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Quality assurance schemes for drug-screening programmes require access to large quantities of biological matrices for reference or control samples. This presents problems when the availability of a matrix, such as oral fluid (OF) for screening or for confirmatory purposes, limits the collection of large volumes. In such cases, synthetic alternatives of OF may provide a solution. The preparation of an artificial (synthetic) oral fluid (AOF) was conducted by dissolving its components (salts, surfactant, antimicrobial agent and mucin) in water. We characterised the physical properties of AOF to determine its suitability as a matrix for quality assurance purposes. The evaluation of pH, specific gravity (SG), conductivity (mS cm-1 ), freezing point depression (°C), light-scattering and kinematic viscosity (mm2 s-1 ) showed AOF to be a stable, reliable matrix. Synthetic OF was prepared using components (mucin, surfactants and so on) obtained from different suppliers and a comparison was performed. Our results suggest that AOF is a feasible matrix for the preparation of quality assurance samples for confirmatory or drug screening programmes.

Chunghwa Telecom has established an Internet of Things (IoT) smart platform embedded with telephone access service (TAS) to allow IoT applications directly interacting with phones. This paper proposes an in-service PBX (Private Branch Exchange) surveillance approach based on the TAS APIs. A service surveillance application for enterprises' PBXs and the self-care portal for the service management are implemented. The application involves the design of surveillance method, the schedule of monitor calls, the detection of service status, and the notification of events and alerts. The real-case example demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed in-service surveillance approach.

Background Diabetes has become one of the hot topics in life science researches. To support the analytical procedures, researchers and analysts expend a mass of labor cost to collect experimental data, which is also error-prone. To reduce the cost and to ensure the data quality, there is a growing trend of extracting clinical events in form of knowledge from electronic medical records (EMRs). To do so, we first need a high-coverage knowledge base (KB) of a specific disease to support the above extraction tasks called KB-based Extraction. Methods We propose an approach to build a diabetes-centric knowledge base (a.k.a. DKB) via mining the Web. In particular, we first extract knowledge from semi-structured contents of vertical portals, fuse individual knowledge from each site, and further map them to a unified KB. The target DKB is then extracted from the overall KB based on a distance-based Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm. Results During the experiments, we selected eight popular vertical portals in China as data sources to construct DKB. There are 7703 instances and 96,041 edges in the final diabetes KB covering diseases, symptoms, western medicines, traditional Chinese medicines, examinations, departments, and body structures. The accuracy of DKB is 95.91%. Besides the quality assessment of extracted knowledge from vertical portals, we also carried out detailed experiments for evaluating the knowledge fusion performance as well as the convergence of the distance-based EM algorithm with positive results. Conclusions In this paper, we introduced an approach to constructing DKB. A knowledge extraction and fusion pipeline was first used to extract semi-structured data from vertical portals and individual KBs were further fused into a unified knowledge base. After that, we develop a distance based Expectation Maximization algorithm to extract a subset from the overall knowledge base forming the target DKB. Experiments showed that the data in DKB are rich and of high-quality.

Background Genetic diversity of the human LPA gene locus is associated with high plasma concentrations of lipoprotein(a) [Lp(a)]. High Lp(a) concentrations are strongly associated with a high incidence rate of ischaemic stroke. Case presentation A 46-year-old female Chinese patient suffered from ischaemic stroke. Upon admission to the hospital, the patient was diagnosed with an elevated level of plasma Lp(a). The patient’s clinical symptoms were alleviated by administration of basilar artery stent thrombectomy, mannitol, and aspirin. A novel compound heterozygous deletion of the region containing exons 3–16 covering kringle IV copy number variation (KIV CNV) domains in the LPA gene was observed in genetic analysis by next-generation sequencing and confirmed by qPCR. Conclusions In the current study, we reported a case of a 46-year-old female patient diagnosed with ischaemic stroke. This novel heterozygous deletion mutation in the LPA gene expands the spectrum of LPA mutations. Further study is required to understand the mechanism of LPA mutations in ischaemic stroke.

