Leptin levels do not change acutely with food administration in normal or obese subjects, but are negatively correlated with pituitary-adrenal activity

Modern liver surgery is based upon deep knowledge of the surgical anatomy of the liver and improvements with ultrasounds imaging techniques have provided multidimensional interpretations of the liver anatomy intraoperatively. The technical advances with real-time scanning combined with the pioneering efforts of the Japanese liver surgeons have permitted the dynamic adaptation of the functional liver anatomy to the real anatomy, thus intimately aiding in segment oriented anatomical resection. Intraoperative ultrasound afford several advantages such as viewing the internal anatomy in direct relationship to the surface landmarks under the probe, enabling higher frequencies resulting in greater image resolution. The utilization of intraoperative ultrasound can modify the tactics involved with resection of both primary and metastatic liver tumours. The routine use of intraoperative ultrasound is strongly advocated since more complex procedures can be performed safely since the surgeon proceeds with complete knowledge of the real liver anatomy when deciding the feasibility and extent of liver resection.     

Implant-supported prostheses for treatment of adults with cleft palate

Six adult patients with cleft palate, ranging in age from 47 to 78 years, were treated with self-tapping titanium implants. Twenty-three implants, 7 to 15 mm in length, were placed. Of these, one (4%) was 7 mm, eight (35%) were 10 mm, nine (39%) were 13 mm, and five (22%) were 15 mm. Time between stage I and stage II implant surgeries was 5 to 14 months, averaging 8.3 months. Time from stage II surgery to the present is 1.5 to 5 years, averaging 3 years. Of the 23 implants placed, 21 (91%) achieved osseointegration. One (4%) implant was not used prosthetically. Two (9%) 10 mm implants failed to integrate in one patient. All patients were treated with a maxillary complete denture or overdenture. Five (83%) required the addition of a pharyngeal section for speech enhancement.     

Short-term power sources for tokamaks and other physical experiments

The Compass-D tokamak is being planned to move from UKAEA Culham (England) be and reinstalled in IPP Prague (Czech Republic). An overview of Compass-D energetics is described in short. The new power sources have to be designed. Alternative solutions of power sources have been investigated. Ignitrons and mechanical breakers can be replaced by modern high-power semiconductors. With respect to the need of accumulated energy, new technologies of energy storage - supercapacitors and high-speed flywheels, not applied up to now in similar fusion projects, are characterized in comparison with traditional ones - capacitors and big motor-flywheel generators. It is shown that these technologies enhance possibilities in arrangement of power supplies for tokamaks as well as for other high-power demanding experiments with pulse length from fraction to tens of seconds.     

Potential of ground heat source systems

This paper presents a historical background of ground source heat pump technology, followed by a review of its current shortcomings. Based on these observations the author assesses the R&D needs and recommendations for future research.     

Object Recognition in X-ray Testing Using Adaptive Sparse Representations

In recent years, X-ray screening systems have been used to safeguard environments in which access control is of paramount importance. Security checkpoints have been placed at the entrances to many public places to detect prohibited items such as handguns and explosives. Human operators complete these tasks because automated recognition in baggage inspection is far from perfect. Research and development on X-ray testing is, however, ongoing into new approaches that can be used to aid human operators. This paper attempts to make a contribution to the field of object recognition by proposing a new approach called Adaptive Sparse Representation (XASR+). It consists of two stages: learning and testing. In the learning stage, for each object of training dataset, several patches are extracted from its X-ray images in order to construct representative dictionaries. A stop-list is used to remove very common words of the dictionaries. In the testing stage, test patches of the test image are extracted, and for each test patch a dictionary is built concatenating the ‘best’ representative dictionary of each object. Using this adapted dictionary, each test patch is classified following the Sparse Representation Classification methodology. Finally, the test image is classified by patch voting. Thus, our approach is able to deal with less constrained conditions including some contrast variability, pose, intra-class variability, size of the image and focal distance. We tested the effectiveness of our method for the detection of four different objects. In our experiments, the recognition rate was more than 97 % in each class, and more than 94 % if the object is occluded less than 15 %. Results show that XASR+ deals well with unconstrained conditions, outperforming various representative methods in the literature.     

Automated synthesis of action selection policies for unmanned vehicles operating in adverse environments

We address the problem of automated action selection policy synthesis for unmanned vehicles operating in adverse environments. We introduce a new evolutionary computation-based approach using which an initial version of the policy is automatically generated and then gradually refined by detecting and fixing its shortcomings. The synthesis technique consists of the automated extraction of the vehicle’s exception states and Genetic Programming (GP) for automated composition and optimization of corrective sequences of commands in the form of macro-actions to be applied locally.     

A new approach to the preparation of large surface area poly(styrene-co-divinylbenzene) monoliths via knitting of loose chains using external crosslinkers and application of these monolithic columns for separation of small molecules

Poly(styrene-divinylbenzene) monoliths have been hypercrosslinked using a Fe³⁺ catalyzed Friedel–Crafts reaction involving three external crosslinkers (1) 4,4′-bis(chloromethyl)-1,1′-biphenyl, (2) α,α′-dichloro-p-xylene, and (3) formaldehyde dimethyl acetal. The first crosslinker was found to produce monoliths with the best chromatographic performance. The effects of a number of variables affecting the hypercrosslinking reaction were studied in detail. These variables included: (i) the temperature and time used for polymerization of the precursor monoliths, (ii) the amount and loading procedure of the external crosslinker and catalyst, and, (iii) the temperature and reaction time of the Friedel–Crafts alkylation. Polymers with extremely large surface areas reaching up to 900 m²/g were obtained using a precursor monolith polymerized for only 2.5 h, and hypercrosslinked with 4,4’-bis(chloromethyl)-1,1′-biphenyl. The increased performance of monoliths modified using this new procedure is comparable to the performance obtained with monolithic polymers containing chloromethylstyrene. However, the preparation of the poly(styrene-divinylbenzene) precursor is simpler than that of conterparts containing chloromethylstyrene. The hypercrosslinked monoliths in capillary columns were tested in an isocratic reversed phase liquid chromatography separation using a mixture comprised of acetone and six alkylbenzenes. Column efficiencies for retained analytes exceeded 70,000 plates/m.