Interactional Order and Constructed Ways of Seeing with Touchless Imaging Systems in Surgery

While surgical practices are increasingly reliant on a range of digital imaging technologies, the ability for clinicians to interact and manipulate these digital representations in the operating theatre using traditional touch based interaction devices is constrained by the need to maintain sterility. To overcome these concerns with sterility, a number of researchers are have been developing ways of enabling interaction in the operating theatre using touchless interaction techniques such as gesture and voice to allow clinicians control of the systems. While there have been important technical strides in the area, there has been little in the way of understanding the use of these touchless systems in practice. With this in mind we present a touchless system developed for use during vascular surgery. We deployed the system in the endovascular suite of a large hospital for use in the context of real procedures. We present findings from a study of the system in use focusing on how, with touchless interaction, the visual resources were embedded and made meaningful in the collaborative practices of surgery. In particular we discuss the importance of direct and dynamic control of the images by the clinicians in the context of talk and in the context of other artefact use as well as the work performed by members of the clinical team to make themselves sensable by the system. We discuss the broader implications of these findings for how we think about the design, evaluation and use of these systems.     

Mössbauer studies of illites and heat-treated illite as related to coal-conversion processes

Mossbauer spectra of iron species in the following illites were studied: Grundite, Fithian, Minerva, and New Albany. Spectra of samples of Fithian illite heated at temperatures of 225, 700, and 1000 °C were also obtained. Analyses of these spectra provide Mössbauer parameter values of iron species in the illites and heat-transformed illite for comparison with similar species found in coals containing illites and in coal process residues derived from them. The illites contain both ferric and ferrous species. Mössbauer parameters for one of the ferric species, designated M(2), are virtually the same as those of pyrite. The two species are therefore difficult to distinguish from one another. Values of the concentration of pyrite in coals and shales may be inflated if the pyrite concentration is measured by Mössbauer spectroscopy. Mössbauer spectra of the heat-treated illite samples reveal changes in iron distribution, principally at the 700 and 1000 °C levels, where there are found three and six different iron species respectively. These changes are accompanied by reduction of ferric to ferrous iron. This process should be integrated into any assessment of the iron chemistry which accompanies coal-conversion processes.     

Controlled destruction of residual crosslinker in a silicone elastomer for drug delivery

In drug delivery systems that use silicone elastomers as a diffusion matrix for the active drug, it is common to crosslink the material by the hydrosilylation reaction. In this platinum‐catalyzed reaction, vinyl groups on a polymer add to the methyl siloxane hydride (MHS) groups on a low molecular mass crosslinker. With an excess of crosslinker, a fast curing is achieved and a fully crosslinked material is formed. Unreacted MHS groups were shown to remain in the elastomer after curing because of the excess crosslinker. In this work, a simple procedure was developed to eliminate the unreacted MHS groups from the final product. We found that storage of the product at +40°C and 75% relative humidity for a few weeks will effectively destroy the residual MHS groups in the elastomer. The effects of varying levels of humidity, oxygen, and temperature on this postcuring procedure were studied. The amount of MHS groups was measured with NMR and IR spectroscopy. We also found that the hardness of the material increased by approximately 25% as a consequence of this postcuring treatment. This increase is probably due to a secondary crosslinking reaction between MHS and silanol groups. Heat treatment at higher temperatures led to an even further increase in the hardness and compression modulus. Because no MHS groups remained in the elastomer when this heat treatment was started, it is apparent that another secondary crosslinking reaction is occurring, probably silanol condensation. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci 84: 2254–2264, 2002     

Blends of i‐PP and SBS. I. Influence of the in situ compatibilization on the morphology

This article concerns the in situ compatibilization of immiscible isotactic polypropylene/butadiene‐styrene‐butadiene triblock copolymer blends (i‐PP/SBS) by means of a reactive mixture. For this purpose, maleated PP (PP‐MAH) and SBS (SBS‐MAH) were used as functionalized polymers and 4,4′‐diaminediphenylmethane was used as a coupling agent between maleated polymers, resulting in a graft copolymer. Binary blends i‐PP/SBS, nonreactive ternary blends i‐PP/PP‐MAH/SBS, and reactive ternary blends i‐PP/PP‐MAH/SBS‐MAH with varying diamine and anhydride molar ratios were prepared. Torque measurements suggest a graft copolymerization during the melt blending for ternary reactive blends, but the extension of the grafting does not vary with the diamine and anhydride molar ratio, but with the elastomer concentration. The morphology of the blends was investigated by scanning electron microscopy. The morphology of binary and ternary nonreactive blends is similar, exhibiting elastomer domains disperse in the i‐PP matrix, whose sizes increase with elastomer concentration. On the other hand, the elastomer domain size in the ternary reactive blends is practically independent of the blends composition and of the diamine and anhydride molar ratio. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci 85: 847–855, 2002     