Background and Purpose: Data on the relationship among neutrophil count, intracranial atherosclerotic stenosis (ICAS), and functional outcomes after endovascular thrombectomy (EVT) for ischemic stroke patients remains unclear. We aimed to evaluate the association between neutrophil count and prognosis of EVT patients and to determine whether the association was mediated by ICAS.Methods: We retrospectively analyzed consecutive patients who underwent EVT at two comprehensive stroke centers between June 2016 and December 2019. A remaining stenosis >70%, or a lesser degree of stenosis with a tendency toward re-occlusion or flow impairment during the procedure, was classified as ICAS. A poor outcome was defined as a 90-day modified Rankin Scale score of 3–6.Results: Of the 221 patients (mean age, 65.9 years; males, 61.1%) included in this study, 81 (36.3%) had ICAS, and 120 (54.3%) experienced a poor outcome at 90 days, respectively. In the multivariate adjustment for potential confounders, neutrophil count (odds ratio [OR], 1.19; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.04–1.36; P = 0.012) and presence of ICAS (OR, 2.65; 95CI%, 1.28–5.45; P = 0.008) were risk factors of poor outcomes. Furthermore, mediation analysis indicated that total ICAS mediated the association between increased neutrophil count and worse functional outcome after EVT (the regression coefficient was changed by 11.7% for poor outcome, and 17.1% for modified Rankin Scale score, respectively).Conclusions: Our study demonstrated that a higher neutrophil count might increase the risk of a poor outcome among ischemic stroke patients who underwent EVT, which was partially mediated by ICAS.

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via the original article.

Based on generalized Arnold transformation and RC4 stream cipher, this paper proposes a method to encrypt images in the transform-domain. The RGB color image is transformed into YUV form first, then the Arnold transformation is carried out according to 8x8 size blocks as the basic unit to scramble the pixel position, and then each block is DCT transformed and quantified. Finally, the quantization results are encoded by run-length and differential coding to achieve data compression, and the final result is obtained by encrypting the coded data with RC4 stream cipher. The encryption method has the characteristics of large key space, mixing the YUV three color gamuts, and combining with the transform domain of the image. Accordingly, the security is high. In addition, the results of the experiments show that the algorithm runs fast and the pixel value distribution of cipher text image is more uniform, that is, the encryption effect is good.

Background The poor prognosis of patients with ovarian cancer is mainly due to cancer progression. γ-Synuclein (SNCG) has reported as a critical player in cancer metastasis. However, its biological roles and mechanism are yet incompletely understood in ovarian cancer, especially in high-grade serous ovarian cancer (HGSOC). Methods This is a retrospective study of 312 patients with ovarian cancer at a single center between 2006 and 2016. Ovarian cancer tissues were stained by immunohistochemistry to analyze the relationship between SNCG expression and clinicopathologic factors. The clinical outcomes versus SNCG expression level were evaluated by Kaplan–Meier method and multiple Cox regression analysis. Next, systematical functional experiments were given to examine the proliferation and metastatic abilities of SNCG both in vitro and in vivo using loss- and gain- of function approaches. Furthermore, the mechanisms of SNCG overexpression were examined by human phospho-kinase array kit and western blot analysis. Results Clinically, the expression of SNCG was significantly upregulated in ovarian cancer compared with the borderline and benign tumor, normal ovary, and fallopian tube. Notably, the high level of SNCG correlated with high-risk clinicopathologic features and showed poor survival for patients with HGSOC, indicating an independent prognostic factor for these patients. Functionally, we observed that overexpression of SNCG promoted cell proliferation, tumor formation, migration, and invasion both in vitro and in vivo. Mechanistically, we identified that SNCG promoted cancer cell metastasis through activating the PI3K/AKT signaling pathway. Conclusions Our results reveal SNCG up-regulation contributes to the poor clinical outcome of patients with HGSOC and highlight the metastasis-promoting function of SNCG via activating the PI3K/Akt signaling pathway in HGSOC.

