Quantification of thyroid volume using 3-D ultrasound imaging

Ultrasound (US) is among the most popular diagnostic techniques today. It is non-invasive, fast, comparably cheap, and does not require ionizing radiation. US is commonly used to examine the size, and structure of the thyroid gland. In clinical routine, thyroid imaging is usually performed by means of 2-D US. Conventional approaches for measuring the volume of the thyroid gland or its nodules may therefore be inaccurate due to the lack of 3-D information. This work reports a semi-automatic segmentation approach for the classification, and analysis of the thyroid gland based on 3-D US data. The images are scanned in 3-D, pre-processed, and segmented. Several pre-processing methods, and an extension of a commonly used geodesic active contour level set formulation are discussed in detail. The results obtained by this approach are compared to manual interactive segmentations by a medical expert in five representative patients. Our work proposes a novel framework for the volumetric quantification of thyroid gland lobes, which may also be expanded to other parenchymatous organs.     

Strain-dependent deformation behavior in nanocrystalline metals

The deformation behavior as a function of applied strain was studied in a nanostructured Ni-Fe alloy using the in situ synchrotron diffraction technique. It was found that the plastic deformation process consists of two stages, undergoing a transition with applied strain. At low strains, the deformation is mainly accommodated at grain boundaries, while at large strains, the dislocation motion becomes probable and eventually dominates. In addition, current results revealed that, at small grain sizes, the 0.2% offset criterion cannot be used to define the macroscopic yield strength any more. The present study also explained the controversial observations in the literature.     

Investigations on the long time behavior of the metastable boron–oxygen complex in crystalline silicon

Boron and oxygen contamination in Czochralski‐grown (Cz) silicon leads to a degradation of the minority charge carrier lifetime within short times due to the formation of recombination active complexes. The formation of these complexes is investigated for longer times showing a further development of the defect. This development called ‘regeneration’ is triggered by illumination or applied forward voltages and leads to a new state of the defect. This new state of the defect is proven to be less recombination active allowing higher stable minority carrier lifetimes and conversion efficiencies of solar cells. The influences of temperature and light intensity are discussed. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Dynamic models and solutions for evaluating ventilation, perfusion and mass transfer in the lung. II. Analog solutions

For pt.I see ibid., vol.35, no.6, p.450-7, June 1988. The model of the lung described in pt.I is presented in terms of analog computer components. This permits the quantitative evaluation of the model even when it is nonlinear and analytically insoluble. This property is used for the evaluation of the multiple-gas effect and for the determination of conditions under which the effect may be neglected with negligible error.<>     

The use of high-throughput synthesis and purification in the preparation of a directed library of adrenergic agents

A library of potential agonists and antagonists for adrenergic receptors was prepared using high-throughput solution-phase parallel synthesis. Traditional solution-phase reductive amination reactions followed by rapid purification by ion exchange chromatography yielded products with near-analytical purity. An array of ketones and amines, arranged in an 8 × 12 matrix, were combined to form 96 individual compounds. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

M-harmonic Besovp-spaces and Hankel operators in the Bergman space on the ball in ℂ n

In this paper, we characterize the Hardy class ofM-harmonic functions on the unit ballB in ℂ ⁿ in terms of the Berezin transform. We define and study the Besovp-spaces ofM-harmonic functions. For anM-harmonic symbolf, we give various criteria for the Hankel operatorsH _f andH _f to be bounded, compact or in the Schatten-von-Neumann classS _p . These criteria establish a close relationship among Besovp-spaces, Berezin transform, the invariant Laplacian, and Hankel operators on the unit ballB.     

Evaluation of a Cluster-Based System for the OLTP Application

In this paper, we have modeled and evaluated a new parallel processing system called Scalable Parallel computer Architecture based on Xbar (SPAX) for commercial applications. SMP systems are widely used as servers for commercial applications; however, they have very limited scalability. SPAX costeffectively overcomes the SMP limitation by providing both scalability and application portability. To investigate whether the new architecture satisfies the requirements of commercial applications, we have built a system model and a workload model. The results of the simulation study show that the I/O subsystem becomes the major bottleneck. We found that SPAX can still meet the I/O requirement of the OLTP workload as it supports flexible I/O subsystem. We also investigated what will be the next most important bottleneck in SPAX and how to remove it. We found that the newly developed system network called Xcent-Net will not be a bottleneck in the I/O data path. We also show the optimal configuration that is to be considered for system tuning.     

Final charge state distribution in the production and decay of hollow Ar

The improved model of radiative-Auger-cascade with shake-off effect is applied to calculate the final charge state distribution and the X-ray and Auger electron spectra emitted during the cascade decay of Ar, with the initial 1s hole created by the synchrotron irradiation. The discrepancy in the predicted charge distribution without the shake-off effect is removed. It was found that the discrepancy was caused mainly by the neglect of the shake-off effect during the productin stage of the 1s hole, and not by the shake-off effect during the decay of the 1s hole. The X-ray and Auger spectra predicted by the improved model are compared with that without the shake-off. The charge distributions resulting from a 2s or 2p initial hole are also presented.