DSC, dielectric and dynamic mechanical behavior of two- and three-component ordered polyurethanes

Liquid crystalline (LC) polyurethanes were made from two diisocyanates (flexible HMDI and stiff TDI) (DIs), mesogenic diol (D) and a polybutadiene-diol (B) with stoichiometric ratios of reactive hydroxy (OH) and isocyanate (NCO) groups ((NCO)_DI/((OH)_D+(OH)_B)=1/1). Two- (B/DIs, D/DIs) and three-component ((D+B)/DIs, D/B=1/1 by weight) polymers were prepared and their dielectric, dynamic mechanical and DSC behavior was investigated. For neat B, the glass transition temperature T_gB (∼−46 °C) was detected. Two-component B/HMDI and B/TDI polymers have exhibited a homogeneous structure with the glass transition temperatures T_gU∼−9 and 2 °C. On the other hand, for D/DI polymers on cooling from the melt and subsequent heating the glass transitions at T_gU∼41 °C (D/HMDI) and 58 °C (D/TDI) together with nematic and smectic mesophases were found. In three-component systems, additional glass transitions at T_gB∼−41 °C (B/D/HMDI) and −31 °C (B/D/TDI) were observed. This means that the polymers exhibit a distinct two-phase structure with soft polybutadiene (B) and hard polyurethane (D/DI) phases. In hard polyurethane phase, the glass transitions at T_gU and LC mesophases similar to those found in two-component D/DI polyurethanes were detected. Dielectric and dynamic mechanical results correlate well with DSC measurements.     

Mass transport in a weakly stratified electrochemical cell

A study of natural convection in an electrochemical system with a Rayleigh number of the order 10¹⁰ is presented. Theoretical and experimental results for the unsteady behaviour of the concentration and velocity fields during electrolysis of an aqueous solution of a metal salt are given. The cell geometry is a vertical slot and the reaction kinetics is governed by a Butler-Volmer law. To reduce the effects of stratification, the flush mounted electrodes are located (symmetrically) in the middle parts of the vertical walls. It is demonstrated, both theoretically and experimentally, that a weak stratification develops after a short time, regardless of cell geometry, even in the central part of the cell. This stratification has a strong effect on the velocity field, which rapidly attains boundary layer character. Measured profiles of concentration and vertical velocity at and above the cathode are in good agreement with numerical predictions. For a constant cell voltage, numerical computations show that between the initial transient and the time when stronger stratification reaches the electrode area, the distribution of electric current is approximately steady.List of symbols a _i left hand side of equation system - b _i right hand side of equation system - c concentration (mol m^–3) - c dimensionless concentration - c _i concentration of species i' (mol m^–3) - c₀ initial cell concentration (300 mol m^–3) - c ₀ dimensionless initial cell concentration - c_wall concentration at electrode surface (mol m^–3) - dx increment solution vector in Newton's method - D _i diffusion coefficient of species i (m² s^–1) - D ₁ 0.38 × 10^–9 m² s^–1 - D ₂ 0.82 × 10^–9 m² s^–1 - D effective diffusion coefficient of the electrolyte (0.52 × 10^–9 m² s^–1) - _x unit vector in the vertical direction - _y unit vector in the horizontal direction - F Faraday's constant (96 487 A s mol^–1) - g acceleration of gravity (9.81 m s^–2) - i dummy referring to positive (i = 1) or negative (i = 2) ion - f current density (A m^–2) - f dimensionless current density - i₀ exchange current density (0.01 A m^–2) - J _ij Jacobian of system matrix - L length of electrode (0.03 m) - N _i transport flux density of ion i (mol m^–2 s^–1) - n unit normal vector - p pressure (Nm^–2) - p dimensionless pressure - R gas constant molar (8.31 J K^–1 mol^–1) - R _i residual of equation system - Ra Rayleigh number gL ³ c ₀/D (2.54 × 101¹⁰) - S _c Schmidt number /D (1730) - t time (s) - t dimensionless time - T temperature (293 K) - velocity vector (m s^–1) - dimensionless velocity vector - U characteristic velocity in the vertical direction - V _± potential of anode and cathode, respectively - x spatial coordinate in vertical direction (m) - x dimensionless spatial coordinate in vertical direction - x solution vector for c, and - y spatial coordinate in horizontal direction (m) - y dimensionless spatial coordinate in horizontal direction - z _i charge number of ion i Greek symbols symmetry factor of the electrode kinetics, 0.5 - volume expansion coefficient (1.24 × 10^–4 m³ mol^–1) - _s surface overpotential - constant in equation for the electric potential (–5.46) - _s diffusion layer thickness - scale of diffusion layer thickness - constant relating c/y to the Butler-Volmer law (0.00733) - kinematic viscosity (0.9 × 10^–6 m2 s^–1)     

