Prevalence of artificial hip implants and use of health services by recipients

Intraneural injection of 10-20 x 10(6) viable Mycobacterium leprae into the sciatic nerve of normal, unsensitized, Swiss white mice gives rise to a tuberculoid type of granulomatous response in 2 weeks. The same dose of viable M. leprae when injected into the sciatic nerves of unsensitized immunosuppressed mice (T200 x 5R) elicited a macrophage response. When macrophages were systemically immobilized using an intraperitoneal injection of silica quartz dust in normal mice, the lesion produced was of the lepromatous type, suggesting a role for the macrophage in the induction of the tuberculoid type of granulomatous response. In all of these in situ experiments, M. leprae failed to enter the Schwann cells.     

Kinetic and spectral aspects in chemiluminescence system Eu(III)/HCO3/H2O2

Chemiluminescence (CL) of the systems containing Eu₂⁺ or HCO₃⁻ ions and hydrogen peroxide was studied. The kinetic curves and CL emission spectra of the systems were discussed. The emission spectrum of the system containing carbonates revealed two emission maxima: the first directly after initiation of the reaction by hydrogen peroxide and the second in several seconds after the first. On the basis of the characteristic bands in the CL spectrum the emitters in the system Eu₂⁺/HCO₃⁻/H₂O₂ were identified as: excited Eu³⁺ ions and excited products of carbonate decomposition. The emission bands for λ=600 and 420 nm appeared in a time distance of a few ten seconds.     

Synthesis and crosslinking properties of phenolphtalein dimethacrylate

Summary By reacting esterification of phenolphtalein with methacrylate chloride, phenolphtalein dimethacrylate was obtained. Based on the results of elemental analysis, FTIR, ¹H-NMR and ¹³C-NMR spectra, the structure of the product was proposed. The dimethacrylate was used as new crosslinker to crosslink poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA). The influence of the amount dimethacrylate on the crosslink density and some properties of the crosslinked polymers networks such as swelling, mechanical properties (tensile strength and elongation at break) and thermal stability were examined.     

Novel lanthanide salicylaldimine complexes with unusual coordination mode

The one-step metal promoted reaction between salicylaldehyde and 4-methyl-1,3-phenylenediamine in the presence of lanthanum(III) or gadolinium(III) nitrate yields new salicylaldimine complexes containing N,N′-bis(salicylidene)-4-methyl-1,3-phenylenediamine as a result of the [2 + 1] Schiff base condensation. The crystal structure of the gadolinium complex reveals a dinuclear species with four unionized ligands coordinating in the monodentate and bridging bidentate fashion, using exclusively the oxygens as donor atoms with the nitrogen atoms not being involved in coordination. The coordination number of nine is achieved by involving three bidentate nitrate counterions in the coordination sphere.     

Self-optimizing generalized adaptive notch filters — comparison of three optimization strategies

The paper provides comparison of three different approaches to on-line tuning of generalized adaptive notch filters (GANFs) — the algorithms used for identification/tracking of quasi-periodically varying dynamic systems. Tuning is needed to adjust adaptation gains, which control tracking performance of GANF algorithms, to the unknown and/or time time-varying rate of system nonstationarity. Two out of three compared approaches are classical solutions — the first one incorporates sequential optimization of adaptation gains while the second one is based on the concept of parallel estimation. The main contribution of the paper is that it suggests the third way — it shows that the best results can be achieved when both approaches mentioned above are combined in a judicious way. Such joint sequential/parallel optimization preserves advantages of both treatments: adaptiveness (sequential approach) and robustness to abrupt changes (parallel approach). Additionally the paper shows how, using the concept of surrogate outputs, one can extend the proposed single-frequency algorithm to the multiple frequencies case, without falling into the complexity trap known as the “curse of dimensionality”.     

Image auto-annotation with automatic selection of the annotation length

Developing a satisfactory and effective method for auto-annotating images that works under general conditions is a challenging task. The advantages of such a system would be manifold: it can be used to annotate existing, large databases of images, rendering them accessible to text search engines; or it can be used as core for image retrieval based on a query image’s visual content. Manual annotation of images is a difficult, tedious and time consuming task. Furthermore, manual annotations tend to show great inter-person variance: considering an image, the opinions about what elements are significant and deserve an annotation vary strongly. The latter poses a problem for the evaluation of an automatic method, as an annotation’s correctness is greatly subjective. In this paper we present an automatic method for annotating images, which addresses one of the existing methods’ major limitation, namely a fixed annotation length. The proposed method, PATSI, automatically chooses the resulting annotation’s length for each query image. It is held as simple as possible and a build-in parameter optimization procedure renders PATSI de-facto parameter free. Finally, PATSI is evaluated on standard datasets, outperforming various state-of-the-art methods.     

Influence of megaplastic deformation on the structure and hardness of Al–Cu–Mg alloy after aging

Methods of electron microscopy and X-ray diffraction have been used to investigate structural and phase transformations in the aluminum alloy of grade A2024 (Al–4.5 Cu–1.37 Mg–0.61 Mn–0.07 Si–0.27 Fe–0.02 Zn–0.02 Ti (wt %)) after aging and deformation by shear under high quasi-static pressure. It has been shown that the combination of two-stage aging with megaplastic deformation leads to the refinement of the structure to a nanolevel and to strengthening of the alloy (to an increase in the microhardness to 3000 MPa). The values of true deformation at which the deformation-induced dissolution of the particles of the strengthening S phase occurs have been determined.