The application of telepresence in medicine

Telemedicine is a wide ranging subject which encompasses teleconsultation, electronic patient records, continuing medical education and public health information systems. Telemedicine will impact every aspect of health care delivery from remote clinical analysis and consultation between experts based in specialist hospitals, to teleconsultation as a substitute for physical referral between the GP and a hospital, and ultimately the remote delivery of medical monitoring and care into the h ome. Telepresence, where remote human expertise is transported by communications networks to a remote location, has its own unique place within the spectrum of telemedicine applications. This paper describes some of those applications of medical telepresence into which BT have been researching with various clinical partners.     

Inactivation of Nisin by Glutathione in Fresh Meat

Matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization time-of-flight mass spectrometry (MALDI-TOF MS) was used to determine the fate of nisin in meat products. Nisin in 0.02N HCl was added to fresh and cooked meat and meat juice and samples were stored at 4 °C overnight. Residual nisin solutions and meat juice and meat extract supernatants were analyzed for antimicrobial activity and for nisin. Nisin was recovered from cooked meat extract and cooked meat juice; however, only nisin bound to a food component was detected in fresh meat extract. Mass spectra for raw meat and juice showed a signal 307 Da greater than the mass of nisin. Results indicated that nisin was likely inactivated in raw meat by an enzymatic reaction with glutathione.     

Mixed-Metal MOF-74 Templated Catalysts for Efficient Carbon Dioxide Capture and Methanation

The vast chemical and structural tunability of metal–organic frameworks (MOFs) are beginning to be harnessed as functional supports for catalytic nanoparticles spanning a range of applications. However, a lack of straightforward methods for producing nanoparticle-encapsulated MOFs as efficient heterogeneous catalysts limits their usage. Herein, a mixed-metal MOF, NiMg-MOF-74, is utilized as a template to disperse small Ni nanoclusters throughout the parent MOF. By exploiting the difference in Ni O and Mg O coordination bond strength, Ni²⁺ is selectively reduced to form highly dispersed Ni nanoclusters constrained by the parent MOF pore diameter, while Mg²⁺ remains coordinated in the framework. By varying the ratio of Ni to Mg in the parent MOF, accessible surface area and crystallinity can be tuned upon thermal treatment, influencing CO₂ adsorption capacity and hydrogenation selectivity. The resulting Ni nanoclusters prove to be an active catalyst for CO₂ methanation and are examined using extended X-ray absorption fine structure and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy. By preserving a segment of the Mg²⁺-containing MOF framework, the composite system retains a portion of its CO₂ adsorption capacity while continuing to deliver catalytic activity. The approach is thus critical for designing materials that can bridge the gap between carbon capture and CO₂ utilization.     

Electrical Percolation Behavior in Silver Nanowire–Polystyrene Composites: Simulation and Experiment

The design and preparation of isotropic silver nanowire‐polystyrene composites is described, in which the nanowires have finite L/D (< 35) and narrow L/D distribution. These model composites allow the L/D dependence of the electrical percolation threshold, ?_c, to be isolated for finite‐L/D particles. Experimental ?_c values decrease with increasing L/D, as predicted qualitatively by analytical percolation models. However, quantitative agreement between experimental data and both soft‐core and core–shell analytical models is not achieved, because both models are strictly accurate only in the infinite‐L/D limit. To address this analytical limitation, a soft‐core simulation method to calculate ?_c and network conductivity for cylinders with finite L/D are developed. Our simulated ?_c results agree strongly with our experimental data, suggesting i) that the infinite‐aspect‐ratio assumption cannot safely be made for experimental networks of particles with L/D < 35 and ii) in predicting ?_c, the soft‐core model makes a less significant assumption than the infinite‐L/D models do. The demonstrated capability of the simulations to predict ?_c in the finite‐L/D regime will allow researchers to optimize the electrical properties of polymer nanocomposites of finite‐L/D particles.     

