an approach that uses the information theoretic rough sets concept (ITRS) to model the ambiguous boundary of the object for further segmentation. The advantage of this approach is incorporating the prior knowledge of the object for effective extraction despite its ambiguous boundary. This approach starts with an assumption that seed points of the regions are available. It then computes the probability of association of the pixels with the seed points. Rough sets theory is invoked on this probability or likelihood map to identify positive, negative, and boundary states of the object. Optimal threshold for the boundary region is determined using histogram based segmentation algorithm for final object extraction. The main contribution relies on the application of ITRS in categorizing the object by combining both the prior and image information. The proposed approach, ITRS segmentation, is compared with different image segmentation methods on simulated brain images, and the result is encouraging with its state-of-the-art performance.     

Antenna Energy Patterns of Nonsinusoidal Waveforms

In this paper, energy patterns of antennas are derived for nonsinusoidal waves with different time variations. Some of the energy patterns for waveforms consisting of positive as well as negative values have a narrow beamwidth and drop to almost the zero value in the vicinity of the beam axis. Such features are desirable for good angular resolution. Energy or average-power patterns for waves consisting of one and two sinusoidal cycles are also derived and compared to that of an infinitely long sinusoidal wave with zero bandwidth.     

Analysis of double-gate thin-film transistor

An analysis is made of a double-gate thin-film transistor structure, and equations are derived for current flow for different input conditions on each gate. The use of two independent gates allows the possibility of simultaneously maintaining depletion and enhancement regions along the channel, and Poisson's equation is used to find the field and potential distribution along the channel. It is shown that by proper manipulation of the second gate, characteristic curves ranging from the normal TFT "pentode" curves to "triode" curves can be obtained from the same device. A comparison is given of experimental and theoretical results.