Bone repair of defects filled with a phosphocalcic hydraulic cement: an in vivo study

A quickly setting calcium phosphate-based hydraulic cement mixed with particles of tricalcium phosphate (TCP) ceramic was implanted in 56 metaphysial defects made in the long bones of ten adult mongrel dogs. Microradiography, histology and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) demonstrated the slow resorption of the cement and the bony incorporation of the calcium phosphate ceramic particles which were consistently embedded in bone. The original structural pattern of the bone tended to be restored 7 months after implantation. The cement did not hinder the incorporation of the calcium phosphate ceramic particles, neither did it elicit any inflammatory or foreign-body response. The cement was easily shaped and allowed a perfect filling of any defect, resulting in close contact of the whole implant surface with the host bone at the time of surgery, associated with appreciable mechanical strength. Most of the practical problems associated with the use of calcium phosphate ceramics in the repair of bone defects could be overcome with the cement.     

Online flowchart understanding by combining max-margin Markov random field with grammatical analysis

Flowcharts are considered in this work as a specific 2D handwritten language where the basic strokes are the terminal symbols of a graphical language governed by a 2D grammar. In this way, they can be regarded as structured objects, and we propose to use a MRF to model them, and to allow assigning a label to each of the strokes. We use structured SVM as learning algorithm, maximizing the margin between true labels and incorrect labels. The model would automatically learn the implicit grammatical information encoded among strokes, which greatly improves the stroke labeling accuracy compared to previous researches that incorporated human prior knowledge of flowchart structure. We further complete the recognition by using grammatical analysis, which finally brings coherence to the whole flowchart recognition by labeling the relations between the detected objects.     

Illustration of the use of multimode deformable plane mirrors to record high-resolution concave gratings: results for the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph gratings of the Hubble Space Telescope

To illustrate the efficiency of using a deformable plane mirror to record holographic gratings, we have computed the three gratings for the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph. Their working conditions are severe, since they have to correct the residual spherical aberration of the Hubble Space Telescope. Nevertheless, all images obtained are largely diffraction limited with regard to the resolution.     

Experimental and numerical approaches of aerosol removal in spray conditions for containment application

TOSQAN is an experimental program undertaken by the Institut de Radioprotection et de Sûreté Nucléaire (IRSN) in order to perform thermal hydraulic containment studies. The TOSQAN facility is a large enclosure devoted to simulate typical accidental thermal hydraulic flow conditions in nuclear pressurized water reactor (PWR) containment. The TOSQAN facility, which is highly instrumented with non-intrusive optical diagnostics, is particularly adapted to nuclear safety code validation. The present work is devoted to study a water spray injection used as a mitigation means in order to washout aerosol fission products.     

EVALUATION OF THE INFRAALYZER 400 FOR THE ANALYSIS OF BARLEY AND MALT

A collaborative study is described of the use of infra-red reflectance for the evaluation of the analytical characteristics of barley and malt. Transfer of centrally-prepared calibrations to other reflectance machines was found to be possible for moisture content and protein content in barley and malt but not for malt extract or malt modification. The examination of infra-red reflectance results, obtained at different wavelengths, by step-wise ascending regression rather than step-wise descending regression showed that the former was more satisfactory, especially in being more rapid in execution.