Intraoperative neurological monitoring

Intraoperative neurological monitoring (INM) is the evaluation of the nervous system within the operating room (OR) environment. In this paper, the INM system is tested in a clinical setting in comparison with conventional somatosensory evoked potential (SEP) monitoring. The study results demonstrate the capability of the INM system in extracting clearer and more stable SEP signals. The high SNR of SEP signals collected in various clinical environments, including the OR, makes the INM system a robust platform for continuous monitoring. While the current use of EP monitoring is limited to intermittent analysis by a highly trained clinical neurophysiologist, the authors believe in changing this paradigm by developing continuous monitoring systems, such as the INM system, capable of automated quantitative EP analysis. This noninvasive monitoring modality will allow for a wider range of use in clinical practice. Based on volunteer and clinical patient studies, the INM monitoring system demonstrates much greater reliability and accuracy via the artifact rejection and denoising strategies. It provides more strategic filtering options for different situations under which the clinical SEP response signal could be greatly contaminated and distorted. Furthermore, the INM system offers a promising approach to signal extraction in real-time monitoring during SEP research.     

Dehulling of canola by hydrothermal treatments

Hydrothermal pretreatments for loosening the hull of Westar canola (Brassica napus L.) to promote dehulling of the seeds were investigated. The samples tested had on average 14.5% hull on a mass basis. Conditioning treatments involved soaking the seeds in distilled water or exposing the seeds to saturated steam. The moistened seed was treated with one of the following drying methods: unheated-air drying, infrared drying, and fluidized-bed drying. The dried grain was milled in an abrasive dehuller to break the hulls loose. The hulls were removed from the mix by aspiration. The treated seeds yielded a minimum of 11.4% to a maximum of 14.9% of the seed mass as the hull fraction. Nontreated seeds yielded 9.4% of the seed mass in hull fraction after abrasive dehulling and aspiration. Among treatments, raising the moisture content of the whole seed from 6 to 15% by exposure to steam, followed by drying in a fluidized bed, resulted in the maximum percent dehulling efficiency. The hull fraction contained about 24% crude fiber, 18% oil, and 18% protein on a dry-mass basis.     

Three-dimensional computer model of the heart: fibrillation induced by extrastimulation

We present a three-dimensional (3D) computer model that simulates electrical activity in the heart during fibrillation. A real dog heart is discretized to form 1473 interconnected cubic elements. The model exhibits normal activation and recovery from pacing. Five or more extrastimuli induce a self-sustaining tachyarrhythmia that soon degenerates into a fibrillatory rhythm. The extrastimuli increase the excitability of the myocardial cell population. The result is a rapid re-excitation of cells that allows for only a partial recovery of cell action potential. This suggests that a dispersion of refractory states of the cell population is the cause of fibrillation in this computer model.     

VLSI Potentiostat Array With Oversampling Gain Modulation for Wide-Range Neurotransmitter Sensing

A 16-channel current-measuring very large-scale integration (VLSI) sensor array system for highly sensitive electrochemical detection of electroactive neurotransmiters like dopamine and nitric-oxide is presented. Each channel embeds a current integrating potentiostat within a switched-capacitor first-order single-bit delta-sigma modulator implementing an incremental analog-to-digital converter. The duty-cycle modulation of current feedback in the delta-sigma loop together with variable oversampling ratio provide a programmable digital range selection of the input current spanning over six orders of magnitude from picoamperes to microamperes. The array offers 100-fA input current sensitivity at 3.4-muW power consumption per channel. The operation of the 3 mm times3 mm chip fabricated in 0.5-mum CMOS technology is demonstrated with real-time multichannel acquisition of neurotransmitter concentration     

Synthesis and evaluation of functional polymeric additives with urethane linkage as dispersing agents for preparation of pigment concentrates with high solid loading, low-VOC content, and usefulness for industrial coatings

A synthetic strategy based on precursor and prepolymer approaches has been adopted for preparing the functional polymeric agents with urethane linkage and functional groups such as –CONH–, –COOH, –NH–, C–N, –COOR and C–Cl, that can interact with the pigment surfaces. The agents were tested for their dispersion capacity. High pigment-loaded (as high as 64%) and solvent-free stainers with potential applications in low-VOC paints were successfully prepared. The stainers were mixed with two commercial binder resins—namely epoxy base white and polyurethane metal coat binder resins—to get first paints and their coats on various substrates such as standard glaze paper, tin and mild steel panels. The paint-specific properties, viz. percentage opacity, color strength, solvent resistance, adhesion, scratch hardness and salt spray resistance, were measured to adjudge the suitability of high pigment-loaded coats in industrial applications. The properties measured in general showed improvement in spite of the increase in the pigment loading. The paint coats resisted not only the xylene, petrol, and lubricating oil attack but also humidity and salt spray (up to 1000 h of exposure).     

Performance of OFDM-FSO link with analog network coding

Optical camera communication (OCC) can be considered a convenient and versatile short-range communication technology within the framework of optical wireless communications. As OCC suffers from low data transmission rate in comparison with very high-speed modulation of light emitting diodes (LEDs), it imposes major limitations on an optical camera-based vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication. This paper presents an OCC-based high-speed V2V using a distinct capturing strategy called selective capture (SC). Experiments were performed to verify the proposed SC-based V2V based on a Raspberry Pi camera module (RaspiCam). The SC was performed with template matching technique on the RaspiCam module. The module enables both the selection of resolution and the capturing of vehicle taillights only from the full camera capture frame. As the transmitter, a \(4\times 4\) red LED array was employed as the taillights of a vehicle. It is found that the use of SC to capture the taillights effectively increases the capture speed of RaspiCam from 120 frames per second (fps) to 435 fps, yielding an efficient and high-speed V2V with flicker-free taillights. In addition, the proposed SC-V2V with increased capture speed provides a data rate of up to 3.456 kbps and achieves acceptable bit error rate performance at a distance of up to 175 cm.