Chitosan/gelatin scaffolds support bone regeneration

Chitosan/Gelatin (CS:Gel) scaffolds were fabricated by chemical crosslinking with glutaraldehyde or genipin by freeze drying. Both crosslinked CS:Gel scaffold types with a mass ratio of 40:60% form a gel-like structure with interconnected pores. Dynamic rheological measurements provided similar values for the storage modulus and the loss modulus of the CS:Gel scaffolds when crosslinked with the same concentration of glutaraldehyde vs. genipin. Compared to genipin, the glutaraldehyde-crosslinked scaffolds supported strong adhesion and infiltration of pre-osteoblasts within the pores as well as survival and proliferation of both MC3T3-E1 pre-osteoblastic cells after 7 days in culture, and human bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells (BM-MSCs) after 14 days in culture. The levels of collagen secreted into the extracellular matrix by the pre-osteoblasts cultured for 4 and 7 days on the CS:Gel scaffolds, significantly increased when compared to the tissue culture polystyrene (TCPS) control surface. Human BM-MSCs attached and infiltrated within the pores of the CS:Gel scaffolds allowing for a significant increase of the osteogenic gene expression of RUNX2, ALP, and OSC. Histological data following implantation of a CS:Gel scaffold into a mouse femur demonstrated that the scaffolds support the formation of extracellular matrix, while fibroblasts surrounding the porous scaffold produce collagen with minimal inflammatory reaction. These results show the potential of CS:Gel scaffolds to support new tissue formation and thus provide a promising strategy for bone tissue engineering.     

3D Variable Density Flow Simulation to Evaluate Pumping Schemes in Coastal Aquifers

A three dimensional model is presented for the simulation of seawater intrusion in coastal aquifers by considering the development of a transition zone and thus the variable density flow approach. The model is applied to a heterogeneous coastal aquifer to study the effects of the pumping rate, the salinity of freshwater inflow and the thickness of the aquifer, on the degradation of pumped water quality through wells in certain location. Even for an optimum pumping scheme solution based on a simple two-dimensional flow model, we simulate freshwater degradation in pumped water which depends on the salinity of freshwater inflow and aquifer thickness.     

Guaranteeing prescribed performance and contact maintenance via an approximation free robot force/position controller

In this paper, we consider the problem of force/position tracking for a robot with revolute joints in compliant contact with a kinematically known planar surface. A novel controller is designed capable of guaranteeing, for an a priori known nonsingular initial robot condition, (i) certain predefined minimum speed of response, maximum steady state error as well as overshoot concerning the force/position tracking errors, (ii) contact maintenance and (iii) bounded closed loop signals. No information regarding either the robot dynamic model or the force deformation model is required and no approximation structures are utilized to estimate them. As the tracking performance is a priori guaranteed irrespectively of the control gains selection, the only concern is to adopt those values that lead to reasonable input torques. Finally, a comparative simulation study on a 6-DOF robot illustrates the performance of the proposed controller.     

Region of interest coding techniques for medical image compression.

We have provided an overview of state-of-the-art ROI coding techniques applied to medical images. These techniques are classified according to the image type they apply to; thus the first class includes ROI coding schemes developed for two-dimensional (2-D) still medical images whereas the second class consists of ROI coding in the case of volumetric images. In the third class, a prototype ROI encoder for compression of angiogram video sequences is presented. ROI coding preserves image quality in diagnostically critical regions by performing advanced image compression, enabling better image examination and addressing issues regarding image handling and transmission in telemedicine systems. The mapping of the ROI from the spatial domain to the wavelet domain is dependent on the used wavelet filters and it is simplified for rectangular and circular regions. Therefore, ROI coding is considered quite important in distributed and networked electronic healthcare.     

PEGASUS: mining peta-scale graphs

In this paper, we describe PeGaSus, an open source Peta Graph Mining library which performs typical graph mining tasks such as computing the diameter of the graph, computing the radius of each node, finding the connected components, and computing the importance score of nodes. As the size of graphs reaches several Giga-, Tera- or Peta-bytes, the necessity for such a library grows too. To the best of our knowledge, PeGaSus is the first such library, implemented on the top of the Hadoop platform, the open source version of MapReduce. Many graph mining operations (PageRank, spectral clustering, diameter estimation, connected components, etc.) are essentially a repeated matrix-vector multiplication. In this paper, we describe a very important primitive for PeGaSus, called GIM-V (generalized iterated matrix-vector multiplication). GIM-V is highly optimized, achieving (a) good scale-up on the number of available machines, (b) linear running time on the number of edges, and (c) more than 5 times faster performance over the non-optimized version of GIM-V. Our experiments ran on M45, one of the top 50 supercomputers in the world. We report our findings on several real graphs, including one of the largest publicly available Web graphs, thanks to Yahoo!, with ≈ 6.7 billion edges.     

Shelf-life Reduction as an Emerging Problem in Cooked Hams Underlines the Need for Improved Preservation Strategies

Cooked hams have gained an important position within the delicatessen market. Nowadays, consumers not only demand superior sensory properties but also request low levels of sodium and fat and the absence of conventional chemicals and preservatives used for the increase of the technological yield and shelf-life of the products. As a result, products that apply strict quality certificates or ‘‘clean’’ labels become increasingly important. However, such cooked hams suffer from a limited shelf-life. Besides some physicochemical effects, this is mainly due to microbial impact, despite the application of modified-atmosphere-packaging and chilling. Microbial spoilage is mostly due to the metabolic manifestation of lactic acid bacteria and Brochothrix thermosphacta, although Enterobacteriaceae and yeasts may occur too. Several preservation strategies have been developed to prolong the shelf-life of such vulnerable cooked meat products by targeting the microbial communities, with different rates of success. Whereas high-pressure treatments do not always pose a straightforward solution, a promising strategy relates to the use of bioprotective cultures containing lactic acid bacteria. The latter consist of strains that are deliberately added to the ham to outcompete undesirable microorganisms. Spoilage problems seem, however, to be specific for each product and processing line, underlining the importance of tailor-made solutions.