The van der Waals integration of atomically thin two-dimensional (2D) materials can enable a new generation of tunable optoelectronic devices, in which the photocarrier generation, separation and extraction can be modulated by an external gate potential. However, studies to date only show a limited modulation due to non-ideal band alignment and the lack independent modulation of distinct 2D layers in the van der Waals heterojunction. Here report the construction of a WSe2/GeSe heterojunction photodiode with type-II band alignment, in which the value of the conduction band and valence band edge in WSe2 is approximately equal to that of GeSe. What's more, the Fermi level of GeSe remains relative stationary and that of WSe2 can be modulated across the entire band gap by an external gate-voltage, thus rendering widely tunable open-circuit voltages from positive (+ 0.7 V) to negative (− 0.1 V). We further show the photoresponsivity can be modulated by the gate-voltage with a factor of 105, which is similar to the current switching ratio in traditional field-effect transistors, opening up exciting potential for photonic logic circuits.

Because of the distinct electronic properties and strong interaction with light, quasi-one-dimensional nanowires (NWs) with semiconducting property have been demonstrated with tremendous potential for various technological applications, especially electronics and optoelectronics. However, until now, most of the state-of-the-art NW photodetectors are predominantly based on the n-type NW channel. Here, we successfully synthesized p-type SnSe and SnS NWs via the chemical vapor deposition method and fabricated high-performance single SnSe and SnS NW photodetectors. Importantly, these two NW devices exhibit an impressive photodetection performance with a high photoconductive gain of 1.5 × 104 (2.8 × 104), good responsivity of 1.0 × 104 A W–1 (1.6 × 104 A W–1), and excellent detectivity of 3.3 × 1012 Jones (2.4 × 1012 Jones) under near-infrared illumination at a bias of 3 V for the SnSe NW (SnS NW) channel. The rise and fall times can be as efficient as 460 and 520 μs (1.2 and 15.1 ms), respectively, for the Sn...

Photodetectors based on low-dimensional materials have attracted tremendous attention because of their high sensitivity and compatibility with conventional semiconductor technology. However, up until now, developing low-dimensional phototransistors with high responsivity and low dark currents over broad-band spectra still remains a great challenge because of the trade-offs in the potential architectures. In this work, we report a hybrid phototransistor consisting of a single In2O3 nanowire as the channel material and a multilayer WSe2 nanosheet as the decorating sensitizer for photodetection. Our devices show high responsivities of 7.5 × 105 and 3.5 × 104 A W–1 and ultrahigh detectivities of 4.17 × 1017 and 1.95 × 1016 jones at the wavelengths of 637 and 940 nm, respectively. The superior detectivity of the hybrid architecture arises from the extremely low dark currents and the enhanced photogating effect in the depletion regime by the unique design of energy band alignment of the channel and sensitizer m...

The ability to use infrared imaging systems with multicolor capabilities, high photoresponsivity and polarization sensitivity, is central to practical photodetectors and has been demonstrated with conventional devices based on Ⅲ-Ⅴ or Ⅱ-Ⅵ semiconductors. However, the photodetectors working at room temperature with high responsivity for polarized infrared light detection remains elusive. Here, we first demonstrate a broadband photodetector using a vertical photogate heterostructure of BP-on-WSe 2 (black phosphorus-on-tungsten diselenide) in which BP serves as the photogate and WSe 2 as the conductive channel. Ultrahigh visible and infrared photoresponsivity at room temperature can reach up to ~10 3 A/W and ~5×10 −1 A/W, respectively, and ultrasensitive visible and infrared specific detectivity is obtained up to ~10 14 and ~10 10 Jones respectively at room temperature. Moreover, the high sensitivity to infrared polarization is about 40 mA/W with incident light polarized along the horizontal axis (defined as 0° polarization). This performance is due to the strong intrinsic linear dichroism of BP and the device design which can sufficiently collect the photoinduced carriers isotropically, as well as the influence from the orientation of the edge of the BP-on-WSe 2 overlapped area which is the same for all polarizations. The high responsivity, good sensitive detectivity and highly polarization-sensitive infrared photoresponse suggest that the photodetectors based on photogate structure afford new opportunities for infrared detecting or imaging at room temperature by using two-dimensional materials.

