Clinical and microbiological effects of minocycline-loaded microcapsules in adult periodontitis

Clinical and microbiological effects of subgingival delivery of 10% minocycline-loaded (MC), bioabsorbable microcapsules were examined in 15 adult periodontitis patients. Patients received oral hygiene instruction 2 weeks prior to the study. At baseline (day 0) all teeth received supragingival scaling (SC); 2 quadrants received no further treatment and 1 quadrant received subgingival scaling and root planning (SRP). In the fourth quadrant, the tooth with the deepest probing sites (at least 1 site > or = 5 mm) was treated with minocycline microcapsules. The sites were evaluated at baseline and weeks 1, 2, 4, and 6. Clinical indices included bleeding on probing (BOP), probing depths (PD), and attachment loss (AL). Microbiological evaluations included percent morphotypes by phase-contrast microscopy; cultivable anaerobic, aerobic, and black-pigmented Bacteroides (BPB); and percent Porphyromonas gingivalis, Prevotella intermedia, Eikenella corrodens, and Actinomyces viscosus by indirect immunofluorescence. In the SC + MC group, BOP, PD, and AL were significantly reduced from baseline for weeks 1 to 6. BOP in the SC + MC group was significantly reduced compared to the SRP group from weeks 2 to 6. In the SC + MC group the percent of spirochetes and motile rods decreased and the percent of cocci increased after 1 week. The increased cocci and decreased motile rods were statistically greater at weeks 4 and 6 in the SC + MC group compared to the SRP group. This study demonstrates that local subgingival delivery of 10% minocycline-loaded microcapsules as an adjunct to scaling results in reduction in the percent sites bleeding on probing greater than scaling and root planning alone and induces a microbial response more favorable for periodontal health than scaling and root planing.     

Real-Time 3-D Sensing, Visualization and Recognition of Dynamic Biological Microorganisms

We introduce optical imaging techniques for three-dimensional (3-D)visualization and identification of microorganisms. Three-dimensional sensing and reconstruction is performed by single-exposure on-line (SEOL)digital holography. A coherent microscope-based Mach-Zehnder interferometer records Fresnel digital holograms of microorganisms. Complex amplitude holographic images are computationally reconstructed at different depths by an inverse Fresnel transformation. For pattern recognition/identification, two approaches are addressed. One is 3-D morphology-based recognition and the other is shape-tolerant 3-D recognition. In the first approach, a series of image recognition techniques is used to analyze 3-D geometrical shapes of microorganisms, which is composed of magnitude and phase distributions. Segmentation, feature extraction, graph matching, feature selection, training, and decision rules are presented. For the second approach, a number of sampling segments are arbitrarily extracted from the reconstructed 3-D biological microorganism. These samples are processed using a number of cost functions and statistical inference theory for the equality of means and equality of variances between the sampling segments. Experimental results with sphacelaria alga, tribonema aequale alga, and polysiphonia alga are presented.     

Novel immobilization of titanium dioxide (TiO2) on the fluidizing carrier and its application to the degradation of azo-dye

A photocatalyst was prepared by attaching TiO(2) powder (diameter, 50nm) in the sol state to fluidizing spherical ceramic carriers using a silicon binder. A high initial photocatalytic activity and strong attachment was obtained at a sintering temperature of 500 degrees C. An azo-dye (Orange-G) was used as the test contaminant to examine the photocatalytic effect of the new photocatalyst. The initial pseudo-first order degradation rate constant for Orange-G was 0.11min(-1). However, the photocatalytic activity doubled when boric acid was added to the silicon binder at a B to Si ratio of 106.5%. When sodium ethoxide was added to the silicon binder at a sodium ion to Si ratio of 15.0%, as much as 80% of the initial photocatalytic activity was maintained after the photocatalyst had been agitated at 180rpm for 300min. Adding both boric acid at a B/Si ratio of 106.5% and sodium ethoxide at a Na/Si ratio of 15% increased the photocatalytic activity and stability by three and four times, respectively.     

Exposure to ethyl carbamate in alcohol-drinking and nondrinking adults and its reduction by simple charcoal filtration

The risk of exposure to ethyl carbamate from the consumption of kimchi, soy sauce, and alcoholic beverages was assessed in alcohol-drinking and nondrinking adults. An alcohol-drinking adult obtains 5.6–9.2 ng/kg bw/day of ethyl carbamate through the addition of kimchi and soy sauce, while a nondrinking adult receives 3.3–4.0 ng/kg bw/day via kimchi and soy sauce alone. The average excess cancer risk of an alcohol-drinking adult (3.9 × 10^?7) was also twice higher than that of an adult who does not drink (1.9 × 10^?7). We achieved a maximum of 47% and 45% removal of the ethyl carbamate present in diluted spirits and soy sauce, respectively, through a simple charcoal filtration process. This resulted in a reduction of the average daily intakes of ethyl carbamate through diluted spirits and soy sauce from 1.7 and 2.2 ng/kg bw/day to 0.9 and 1.2 ng/kg bw/day, respectively.     