The Influence of the Acid Sites on the Methylamines Synthesis with Cu-HZSM-5 Zeolite

There is a high industrial demand for MMA and DMA, however, the production of TMA is favored with the commercial catalysts. This work tested the methanol amination reaction with HZSM-5 and Cu/HZSM-5 zeolites (%Cu = 1.2, 3.7 and 6.0). Regarding the MMA selectivity, light differences were observed among Cu/HZSM-5 catalysts and pure zeolite, although the catalysts containing 3.7% copper was slightly more selective to MMA than the other metallic catalysts studied. From these results it is suggested that the metal loading present in the catalysts leads to a modification in the nature of the acidic sites, in particular, the selectivity depends on ratio Brönsted/Lewis acid sites. This modifications would facilitate the amines desorption during the reaction.     

Single-stage flowing liquid film impactor for continuous on-line particle analysis

A single-stage “wet impactor” is presented, where the impaction occurs on a regenerated water surface. The developed impactor is equipped with an impaction liquid support plate of etched glass and a drain spout providing a continuous liquid flow covering the impaction area. Subsequent transport of the impaction liquid makes an on-line determination possible. With multiple nozzles (74 holes, 0.3 mm i.d.) and an air flow of 101/min the cut-off was determined to 0.41 ± 0.02 μm. The impactor was also investigated for its particle loss. The cut-off function, regarding the consequences of letting impaction occur in a liquid film is discussed and compared to conventional impactors. The analysis technique was tested in an ambient air measurement study with an ion chromatograph attached to the sampling system.     

Sense representations for Portuguese: experiments with sense embeddings and deep neural language models

Sense representations have gone beyond word representations like Word2Vec, GloVe and FastText and achieved innovative performance on a wide range of natural language processing tasks. Although very useful in many applications, the traditional approaches for generating word embeddings have a strict drawback: they produce a single vector representation for a given word ignoring the fact that ambiguous words can assume different meanings. In this paper, we explore unsupervised sense representations which, different from traditional word embeddings, are able to induce different senses of a word by analyzing its contextual semantics in a text. The unsupervised sense representations investigated in this paper are: sense embeddings and deep neural language models. We present the first experiments carried out for generating sense embeddings for Portuguese. Our experiments show that the sense embedding model (Sense2vec) outperformed traditional word embeddings in syntactic and semantic analogies task, proving that the language resource generated here can improve the performance of NLP tasks in Portuguese. We also evaluated the performance of pre-trained deep neural language models (ELMo and BERT) in two transfer learning approaches: feature based and fine-tuning, in the semantic textual similarity task. Our experiments indicate that the fine tuned Multilingual and Portuguese BERT language models were able to achieve better accuracy than the ELMo model and baselines.

     

The influence of thermal annealing on residual stresses and mechanical properties of arc-evaporated TiCxN1−x (x=0, 0.15 and 0.45) thin films

We report the stress relaxation behavior of arc-evaporated TiC_xN_1−x thin films during isothermal annealing between 350 and 900°C. Films with x=0, 0.15, and 0.45, each having an initial compressive intrinsic stress σ_int=−5.4 GPa, were deposited by varying the substrate bias V_s and the gas composition. Annealing above the deposition temperature leads to a steep decrease in the magnitude of σ_int to a saturation stress value, which is a function of the annealing temperature. The corresponding apparent activation energies for stress relaxation are E_a=2.4, 2.9, and 3.1 eV, for x=0, 0.15, and 0.45, respectively. TiC_0.45N_0.55 films with a lower initial stress σ_int=−3 GPa, obtained using a high substrate bias, show a higher activation energy E_a=4.2 eV. In all the films, stress relaxation is accompanied by a decrease in defect density indicated by the decreased width of X-ray diffraction peaks and decreased strain contrast in transmission electron micrographs. Correlation of these results with film hardness and microstructure measurements indicates that the stress relaxation is a result of point-defect annihilation taking place both during short-lived metal-ion surface collision cascades during deposition, and during post-deposition annealing by thermally activated processes. The difference in E_a for the films of the same composition deposited at different V_s suggests the existence of different types of point-defect configurations and recombination mechanisms.