Determination of the presence of antioxidants deriving from sage and oregano extracts added to animal fat by means of assessment of the radical scavenging capacity by photochemiluminescence analysis

Herbs and their extracts with antioxidant capacity could be used directly as stabilisers of fat and indirectly as feed additives, in order to improve quality and shelf-life of meat and fat-containing food. In this work a sensitive analytical method is proposed for determination of the antioxidant activity measured by photochemiluminescence (PCL) in lard stabilised with extracts of sage (Salvia officinalis L.) or oreganum (Origanum vulgare L.). A prior step of purification of fat samples is required, in order to separate and concentrate the phenolics from lipidic substances. The method was validated by determination of recovery rate and repeatability. In addition fat samples originating from pigs fed with feed additives of Salviae folium or Origani herba were analysed to investigate the supposed antioxidative effects, that could increase the shelf-life of meat products. In contrast with lard mixed with extracts of sage or oregano, back fat samples originating from pigs fed with feed additives of the same herbs didn't show a higher antioxidant activity than the control group. On the one hand it seems possible to keep perishable fat-containing food longer by an addition of an extract of sage or oregano due to their antioxidative properties, on the other hand administration of feed additives of dried herbs to pigs had no effect on quality and shelf-life of fat obtained from these animals.     

Online tissue discrimination for transcutaneous needle guidance applications using broadband impedance spectroscopy

This paper reports on a novel system architecture for measuring impedance spectra of a biological tissue close to the tip of a hollow needle. The measurement is performed online using fast broadband chirp signals. The time domain measurement raw data are transformed into the transfer function of the tissue in frequency domain. Correlation technique is used to analyze the characteristic shape of the derived tissue transfer function with respect to known "library functions" for different types of tissue derived in earlier experiments. Based on the resulting correlation coefficients the exact type of tissue is determined. A bipolar coaxial needle is constructed, simulated by finite element method and tested during various in vitro and in vivo experiments. The results show a good spatial resolution of approximately 1.0 mm for a needle with a diameter of 2.0 mm. The correlation coefficients for the three tested tissue types muscle, fat, and blood allow for a clear tissue classification. Best results have been obtained using the characteristic phase diagrams for each tissue. Correlated to the corresponding library transfer function the coefficients are in the range of +0.96 to +0.99 for the matching tissue. In return, the resulting coefficients for correlation with nonmatching tissues are in the range of -0.93 to +0.81.     

Influence of Discontinuous Transmission and Power Control on the Average SIR and the Outage Probability of the Uplink of CDMA Systems

In this paper the impact of the voice activity detection process and the powercontrolsystem on the average signal-to-interference ratio (SIR) is investigatedconcerningthe uplink of a single cell code division multiple access (CDMA) based mobilecommunication system. In the literature lower bounds on the average SIR areoftenemployed. Here we show the applicability of such bounds. For this purpose theresultsobtained from these bounds are compared with results obtained fromsimulations.Especially, for a few number of subscribers the differences between the lowerboundand the exact values are significant. Furthermore, the variance of the SIR isinvestigated for different parameters. We found out that significantvariations occurwhich affect the outage probability. But, many authors often employ only theaverageSIR, e.g. for their capacity estimations. However, the variance of the SIR hasto betaken into consideration too.     

Limits of sectorisation gain caused by mobility and soft handoff

The improvement of the capacity of mobile communication systems by sectorisation of radio cells is assessed to be too optimistic at present. The authors point out the limits of the sectorisation gain caused by the mobility behaviour of the subscribers and soft handoff. In environments with few subscribers a substantial loss of this gain occurs