Search

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disease which affects a growing number of people as the population ages worldwide. Alzheimer’s Disease International estimated that more than 100 million people will be living with dementia by 2050. At present there are no disease-modifying therapies and research has expanded to the −omic sciences with scientists aiming to get a holistic view of the disease using systems medicine. Metabolomics and Lipidomics give a snap-shot of the metabolism. As analyzing the brain in vivo is difficult, the metabolic information of the periphery has potential to unravel mechanisms that have not been considered, such as those that link the brain to the liver and the gut or other organs. With that in mind we have produced a mini-review, to record a number of studies in the field and the molecular pathways that have been flagged in animal and human models of AD. Human studies deal with cohorts in the order of the hundreds due to the difficulty of organizing AD studies, however it is possible that these first pilots point towards important mechanisms. The trend in these small studies is the involvement of many organs and pathways. Some findings, that have been reproduced, are ceramides being increased, phospholipids and neurotransmitters depleted and sterols being found depleted too. Initial findings point to an important role to lipid homeostasis in AD, this is not surprising as the brain’s main constituents are water and lipids.

In this study, the photocatalyst TiO2 was mixed with a general paint and applied on indoor walls as part of a mock-up test to measure the reduction in the NOx concentration affected by the on or off state of a UV lamp. The findings may be summarized as follows; the NOx concentration was reduced by approximately 7% more (0.134 ppm) with the UV lamp on than when the lamp was off in the indoor space where the paint mixed with TiO2 was applied.

This study aims to examine the fiber orientation effect on flexural behavior of ultra-high-performance fiber-reinforced concrete (UHPFRC) with various casting methods and loading rates. For this, two different placement methods were adopted for making UHPFRC beams along with two different loading rates (i.e., quasi-static and impact). Test results indicated that the flexural performance of UHPFRC beams at both quasi-static and impact loads was significantly influenced by the placement method, leading to dissimilar fiber orientation. Better fiber orientation, denoting that more fibers are aligned in the direction of tensile load, exhibited better post-cracking flexural behaviors in terms of flexural strength, deflection capacity, and toughness, compared to poor fiber orientation. Strength enhancement in UHPFRC beams was obtained by increasing the loading rates, and their deflection-hardening behaviors were successfully observed.

Terminal velocity maximization of air-to-air agile missiles during agile turn phase is studied. It is important to make sure that agile missiles have enough velocity after agile turn stage in order to impact the target. The agile turn is operated during the boost phase. Thus, the agile turn problem is formulated as terminal velocity maximization with given final time. Optimal solutions are obtained by two different methods, pseudospectral method and parameterized costate optimization method. The parameterized costate optimization method is a part of shooting method of indirect method which is proposed to verify the solutions obtained by pseudospectral method. At first, the basic missile model with constant axial acceleration is treated in the two dimensional yaw plane. After looking into the basic missile model, missile model with aerodynamic forces and thrust is analyzed.

This paper describes the implementation of a 3D handheld scanning system based on visual inertial pose estimation and structured light technique.3D scanning system is composed of stereo camera, inertial navigation system (INS) and illumination projector to collect high resolution data for close range applications. The proposed algorithm for visual pose estimation is either based on feature matching or using accurate target object. The integration of INS enables the scanning system to provide the fast and reliable pose estimation supporting visual pose estimates. Block matching algorithm was used to render two view 3D reconstruction. For multiview 3D approach, rough registration and final alignment of point clouds using iterative closest point algorithm further improves the scanning accuracy. The proposed system is potentially advantageous for the generation of 3D models in bio-medical applications.

Image guided surgery using medical robots is becoming popular these days. For image guided surgery, a tracking system is required to provide 6DOF information of patient coordinate, surgical instruments and medical robots used in surgery. To provide 6DOF information, a marker has to be attached to the target. However, it is hard to use many markers all together because the markers will take too much space in the surgical area. The tracking system proposed in this study utilizes down sized markers compared to traditional markers by using micro-engraved data-coded pattern with a lens instead of using geometrically specified marker spheres as a tracking target. A tracking system is developed that has a measurement area of 1m to 2.5m from the tracking system. Experiment has been done for surgical navigation using the proposed tracking system and a medical robot.

Tracking system is essential for Image Guided Surgery(IGS). The Optical Tracking Sensor(OTS) has been widely used as tracking system for IGS due to its high accuracy and easy usage. However, OTS has a limit that tracking fails when occlusion of marker occurs. In this paper, sensor fusion with OTS and Inertial Measurement Unit(IMU) is proposed to solve this problem. The proposed algorithm improves the accuracy of tracking system by eliminating scattering error of the sensor and supplements the disadvantages of OTS and IMU through sensor fusion based on Kalman filter. Also, coordinate axis calibration method that improves the accuracy is introduced. The performed experiment verifies the effectualness of the proposed algorithm.