Assembling nanomaterials into hybrid structures provides a promising and flexible route to reach ultrahigh responsivity by introducing a trap‐assisted gain (G) mechanism. However, the high‐gain photodetectors benefitting from long carrier lifetime often possess slow response time (t) due to the inherent G–t tradeoff. Here, a light‐driven junction field‐effect transistor (LJFET), consisting of an n‐type ZnO belt as the channel material and a p‐type WSe2 nanosheet as a photoactive gate material, to break the G–t tradeoff through decoupling the gain from carrier lifetime is reported. The photoactive gate material WSe2 under illumination enables a conductive path for externally applied voltage, which modulates the depletion region within the ZnO channel efficiently. The gain and response time are separately determined by the field effect modulation and the switching speed of LJFET. As a result, a high responsivity of 4.83 × 103 A W−1 with a gain of ≈104 and a rapid response time of ≈10 µs are obtained simultaneously. The LJFET architecture offers a new approach to realize high‐gain and fast‐response photodetectors without the G–t tradeoff., The concept of a light‐driven junction field‐effect transistor (LJFET) is proposed to break the gain‐response time tradeoff for high‐gain phototransistors. The gain and response time are separately determined by the field effect modulation and the switching speed of LJFET. The design offers a new approach for photodetectors to reach high gain and fast response simultaneously.

Absrtact: An intelligent robot system integrating motion, machine vision and throwing function is designed. The system uses STM32 as the main control chip, realizes the motion control of the robot through mcnaum wheel, completes the image acquisition, recognition and processing of the robot with openmv machine vision module, and realizes the throwing function control of the robot through steering gear and motor. The intelligent throwing robot can recognize and grasp the ball of the corresponding color according to the functional requirements, move to the throwing area of the specified color, and complete the fixed-point throwing of the ball. Through the experimental debugging, the results of the intelligent throwing robot based on the design meet the expected requirements.

An efficient ferroelectric-enhanced side-gated single CdS nanowire (NW) ultraviolet (UV) photodetector at room temperature is demonstrated. With the ultrahigh electrostatic field from polarization of ferroelectric polymer, the depletion of the intrinsic carriers in the CdS NW channel is achieved, which significantly reduces the dark current and increases the sensitivity of the UV photodetector even after the gate voltage is removed. Meanwhile, the low frequency noise current power of the device reaches as low as 4.6 × 10−28 A2 at a source-drain voltage Vds = 1 V. The single CdS NW UV photodetector exhibits high photoconductive gain of 8.6 × 105, responsivity of 2.6 × 105 A W−1, and specific detectivity (D*) of 2.3 × 1016 Jones at a low power density of 0.01 mW cm−2 for λ = 375 nm. In addition, the spatially resolved scanning photocurrent mapping across the device shows strong photocurrent signals near the metal contacts. This is promising for the design of a controllable, high-performance, and low power consumption ultraviolet photodetector.

In recent years, 2D layered materials have been considered as promising photon absorption channel media for next-generation phototransistors due to their atomic thickness, easily tailored single-crystal van der Waals heterostructures, ultrafast optoelectronic characteristics, and broadband photon absorption. However, the photosensitivity obtained from such devices, even under a large bias voltage, is still unsatisfactory until now. In this paper, high-sensitivity phototransistors based on WS2 and MoS2 are proposed, designed, and fabricated with gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) embedded in the gate dielectric. These AuNPs, located between the tunneling and blocking dielectric, are found to enable efficient electron trapping in order to strongly suppress dark current. Ultralow dark current (10−11 A), high photoresponsivity (1090 A W−1), and high detectivity (3.5 × 1011 Jones) are obtained for the WS2 devices under a low source/drain and a zero gate voltage at a wavelength of 520 nm. These results demonstrate that the floating-gate memory structure is an effective configuration to achieve high-performance 2D electronic/optoelectronic devices.

