The effect of the textile industry dye bath additive EDTMPA on colour removal characteristics by ozone oxidation.

In this study, the effects of the phosphonic acid based sequestering agent EDTMPA used in the textile dye baths on colour and organic matter removal by ozone oxidation was experimentally investigated. Procion Navy HEXL dyestuff that has been commonly used for the reactive dyeing of cellulose fibers was selected as the model component. The organic matter oxidation by ozone was determined to obey the pseudo-first order kinetics as they are treated singly or in combination. COD removal rates obtained from pseudo-first order reaction kinetics showed that oxidation of Navy HEXL alone (0.0947 L/min) was faster than that of EDTMPA (0.0171 L/min) and EDTMPA with dye (0.0155 L/min) at pH 3.0. It was also found that reaction rates of single EDTMPA removal and EDTMPA and dye mixture removal increased as the reaction pH was increased from 3.0 to 10.5.     

BATCH SEQUENCING

Consider the single machine scheduling problem where there are a number of part types to be processed. A part type is defined as follows: Two parts are of the same part type if the machine does not require a setup in between the processing of these parts. The problem investigated in this paper is to find a sequence of batches of parts (if there are any) where all the requirements for parts are met. A heuristic and an exact algorithm are developed, and computational analysis is performed to measure the performance of the heuristic. The time complexity function of the heuristic is O(n²), and the exact algorithm runs in polynomial time given a fixed upper bound on the number of setups.     

Robust estimation approach for blind denoising.

This work develops a new robust statistical framework for blind image denoising. Robust statistics addresses the problem of estimation when the idealized assumptions about a system are occasionally violated. The contaminating noise in an image is considered as a violation of the assumption of spatial coherence of the image intensities and is treated as an outlier random variable. A denoised image is estimated by fitting a spatially coherent stationary image model to the available noisy data using a robust estimator-based regression method within an optimal-size adaptive window. The robust formulation aims at eliminating the noise outliers while preserving the edge structures in the restored image. Several examples demonstrating the effectiveness of this robust denoising technique are reported and a comparison with other standard denoising filters is presented.     

A histopathologic study of direct pulp-capping with adhesive resins

The concentration of heat-shock proteins of 70 kD (HSP70) in heart tissue has been shown to increase during transient myocardial ischaemia and to persist during several hours of reperfusion. In this study the relationship between the local myocardial HSP70 concentration and blood flow was addressed for control physiological conditions and acute myocardial ischaemia. A specific aim of this study was to address the question of whether low flow areas under control physiological conditions have undergone a transient ischaemia during the preceding hours and thus may be in a state of hibernation or stunning. In 12 anaesthetized, open-chest beagle dogs (6 control and 6 with 60-min coronary artery stenosis) heart rate, mean aortic pressure, mean arterial partial pressure of O2 and partial pressure of CO2 averaged 85+/-16 beats/min, 94+/-14 mmHg, 102+/-17 mmHg and 39+/-6 mmHg, respectively. Regional HSP70 and myocardial blood flow (RMBF) were measured using an HSP70-enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay and the tracer microsphere technique, respectively, in samples of 250 mg wet mass. In the control group the mean RMBF was 1.06+/-0.59 ml.min-1.g-1 and the local HSP70 concentration was 7.08+/-1.03 microg/mg cytosolic protein. Myocardial HSP70 showed a blood flow-independent regional biological heterogeneity, equivalent to a coefficient of variation of 0.31. Local HSP70 concentrations did not differ (P>0.05) between control low and high flow samples, 6.16+/-1.0 vs 6.08+/-0.75 microg/mg cytosolic protein, respectively. However, after 60 min of coronary artery occlusion the local HSP70 concentration increased from 7.08 +/-1.03 to 13.43+/-3.19 microg/mg cytosolic protein (P<0. 001). There was a significant inverse relationship between the percent reduction of local blood flow and HSP70 (r=-0.56, P<0.001). From these results it is concluded that: (1) low flow samples under control physiological conditions are unlikely to be in a state of hibernation or stunning since their HSP70 concentration is normal and (2) the increase in the local HSP70 concentration during myocardial ischaemia reflects the degree of impairment of O2 delivery.     

Modification of polyolefins with silicone copolymers. II. Thermal,mechanical, and tribological behavior of PP and HDPE blended with silicone copolymers

Thermoplastic polyolefin (TPO) films with permanent, silicone‐rich, low‐friction, low‐abrasion surfaces were obtained by melt blending of high‐density polyethylene (HDPE) and polypropylene (PP) with polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS)‐containing block copolymers. Two different block copolymers, a siloxane–urea segmented copolymer and a polycaprolactone‐b‐PDMS triblock copolymer were used as modifiers at levels between 0.1 and 5.0% by weight. Blends were prepared in a twin‐screw extruder. Modified films displayed surfaces with very low friction coefficients and high abrasion resistance, which depended on the type and the level of additive incorporated into the system. Bulk properties of these modified systems, such as crystallization and melting behavior or tensile properties, were not affected. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci 84: 535–540, 2002; DOI 10.1002/app.10279     

Tissue segmentation in ultrasound images by using genetic algorithms

This paper presents a genetic based incremental neural network (GINeN) for the segmentation of tissues in ultrasound images. Performances of the GINeN and the Kohonen network are investigated for tissue segmentation in ultrasound images. Feature extraction is carried out by using continuous wavelet transform. Pixel intensities at the same spatial location on 12 wavelet planes and on the original image are considered as features, leading to 13-dimensional feature vectors. The same training set is used for the training of the Kohonen network and the GINeN.

This paper proposes the use of wavelet transform and genetic based incremental neural network together in order to increase the segmentation performance. It is observed that genetic based incremental neural network gives satisfactory segmentation performance for ultrasound images.     

Medical image segmentation with transform and moment based features and incremental supervised neural network

In this study, a novel incremental supervised neural network (ISNN) is proposed for the segmentation of medical images. Performance of the ISNN is investigated for tissue segmentation in medical images obtained from various imaging modalities. Two feature extraction methods based on transform and moments are comparatively investigated to segment the tissues in medical images. Two-dimensional (2D) continuous wavelet transform (CWT) and the moments of the gray-level histogram (MGH) are computed in order to form the feature vectors of ultrasound (US) bladder and phantom images, X-ray computerized tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance (MR) head images. In the 2D-CWT method, feature vectors are formed by the intensity of one pixel of each wavelet-plane of different energy bands. The MGH represents the tissues within the sub-windows by using the spatial variation of image intensities. In this study, the ISNN and Grow and Learn (GAL) network are employed for the segmentation task. It is observed that the ISNN has significantly eliminated the disadvantages of the GAL network in the segmentation of the medical images.