Nanostructured β‐Bi2O3 Fractals on Carbon Fibers for Highly Selective CO2 Electroreduction to Formate

3D Bi₂O₃ fractal nanostructures (f‐Bi₂O₃) are directly self‐assembled on carbon fiber papers (CFP) using a scalable hot‐aerosol synthesis strategy. This approach provides high versatility in modulating the physiochemical properties of the Bi₂O₃ catalyst by a tailorable control of its crystalline size, loading, electron density as well as providing exposed stacking of the nanomaterials on the porous CFP substrate. As a result, when tested for electrochemical CO₂ reduction reactions (CO₂RR), these f‐Bi₂O₃ electrodes demonstrate superior conversion of CO₂ to formate (HCOO^?) with low onset overpotential and a high mass‐specific formate partial current density of ?52.2 mA mg^?1, which is ≈3 times higher than that of the drop‐casted control Bi₂O₃ catalyst (?15.5 mA mg^?1), and a high Faradaic efficiency (FE_HCOO^?) of 87% at an applied potential of ?1.2 V versus reversible hydrogen electrode. The findings reveal that the high exposure of roughened β‐phase Bi₂O₃/Bi edges and the improved electron density of these fractal structures are key contributors in attainment of high CO₂RR activity.     

Book Reviews: Extensible Middleware

A review of Distributed Infrastructure Support for Electronic Commerce Applications by Hans-Arno Jacobsen.     

Zero-Error Source&#8211;Channel Coding With Side Information

This correspondence presents a novel application of the theta function defined by Lovasz. The problem of coding for transmission of a source through a channel without error when the receiver has side information about the source is analyzed. Using properties of the Lovasz theta function, it is shown that separate source and channel coding is asymptotically suboptimal in general. By contrast, in the case of vanishingly small probability of error, separate source and channel coding is known to be asymptotically optimal. For the zero-error case, it is further shown that the joint coding gain can in fact be unbounded. Since separate coding simplifies code design and use, conditions on sources and channels for the optimality of separate coding are also derived     

Performance Analysis of Downlink W-CDMA Systems in Weibull and Lognormal Fading Channels Using Chaotic Codes

In this paper, a subspace based blind channel estimation scheme for downlink W-CDMA systems using chaotic codes under Weibull and Lognormal fading channel conditions is proposed and compared with W-CDMA system using PN codes. The algorithm provides estimates of multiuser channels by exploiting the structural information of the data output. The subspace of the (data + noise) matrix contains sufficient information for unique determination of channels and, hence, the signature waveforms and signal constellations. The proposed channel estimation algorithm is also implemented for multiuser—orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) system. Performance measures like bit error rate (BER) and root mean square error (RMSE) are plotted for Weibull and Lognormal fading channels. Signal constellations under Weibull and Lognormal channels are also plotted. Analytical and Simulation results for BER and RMSE are compared for W-CDMA system using PN codes and chaotic codes. Simulation results show that, chaos-based W-CDMA outperforms the PN-based W-CDMA in terms BER and RMSE. Simulation results of multiuser-OFDM system shows that performance is further improved when compared to the W-CDMA system.     

Entropy-constrained tree-structured vector quantizer design

Current methods for the design of pruned or unbalanced tree-structured vector quantizers such as the generalized Breiman-Friedman-Olshen-Stone (GBFOS) algorithm proposed in 1980 are effective, but suffer from several shortcomings. We identify and clarify issues of suboptimality including greedy growing, the suboptimal encoding rule, and the need for time sharing between quantizers to achieve arbitrary rates. We then present the leaf-optimal tree design (LOTD) method which, with a modest increase in design complexity, alters and reoptimizes tree structures obtained from conventional procedures. There are two main advantages over existing methods. First, the optimal entropy-constrained nearest-neighbor rule is used for encoding at the leaves; second, explicit quantizer solutions are obtained at all rates without recourse to time sharing. We show that performance improvement is theoretically guaranteed. Simulation results for image coding demonstrate that close to 1 dB reduction of distortion for a given rate can be achieved by this technique relative to the GBFOS method.