Single-photon detectors that can resolve photon number play a key role in advanced quantum information technologies. Despite significant progress in improving conventional photon-counting detectors and developing novel device concepts, single-photon detectors that are capable of distinguishing incident photon number at room temperature are still very limited. We demonstrate a room-temperature photon-number-resolving detector by integrating a field-effect transistor configuration with core/shell-like nanowires. The shell serves as a photosensitive gate, shielding negative back-gated voltage, and leads to a persistent photocurrent. At room temperature, our detector is demonstrated to identify 1, 2, and 3 photon-number states with a confidence of >82%. The detection efficiency is determined to be 23%, and the dark count rate is 1.87 × 10-3 Hz. Importantly, benefiting from the anisotropic nature of 1D nanowires, the detector shows an intrinsic photon-polarization selection, which distinguishes itself from existing intensity single-photon detectors. The unique performance for the single-photon detectors based on single nanowire demonstrates the great potential for future single-photon detection applications.

The next generation video coding standard High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) provides better compression rate for high resolution videos, at the cost of substantially higher computational complexity. While some latest off-the-shelf consumer electronics support HEVC via ASIC solutions, software implementation of real-time HEVC remains an open challenge for resource-constraint embedded systems. In this work, we present an HEVC decoder design on a low-power embedded heterogeneous multiprocessor System-on-Chip (HMPSoC) with CPU and GPU. Our analysis shows that the massive parallel architecture of GPU leads to a relatively smooth fluctuation on the processing time between video frames. Moreover, the dynamic workload of each frame has a monotonic correlation with a particular coding parameter that can be obtained at decoding time. Based on these observations, we propose an application-specific userspace CPU-GPU DVFS scheme which effectively saves the energy consumption for HEVC decoding. Furthermore, given our accurate workload prediction, only a small frame buffer is required to ensure real-time video decoding.

Objective:We aimed to identify and represent factors associated with thrombocytopenia in intensive care unit, especially the pathogens and drugs related to severe and extremely thrombocytopenia. Then, we aim to compare the mortality of platelet transfusion and non-transfusion in patients with different degrees of thrombocytopenia.Methods:We identified all thrombocytopenic patients in intensive care unit by using platelet-specific values and then extracted electronic health records from our Hospital Information System. Data were statistically analyzed with t test, chi-square test, and logistic regression.Results:We found that infections (32.7%) were the most frequent cause associated with thrombocytopenia, followed by sepsis shock (3.93%) and blood loss (2.99%). Meanwhile, antifungals ( p = 0.002) and bacterial infection ( p = 0.037) were associated with severe and extremely severe thrombocytopenia. Finally, we found that the mortality of platelet transfusion and non-transfusion in patients was statistically significant for patients with platelet counts between 30 and 49/nL (χ2 = 9.719, p = 0.002).Conclusion:Infection and sepsis emerged as two primary factors associated with thrombocytopenia in intensive care unit. Meanwhile, antifungals and bacterial infection were associated with platelet counts less than 49/nL. Finally, platelet transfusion may be associated with reduced mortality in patients with platelet counts between 30 and 49/nL.

As typical direct bandgap II–VI semiconductors, quasi-one dimensional CdS nanowires, nanobelts, and nanorods have shown great potential in electronic and optoelectronic applications. However, most nano-scale CdS Field Effect Transistors (FETs) work in the depletion-mode (D-mode) due to the high unintentional n-type doping concentration, which results in high power consumption under off-state. In addition, the large dark current limits to the specific detectivity when they are fabricated into phototransistors. Here, we have synthesized single crystal CdS nanobelts (NBs) on a SiO2/Si substrate via chemical vapor deposition. The CdS NB FETs were fabricated with HfO2 as a passivation layer. It is found that the working mode of the FETs was transformed from the D-mode to the enhancement-mode with the threshold voltage changing from −22.6 to 0.7 V due to the decrease in the defect density. The HfO2 passivated CdS NB phototransistor shows a responsivity of 4.7 × 104 A/W and an ultrahigh detectivity of 9.07 × 1014 Jones at the source-drain voltage of 1 V under an illumination wavelength of 450 nm. Our work demonstrates an effective way to achieve enhancement-mode CdS FETs and high performance phototransistors.