Effect of the surface texturing shapes fabricated using dry etching on the extraction efficiency of vertical light-emitting diodes

On the surfaces of GaN-based light-emitting diodes (LEDs) having an n-side-up vertical electrode structure formed by the laser lift-off, various shapes of photoresist-patterned surface textures were formed by inductively coupled plasma etching and their effect on the light emission efficiencies was investigated. By the formation of various shapes of surface textures, the light output efficiency was increased from 37% to 45% compared to that without surface textures. The increase of light output efficiency was related to the increase of sidewall scattering, the decrease of reflected loss, and the decrease of cavity wall effect that occurs for the vertical LEDs by the increase of sidewall surface area.     

Morphogenic inspired self-organization control of unmanned aerial swarm robots

A central issue in distributed formation of swarm is enabling agents with only a local view of their environment to take actions that advance global system objectives (emergence of collective behavior). This paper describes a bio-inspired control algorithm using pheromone for coordinating a swarm of identical flying agents to spatially self-organize into arbitrary shapes using local communication maintaining a certain level of density. Development of morphological features such as the fine formation of particles, hollow particles, cracks in particles, and the evolution of the structure are used as illustrative examples. Distributed formation of swarming with no coordinated agreement or positioning information is an interesting research area because the global behaviors must emerge from many diverse local interactions. Different from most existing distributed control, the proposed approach considers the topological structure of the organization, supports dynamic reconfiguration and self-organization. This paper presents the experimental results on simulating in the forming of arbitrary shape, and also describes a analytic aspect of our model comparing with behavioral performances.

     

The optimum operational condition of membrane bioreactor (MBR): cost estimation of aeration and sludge treatment

A methodology to obtain the most economical operational condition of membrane bioreactor (MBR) is developed. In order to achieve the optimum design parameters of MBR with which operational costs are minimized, aeration and sludge treatment costs were estimated for various operational conditions. Generally sludge treatment cost and aeration cost were inversely proportional to each other, which means sludge treatment cost is minimized when aeration cost is maximized and vice versa. Therefore, there might exist an optimum point between the two extreme cases. However, sludge treatment cost turned out to overwhelm the aeration cost over the reasonable operational conditions. Therefore, sludge minimization was considered to be a key for the economical operation of MBR. In the case of typical municipal wastewater of which COD was 400mgL(-1), steady-state MLSS was expected to increase from 11,000 to 15,000mg/L without sludge removal when HRT was decreasing from 16 to 12h. For the range of operational conditions considered in this study, economically optimum HRT and target MLSS were turned out to be 16h and 11,000mg/L, respectively. Under this condition, aeration for the biodegradation of organic matters would be 13.3m(3) air/min when influent was 1000m(3)/day.     

ZnO nanowire-based nano-floating gate memory with Pt nanocrystals embedded in Al(2)O(3) gate oxides

The memory characteristics of ZnO nanowire-based nano-floating gate memory (NFGM) with Pt nanocrystals acting as the floating gate nodes were investigated in this work. Pt nanocrystals were embedded between Al(2)O(3) tunneling and control oxide layers deposited on ZnO nanowire channels. For a representative ZnO nanowire-based NFGM with embedded Pt nanocrystals, a threshold voltage shift of 3.8?V was observed in its drain current versus gate voltage (I(DS)-V(GS)) measurements for a double sweep of the gate voltage, revealing that the deep effective potential wells built into the nanocrystals provide our NFGM with a large charge storage capacity. Details of the charge storage effect observed in this memory device are discussed in this paper.     

An effective admission control mechanism for variable-bit-rate video streams

For admission control in real-time multimedia systems, buffer space, disk bandwidth and network bandwidth must be considered. The CBR-based mechanisms do not use system resources effectively, since media data is usually encoded with VBR compression techniques. We propose an admission control mechanism based on a VBR data model that has a dynamic period length. In our mechanism, the period can be adaptively changed to maximize the performance, considering both disk bandwidth and buffer space. To compare the performance, extensive simulations are conducted on RR, SCAN, and GSS schemes which have the dynamic period length and the static period length.