Quantitation of fluoxetine hydrochloride in capsules using high-performance liquid chromatography

A stability-indicating high-performance liquid chromatographic method for the quantitation of fluoxetine hydrochloride in capsules (the only dosage form available) has been developed. The method is accurate and precise with a percent relative standard deviation of 1.04 based on 6 readings. An excellent separation of fluoxetine from methyltestosterone (the internal standard) was achieved, and sharp peaks were obtained by adding acetic acid to the mobile phase. The inactive ingredients present in the capsule powder did not interfere with the assay procedure. The recovery of fluoxetine from the synthetic mixtures was quantitative. The drug appears to be very stable in the acidic medium and highly susceptible to degradation in the basic medium.     

Trichodermin Induces G0/G1 Cell Cycle Arrest by Inhibiting c-Myc in Ovarian Cancer Cells and Tumor Xenograft-Bearing Mice

Ovarian cancer is a fatal gynecological cancer because of a lack of early diagnosis, which often relapses as chemoresistant. Trichodermin, a trichothecene first isolated from Trichoderma viride, is an inhibitor of eukaryotic protein synthesis. However, whether trichodermin is able to suppress ovarian cancer or not was unclear. In this study, trichodermin (0.5 µM or greater) significantly decreased the proliferation of two ovarian cancer cell lines A2780/CP70 and OVCAR-3. Normal ovarian IOSE 346 cells were much less susceptible to trichodermin than the cancer cell lines. Trichodermin predominantly inhibited ovarian cancer cells by inducing G0/G1 cell cycle arrest rather than apoptosis. Trichodermin decreased the expression of cyclin D1, CDK4, CDK2, retinoblastoma protein, Cdc25A, and c-Myc but showed little effect on the expression of p21^Waf1/Cip1, p27^Kip1, or p16^Ink4a. c-Myc was a key target of trichodermin. Trichodermin regulated the expression of Cdc25A and its downstream proteins via c-Myc. Overexpression of c-Myc attenuated trichodermin’s anti-ovarian cancer activity. In addition, trichodermin decelerated tumor growth in BALB/c nude mice, proving its effectiveness in vivo. These findings suggested that trichodermin has the potential to contribute to the treatment of ovarian cancer.     

The role of interface modification on thermal degradation and crystallization behavior of composites from commingled polypropylene fiber and banana fiber

The thermal degradation behavior of banana fiber and polypropylene/banana fiber composites has been studied by thermogravimetric analysis. Banana fiber was found to be decomposing in two stages, first one around 320°C and the second one around 450°C. For chemically treated banana fiber, the decomposition process has been at a higher temperature, indicating thermal stability for the treated fiber. Activation energies for thermal degradation were estimated using Coats and Redfern method. Calorific value of the banana fiber was measured using a constant volume isothermal bomb calorimeter. Crystallization studies exhibited an increase in the crystallization temperature and crystallinity of polypropylene upon the addition of banana fiber. POLYM. COMPOS., 2010. © 2009 Society of Plastics Engineers     

Complete Tensor Field Topology on 2D Triangulated Manifolds embedded in 3D

This paper is concerned with the extraction of the surface topology of tensor fields on 2D triangulated manifolds embedded in 3D. In scientific visualization topology is a meaningful instrument to get a hold on the structure of a given dataset. Due to the discontinuity of tensor fields on a piecewise planar domain, standard topology extraction methods result in an incomplete topological skeleton. In particular with regard to the high computational costs of the extraction this is not satisfactory. This paper provides a method for topology extraction of tensor fields that leads to complete results. The core idea is to include the locations of discontinuity into the topological analysis. For this purpose the model of continuous transition bridges is introduced, which allows to capture the entire topology on the discontinuous field. The proposed method is applied to piecewise linear three‐dimensional tensor fields defined on the vertices of the triangulation and for piecewise constant two or three‐dimensional tensor fields given per triangle, e.g. rate of strain tensors of piecewise linear flow fields.     

From laser-scanned data to feature human model: a system based on fuzzy logic concept

This paper describes the development of a prototype system using fuzzy logic concept for constructing a feature human model, which is to be stored in a 3D digital human model database. In our approach, the feature human model is constructed by unorganized cloud points obtained from 3D laser scanners. Firstly, noisy points are removed, and the orientation of the human model is adjusted; secondly, a feature based mesh generation algorithm is applied on the cloud points to construct the mesh surface of a human model; lastly, semantic features of the human model are extracted from the mesh surface. Compared with earlier approach, our method strongly preserves the topology of a human model; more details can be constructed; and both the robustness and the efficiency of the algorithm are improved. At the end of the paper, in order to demonstrate the functionality of feature human models, potential applications are given.     