The common method of implementing a HDLC controller is either using an ASIC device or designing it with software. It is easy to implement a HDLC controller with an ASIC device, but it is hard to modify it. The software method introduces a flexible way, but it will occupy a huge amount of CPU resource, and the timing parameters are hard to ensure. Designing HDLC controller with FPGA can take advantage of both speed and flexibility, furthermore, with the programmable ability of FPGA, more than one channel can be implemented in a single FPGA. This paper introduces a HDLC controller design base on Alteras Cyclone III FPGA and Quartus II developing environment. The controller contains four HDLC channels and an interface for PC104 bus. Except the basic HDLC protocol, more functions are added into the controller, such as alterable flag sequence, built-in timer and so on. The design has been fully tested, and has been used in a communication production successfully.

Two-dimensional materials are promising candidates for electronic and optoelectronic applications. MoTe2 has an appropriate bandgap for both visible and infrared light photodetection. Here we fabricate a high-performance photodetector based on few-layer MoTe2. Raman spectral properties have been studied for different thicknesses of MoTe2. The photodetector based on few-layer MoTe2 exhibits broad spectral range photodetection (0.6-1.55 μm) and a stable and fast photoresponse. The detectivity is calculated to be 3.1 × 10(9) cm Hz(1/2) W(-1) for 637 nm light and 1.3 × 10(9) cm Hz(1/2) W(-1) for 1060 nm light at a backgate voltage of 10 V. The mechanisms of photocurrent generation have been analyzed in detail, and it is considered that a photogating effect plays an important role in photodetection. The appreciable performance and detection over a broad spectral range make it a promising material for high-performance photodetectors.

One-dimensional InAs nanowires (NWs) have been widely researched in recent years. Features of high mobility and narrow bandgap reveal its great potential of optoelectronic applications. However, most reported work about InAs NW-based photodetectors is limited to the visible waveband. Although some work shows certain response for near-infrared light, the problems of large dark current and small light on/off ratio are unsolved, thus significantly restricting the detectivity. Here in this work, a novel "visible light-assisted dark-current suppressing method" is proposed for the first time to reduce the dark current and enhance the infrared photodetection of single InAs NW photodetectors. This method effectively increases the barrier height of the metal-semiconductor contact, thus significantly making the device a metal-semiconductor-metal (MSM) photodiode. These MSM photodiodes demonstrate broadband detection from less than 1 μm to more than 3 μm and a fast response of tens of microseconds. A high detectivity of ∼10

One-dimensional semiconductor nanowires (NWs) have been widely applied in photodetector due to their excellent optoelectronic characteristics. However, intrinsic carrier concentration at certain level results in appreciable dark current, which limits the detectivity of the devices. Here, we fabricated a novel type of ferroelectric-enhanced side-gated NW photodetectors. The intrinsic carriers in the NW channel can be fully depleted by the ultrahigh electrostatic field from polarization of P(VDF-TrFE) ferroelectric polymer. In this scenario, the dark current is significantly reduced and thus the sensitivity of the photodetector is increased even when the gate voltage is removed. Particularly, a single InP NW photodetector exhibits high-photoconductive gain of 4.2 × 10(5), responsivity of 2.8 × 10(5) A W(-1), and specific detectivity (D*) of 9.1 × 10(15) Jones at λ = 830 nm. To further demonstrate the universality of the configuration we also demonstrate ferroelectric polymer side-gated single CdS NW photodetectors with ultrahigh photoconductive gain of 1.2 × 10(7), responsivity of 5.2 × 10(6) A W(-1) and D* up to 1.7 × 10(18) Jones at λ = 520 nm. Overall, our work demonstrates a new approach to fabricate a controllable, full-depleted, and high-performance NW photodetector. This can inspire novel device structure design of high-performance optoelectronic devices based on semiconductor NWs.

