On acoustic emissions in percussion laser drilling

Laser drilling is a well established sheet metal processing method. The development of a monitoring system capable of assessing the dimensions of holes is the subject of this work. This paper investigates the applicability of an acoustic-based monitoring system for the percussion laser drilling process. Correlation between the sensor output and the hole's geometry, determined by its depth and upper diameter, is investigated and the results are presented. In general, the results indicate that a correlation exists between the acoustic signal output and the depth of the hole.     

Surface tension study of the interaction between two nonionic surfactants and two direct dyes

The complex-forming interaction between two direct dyes, CI Yellow 106 and CI Blue 78, and two nonionic surfactants, namely, polyoxyethylene nonyl phenyl ether (NP-12) and polyoxyethylene stearylamine (R-11), in aqueous solutions was studied. The estimation was made by measuring surface tension and critical micelle concentration (CMC) changes as a function of dye concentration. A decrease of NP-12 surface tension at low concentration and an increase of R-11 surface tension in the presence of both dyes were observed along with a significant decrease of NP-12 CMC values. A difference in the spectrophotometric absorbance of dye solutions in the presence of both surfactants, indicating a change in the environment of the dye chromophore, was also visible. These results confirm the formation of hydrophobic complexes of NP-12 and hydrophilic complexes of R-11 with both dyes.     

Bayesian kernel methods for analysis of functional neuroimages

We propose an approach to analyzing functional neuroimages in which 1) regions of neuronal activation are described by a superposition of spatial kernel functions, the parameters of which are estimated from the data and 2) the presence of activation is detected by means of a generalized likelihood ratio test (GLRT). Kernel methods have become a staple of modern machine learning. Herein, we show that these techniques show promise for neuroimage analysis. In an on-off design, we model the spatial activation pattern as a sum of an unknown number of kernel functions of unknown location, amplitude, and/or size. We employ two Bayesian methods of estimating the kernel functions. The first is a maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimation method based on a Reversible-Jump Markov-chain Monte-Carlo (RJMCMC) algorithm that searches for both the appropriate model complexity and parameter values. The second is a relevance vector machine (RVM), a kernel machine that is known to be effective in controlling model complexity (and thus discouraging overfitting). In each method, after estimating the activation pattern, we test for local activation using a GLRT. We evaluate the results using receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves for simulated neuroimaging data and example results for real fMRI data. We find that, while RVM and RJMCMC both produce good results, RVM requires far less computation time, and thus appears to be the more promising of the two approaches.     

Editorial

Neural Computing and Applications -     

An ultrasound wearable system for the monitoring and acceleration of fracture healing in long bones

An ultrasound wearable system for remote monitoring and acceleration of the healing process in fractured long bones is presented. The so-called USBone system consists of a pair of ultrasound transducers, implanted into the fracture region, a wearable device and a centralized unit. The wearable device is responsible to carry out ultrasound measurements using the axial-transmission technique and initiate therapy sessions of low-intensity pulsed ultrasound. The acquired measurements and other data are wirelessly transferred from the patient-site to the centralized unit, which is located in a clinical setting. The evaluation of the system on an animal tibial osteotomy model is also presented. A dataset was constructed for monitoring purposes consisting of serial ultrasound measurements, follow-up radiographs, quantitative computed tomography-based densitometry and biomechanical data. The animal study demonstrated the ability of the system to collect ultrasound measurements in an effective and reliable fashion and participating orthopaedic surgeons accepted the system for future clinical application. Analysis of the acquired measurements showed that the pattern of evolution of the ultrasound velocity through healing bones over the postoperative period monitors a dynamic healing process. Furthermore, the ultrasound velocity of radiographically healed bones returns to 80% of the intact bone value, whereas the correlation coefficient of the velocity with the material and mechanical properties of the healing bone ranges from 0.699 to 0.814. The USBone system constitutes the first telemedicine system for the out-hospital management of patients sustained open fractures and treated with external fixation devices.     

Hyperplane Grouping and Pipelined Schedules: How to Execute Tiled Loops Fast on Clusters of SMPs

This paper proposes a novel approach for the parallel execution of tiled Iteration Spaces onto a cluster of SMP PC nodes. Each SMP node has multiple CPUs and a single memory mapped PCI-SCI Network Interface Card. We apply a hyperplane-based grouping transformation to the tiled space, so as to group together independent neighboring tiles and assign them to the same SMP node. In this way, intranode (intragroup) communication is annihilated. Groups are atomically executed inside each node. Nodes exchange data between successive group computations. We schedule groups much more efficiently by exploiting the inherent overlapping between communication and computation phases among successive atomic group executions. The applied non-blocking schedule resembles a pipelined datapath, where group computation phases are overlapped with communication ones, instead of being interleaved with them. Our experimental results illustrate that the proposed method outperforms previous approaches involving blocking communication or conventional grouping schemes.     

Macroporous polymeric hydrogels formed from acrylate modified polyvinyl alcohol macromers

Macroporous polymeric hydrogels for the last several years have found broad application in areas connected with medicine, especially in such new disciplines as cell and tissue engineering. In present work a novel combine approach is proposed for preparation of polyvinyl alcohol macroporous hydrogels by cross-linking of polyvinyl alcohol acrylic derivatives in the presence of heterophase of frozen aqueous media. Hydrogels prepared using this method does not need additional structure fixing and are characterized by high thermal stability in swollen state sustaining even heating to more than 100 °С. The influence of different factors and reaction conditions on the cross-linked hydrogel formation process was studied. The high yield of products (80 ÷ 95%) was observed when reaction was conducted at temperature range −12 ÷ −18 °С, concentration of macromer 4–12 weight %, and amount of initiator 0.8 ÷ 1.6 mg/ml. Moreover, the equilibrium swelling of synthesized macroporous hydrogels was investigated and it was shown that synthesized cross-linked hydrogels are characterized by high water absorption which is weakly depended on solution pH and ionic force values.     

Three dimensional modeling for steel-concrete composite bridges using systems of bar elements — Modeling of skewed bridges

A new improved way for modeling steel composite straight bridges has been presented (Vayas, 2009; Vayas, 2010). The proposed model is based on the representation of steel I-girders through the use of equivalent trusses. The concrete slab is suitably represented by a set of bar elements. Diaphragms and stiffeners may also be taken into account. In contrast to the grillage model, which is usually used for the analysis of bridges, the recommended three dimensional model allows for a more reliable prediction of deformations and internal forces. This paper discusses the extension of the model to skewed composite bridges. The presence of skew makes the analysis complicated and for this reason the grillage analysis is not always recommended. Phenomena like differential deflections of the main girders during concreting and lateral displacements of the flanges can be adequately predicted using the proposed model. The new way for modeling composite bridges, using a spatial system of beam-like structural elements, can also be used for stability analysis of skewed bridges. Worked examples are provided to illustrate the set up procedure of the proposed modeling and to compare the different ways of analysis.     

Optical emissions for monitoring of the percussion laser drilling process

In percussion laser drilling, a sufficiently powerful laser beam is used for the formation of a hole on the workpiece. In this study, the investigation of utilizing optical signals, acquired by means of photodiodes and emitted from the processing zone for real-time monitoring, is presented. The correlation between the sensor output and the geometry of the hole, determined by the depth and upper diameter, is investigated, and the results are presented. In general, the results indicate that there is a strong correlation between the optical signal output and the diameter of the hole.