Parallel and efficient Boolean on polygonal solids

We present a novel framework which can efficiently evaluate approximate Boolean set operations for B-rep models by highly parallel algorithms. This is achieved by taking axis-aligned surfels of Layered Depth Images (LDI) as a bridge and performing Boolean operations on the structured points. As compared with prior surfel-based approaches, this paper has much improvement. Firstly, we adopt key-data pairs to store LDI more compactly. Secondly, robust depth peeling is investigated to overcome the bottleneck of layer-complexity. Thirdly, an out-of-core tiling technique is presented to overcome the limitation of memory. Real-time feedback is provided by streaming the proposed pipeline on the many-core graphics hardware.     

Factors that influence the temporal stability of personality by questionnaire.

Analyzed test–retest reliability data gathered from 106 sources (89 independent samples), using a multiple-regression method in an attempt to estimate the effects of several factors on questionnaire stability. We examined 8 self-report inventories: the High School Personality Questionnaire, the 16PF, the MMPI, the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator, the CPI, the Guilford–Zimmerman Temperament Survey, the EPPS, and the OPI. Samples ranged in size and encompassed a wide range of Ss divergent on status and age. We found S's age and status, number of test items, test interitem correlation, and test–retest interval to be significant predictors of reliability. Variables representing general adjustment were found to be less predictable than extraversion variables, and short-term reliability was more predictable than long-term reliability. S's sex and specific questionnaires were not found to have a significant effect on reliability. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Inguinal hernia 1998--an assessment of current status

Hernia surgery has considerably changed in recent years. In the era of minimal invasive surgery classical Shouldice repair has become old-fashioned and is increasingly replaced by tension-free techniques using synthetic mesh material. Currently, Shouldice repair remains the treatment of choice in young patients with small primary hernia. Lichtenstein hernioplasty is indicated in young patients with large hernias, and in those over 35 years of age for any size of hernias. Endoscopic operations are restricted to bilateral primary hernias and recurrent hernias. In future, when used on the basis of a reasonable strategy, the variety of operative procedures offers a chance to improve the results of hernia surgery. Further studies are needed to demonstrate which hernia strategy is most reliable in terms of cost-effectiveness, patient comfort, complication and recurrence rate.     

A direct boosting algorithm for the k-nearest neighbor classifier via local warping of the distance metric

Though the k-nearest neighbor (k-NN) pattern classifier is an effective learning algorithm, it can result in large model sizes. To compensate, a number of variant algorithms have been developed that condense the model size of the k-NN classifier at the expense of accuracy. To increase the accuracy of these condensed models, we present a direct boosting algorithm for the k-NN classifier that creates an ensemble of models with locally modified distance weighting. An empirical study conducted on 10 standard databases from the UCI repository shows that this new Boosted k-NN algorithm has increased generalization accuracy in the majority of the datasets and never performs worse than standard k-NN.     

Direct extraction of surface meshes from implicitly represented heterogeneous volumes

This paper describes a novel algorithm to extract surface meshes directly from implicitly represented heterogeneous models made of different constituent materials. Our approach can directly convert implicitly represented heterogeneous objects into a surface model separating homogeneous material regions, where every homogeneous region in a heterogeneous structure is enclosed by a set of two-manifold surface meshes. Unlike other discretization techniques of implicitly represented heterogeneous objects, the intermediate surfaces between two constituent materials can be directly extracted by our algorithm. Therefore, it is more convenient to adopt the surface meshes from our approach in the boundary element method (BEM) or as a starting model to generate volumetric meshes preserving intermediate surfaces for the finite element method (FEM). The algorithm consists of three major steps: firstly, a set of assembled two-manifold surface patches coarsely approximating the interfaces between homogeneous regions are extracted and segmented; secondly, signed distance fields are constructed such that each field expresses the Euclidean distance from points to the surface of one homogeneous material region; and finally, coarse patches generated in the first step are dynamically optimized to give adaptive and high-quality surface meshes. The manifold topology is preserved on each surface patch.