Compared to the use of anti-TB drugs for the treatment of tuberculosis (TB), surgery is destructive and is associated with higher risk. Whether surgery is needed for the treatment of TB-destroyed lungs (for short: destroyed lungs) is still controversial and unresolved in the clinic.Retrospective analysis of treatment efficacy was performed on 172 cases of destroyed lungs (176 surgeries) in the Thoracic Surgery Department of our hospital from April 1992 to June 2010.A total of 83 male and 89 female patients was analyzed. The youngest patient was 7 years old, and the oldest was 72 years old, with a mean age of 38.4 years. A total of 120 cases had a preoperative cough, 31 cases had fever, and 42 cases had hemoptysis. A total of 49 cases was positive for Mycobacterium tuberculosis by sputum test before surgery, yielding a positive TB rate of 28.5% (49/172). A total of 116 patients had a destroyed left lung and 56 cases had a destroyed right lung. In all, 110 cases underwent total pneumonectomy, 37 pleuropneumonectomy, one lobectomy, 10 residual lobectomy, two total pneumonectomy and tracheoplasty, 11 cases bronchopleural fistula (BPF) repair and other surgeries, and one case underwent thoracoplasty. A total of four patients underwent thoracoplasty 30 days after surgery due to a thoracic cavity infection or empyema. The overall perioperative mortality rate was 2.9% (5/172). The surgical complication rate was 18.6% (32/172). The sputum negative conversion rate was 87.8% (43/49), and the clinical cure rate was 91.9% (158/172).Our findings suggested that surgical treatment efficacy in destroyed lungs was satisfactory with strict surgical indications, standard preoperative anti-TB treatment, adequate preoperative preparation, and careful intraoperative operations.

Nanostructured zinc oxide (ZnO) semiconductors have emerged as promising materials for high-performance photodetectors due to their natural direct bandgap and extraordinary physicochemical properties. However, the oxygen vacancy defects of nano-ZnO can easily trap oxygen molecules in air and generate charge transfer at the interface, which induced continuous photoconductance that limited the development and application of ZnO in photodetection. Here, we demonstrate a homojunction ultrathin ZnO nanosheet photodetector with high performance and propose a better dominant photoresponse mechanism of the ZnO nanosheet driven by the charge transfer induced local field. The strong localized electric field significantly accelerates the separation of photo-generated carriers and effectively suppresses the dark current. Thus, the photodetector of the charge transfer induced homojunction exhibits ultralow dark current (10−12 A), ultra-high specific detectivity (up to ∼1014 Jones), and fast rising (300 ms) and decaying times (310 ms), taking advantages of high-performance and fast response speed and subverting the limitation of traditional ZnO photodetectors in the field of application. An easy-fabrication, fast response, and high-performance photodetector proposed here provides a good paradigm for the next-generation photodetectors based on two-dimensional nanostructures.

With the development of technologies such as intelligent, automatic control and automatic detection, the research of smart cars has been gradually applied to all levels of people’s social life. The design aims to use K60 as the control chip of smart car and combined with image recognition sensor. Identify road condition information, feedback steering gear, motor control, to complete the intelligent driving of the smart car under complicated road conditions. The experimental results show that the control system has good response characteristics, good stability and meets technical requirements.

A Next Generation Network (NGN) has been developed in Taiwan, where IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) plays an important role to offer IP-based multimedia services. Such NGN/IMS networks have also been deployed worldwide. However, details of commercial-grade NGN service implementations are seldom reported in public. In this paper, we show how existing video phone service can be enhanced through Chunghwa Telecom's NGN/IMS. Specifically, we illustrate three examples including Multimedia on Demand (MOD) TV, Multimedia Ringback Tone (MRBT), and Easy Go (EzGo). We also measure the delay times for accessing these services. The measurements indicate that performance for these IMS-based services is satisfactory. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Recently, the fingerprinting approach using chromatography has become one of the most potent tools for quality assessment of herbal medicine. Due to the complexity of the chromatographic fingerprint and the irreproducibility of chromatographic instruments and experimental conditions, several chemometric approaches such as variance analysis, peak alignment, correlation analysis, and pattern recognition were employed to deal with the chromatographic fingerprint in this work. To facilitate the data preprocessing, a software named Computer Aided Similarity Evaluation (CASE) was also developed. All programs of chemometric algorithms for CASE were coded in MATLAB5.3 based on Windows. Data loading, removing, cutting, smoothing, compressing, background and retention time shift correction, normalization, peak identification and matching, variation determination of common peaks/regions, similarity comparison, sample classification, and other data processes associated with the chromatographic fingerprint we...

The successful resolution of overlapping chromatographic peaks using multivariate resolution methods depends on information about the concentration windows of all the chemical components being available. When conventional methods based on evolving factor analysis are used to obtain such information, a problem arises as a consequence of there not being a one-to-one correspondence between the rank maps and the elution patterns. The recursive evolving spectral projection (RESP) methodology developed in this paper offers a solution to this problem. The algorithm is initialized with a gross partition of the whole retention time region into several exclusive forward or backward informative regions. After selecting a representative spectrum from every informative region, the concentration windows of the overlapping components are determined by examining the residual plots obtained from the proposed recursive evolving spectral projection procedure. Both theoretical and experimental results demonstrate that RESP possesses the characteristics of easy implementation and good performance, which will help realize the automation of non-iterative multivariate resolution methods.

In recent years, the electrical characteristics of WSe2 field-effect transistors (FETs) have been widely investigated with various dielectrics. Among them, being able to perfectly tune the polarity of WSe2 is meaningful and promising work. In this work, we systematically study the electrical properties of bilayer WSe2 FETs modulated by ferroelectric polymer poly(vinylidenefluoride-co-trifluoroethylene) (P(VDF-TrFE)). Compared to traditional gate dielectric SiO2, the P(VDF-TrFE) can not only tune both electron and hole concentrations to the same high level, but also improve the hole mobility of bilayer WSe2 to 265.96 cm2 V-1 s-1 under SiO2 gating. Its drain current on/off ratio is also improved to 2 × 105 for p-type and 4 × 105 for n-type driven by P(VDF-TrFE). More importantly, the ambipolar behaviors of bilayer WSe2 are effectively achieved and maintained because of the remnant polarization field of P(VDF-TrFE). This work indicates that WSe2 FETs with P(VDF-TrFE) gating have huge potential for complementary logic transistor applications, and paves an effective way to achieve in-plane p-n junctions.

Nanowire photodetectors, which have the advantages of fast response and high photoelectric conversion efficiency, can be widely applied in various industries. However, the rich surface states result in large dark current and can hinder the development of high-performance nanowire photodetectors. In this paper, the influence and mechanism of sulfur surface passivation on the dark current of a single GaAs nanowire photodetector have been studied. The dark current is significantly reduced by about 30 times after surface passivation. We confirm that the origin of the reduction of dark current is the decrease in the surface state density. As a result, a single GaAs nanowire photodetector with low dark current of 7.18 × 10−2 pA and high detectivity of 9.04 × 1012 cmHz0.5W−1 has been achieved. A simple and convenient way to realize high-performance GaAs-based photodetectors has been proposed.

An advanced visible/infrared dual-band photodetector with high-resolution imaging at room temperature is proposed and demonstrated for intelligent identification based on the 2D GaSe/GaSb vertical heterostructure. It resolves the challenges of producing large-scale 2D growth, achieving fast response speed, outstanding detectivity, and lower manufacture cost, which are the main obstacles for industrialization of 2D-materials-based photodetection.

In this paper, we designed a reliable and image configurable flight arena, RICA, for developing cyborg bumblebees. To meet the spatial and temporal requirements of bumblebees, the Controller Area Network (CAN) bus is adopted to interconnect the LED display modules to ensure the reliability and real-time performance of the arena system. Easily-configurable interfaces on a desktop computer implemented by python scripts are provided to transmit the visual patterns to the LED distributor online and configure RICA dynamically. The new arena system will be a power tool to investigate the quantitative relationship between the visual inputs and induced flight behaviors and also will be helpful to the visual-motor research in other related fields.

The authors propose a homogeneous architecture for organizing and controlling multiple knowledge sources in signal interpretation systems based on the decomposition of the interpretation problem into subproblems at successive conceptual levels. Partial interpretations and knowledge about the problem are partitioned into associations each of which consisting of several specialists. Information exchange is assured by a common data structure within knowledge sources at each given level and by a message passing mechanism between two different levels. Different strategies adapted to the nature of the problem may be implemented at each level. The interpretation process consists in executing the groups of knowledge sources in multiple phases controlled by data and models in each concept domain and allowing incremental construction of solutions. The authors illustrate the architecture by an application to continuous spoken Chinese understanding. >