Quantitation of plasma and biliary cefpiramide concentrations in human samples using high-performance liquid chromatography

Cefpiramide is frequently used to treat biliary infections. However, no bioanalytical method has been validated to quantitate cefpiramide in human samples, particularly in bile. Therefore, this study was conducted to develop a simple, selective and validated high-performance liquid chromatographic method to determine cefpiramide in human plasma and bile. A protein precipitation procedure was used to extract cefpiramide and cefoperazone (internal standard, IS) from 200 μl of plasma and bile. Utilizing a Capcell Pak C₁₈ column (4.6 × 250 mm), cefpiramide and IS were separated using the timed-gradient mobile phase consisting of 0.1 m sodium acetate (pH 5.2) and acetonitrile at a flow rate of 1 ml/min with photodiode array detector (wavelength set at 273 nm). The calibration curves showed linearity at concentrations ranging from 1 to 150 μg/ml in both plasma and bile (r² > 0.999). The within- and between-run coefficients of variation (CVs) for plasma samples were 0.570–4.43 and 1.10–2.76%, respectively; for bile samples, the within- and between-day precision (CV) was 0.814–6.34 and 2.05–4.00%, respectively. Our newly developed bioanalytical method was successfully employed to quantify cefpiramide concentrations in both plasma and bile at multiple time points in patients with acute cholangitis.     

Effect of heat treatment on physical and electrical characteristics of conductive circuits printed on Si substrate

Printed electronics is expected to increase its market share significantly in near future on account of its high material usage efficiency, environmental friendliness, the avoidness of expensive process steps, and the ability to rapidly change circuit designs in real time in a highly cost effective fashion. Herein, we tried to examine the physical characteristics of the two types of selected Ag nanopastes and electrical characteristics of screen printed Ag patterns on a Si substrate sintered at 200 °C for varying sintering times. The first type of the paste had no binder material and the second one was formulated with an addition of a polymeric binder. They had different thermal behaviors, i.e., the paste with a binder showed a continuous small reaction well beyond the temperature for the main reaction of the paste without any binder. The microstructure of the Ag tracks after sintering was also different between the two cases, which verified the poor electrical characteristics of the paste containing a binder than the one without any binder. We also measured the insertion losses of the Ag tracks with a design for the high frequency transmission, and the observed electrical behaviors were discussed with the physical properties of the pastes measured in this study.     

Technical Analysis of Security Management in Terms of Crowd Energy and Smart Living

In this paper, a technical and statistical analysis of security system and security management is provided for crowd energy and smart living. At the same time, a clear understanding is made for crowd energy concept and next generation smart living. Various case examples have been studied and a brief summary has been provided. Furthermore, a statistical analysis has been provided in terms of security management in smart living where it is found that young technocrats give the highest importance to security management in smart living. Last but not the least, current limitation, constraints, and future scope of security implementation have been discussed in terms of crowd energy clustered with next generation smart living.     

Surface wave transmission measurements across distributed surface-breaking cracks using air-coupled sensors

Near-field scattering of surface waves by a single surface-breaking crack in solid medium has been well investigated by prior researchers. However, there have been few studies for more realistic problems involving near scattering of surface waves by distributed surface-breaking cracks. One possible reason is complexity caused by the interaction of surface waves between multiple cracks. In this study, interaction of surface waves between two surface-breaking cracks with various crack spacing was investigated. The experimental study was performed on Plexiglas specimens with non-contact sensors (air-coupled sensors, and a laser vibrometer), and compared with numerical simulation results. The effects of crack depth h, spacing a, and the number of cracks N on surface wave transmission were studied. Analyses show that for the very small crack spacing (a/h<0.2), the distributed cracks can be regarded as a single surface-breaking crack. However, for a/h ranging between approximately 1 and 6, transmission coefficient of surface waves is significantly affected by interaction between cracks. The transmission coefficients have the lowest value when a/h is between 2 and 3. When a/h is large (a/h>6), transmission coefficients obtained from experiments, and numerical simulations agree with the theoretical results based on non-interaction crack assumption.     

Synthesis of 9‐[2‐(2‐hydroxymethyl‐2‐methyl‐, ‐(2‐acetoxymethyl‐2‐methyl‐, ‐(2,2‐di(hydroxymethyl)‐, and ‐(2,2‐Di(acetoxymethyl)‐1,3‐dioxan‐5‐yl)ethyl] derivatives of guanine and 2‐aminopurine

Synthesis of 9‐[2‐(2‐hydroxymethyl‐2‐methyl‐, ‐(2‐acetoxymethyl‐2‐methyl‐, ‐(2,2‐di(hydroxymethyl)‐, and ‐(2,2‐di(acetoxymethyl)‐1,3‐dioxan‐5‐yl)ethyl] derivatives of guanine and 2‐aminopurine, 2–9 , has been accomplished in seven to eight step sequences from readily available 1‐(tert‐butyldiphenylsilyloxy)‐acetone, 1,3‐di(tert‐butyldiphenylsilyloxy)acetone, and the diol 10 . Formation of cyclic ketals 11 and 12 was carried out successfully under an acidic condition using a catalytic amount of methanesulfonic acid along with excess anhydrous copper(II) sulfate in toluene. Subsequent reactions of desilylation, acetylation, hydrogenolysis, and bromination afforded the key intermediates 19 and 20 , which were coupled with 2‐amino‐6‐chloropurine to produce the purine compounds 21 and 22 in good yields. Guanine derivatives 2–5 were obtained from 21 and 22 by hydrolysis and acetylation, while the dechlorination and hydrolysis of 21 and 22 yielded the 2‐aminopurine compounds 6–9 .     

Broad-band photoresponse from InAs quantum dots embedded into InGaAs graded well

A broad-band photoresponse is obtained from undoped InAs multiple quantum dots grown by the molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) technique on a (100) GaAs substrate. The quantum dots were embedded in an In/sub x/Ga/sub 1-x/As graded well where the In mole fraction is chosen in the range of 0.3 /spl ges/ x /spl ges/ 0.0. The photoresponse of the reversed biased device, obtained at 80.5 K and using the normal incident configuration, was found to span the spectral range of 3.5 - 9.5 /spl mu/m. While the photoresponse is significantly high under the influence of the reverse bias voltage, the forward bias photoresponse is found to be negligible.     

Connected sensor cover for area information coverage in wireless sensor networks

Coverage is an important issue in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) and is often used to measure how well a sensor field is monitored by the deployed sensors. If the area covered by a sensor can also be covered by some other sensors, this sensor can go into an energy‐saving sleep state without sacrificing the coverage requirement. In this paper, we study the problem of how to select active sensors with the constraints that the selected active sensors can provide complete field coverage and are completely connected. We propose to use the notion of information coverage, which is based on estimation theory to exploit the collaborative nature of WSNs, instead of using the conventional definition of coverage. Owing to the use of information coverage, a point that is not within the sensing disk of any sensor can still be considered to be covered without loss of estimation reliability. We propose a heuristic to approximately solve our problem. The basic idea is to grow a connected sensor tree to maximize the profit from the covered points of the selected sensors in each step. Simulations are used to validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm and the results illustrate that the number of active sensors to provide area coverage can be greatly reduced by using the notion of information coverage compared with that by using the conventional definition of coverage. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

GVF-based anisotropic diffusion models.

In this paper, the gradient vector flow fields are introduced in image restoration. Within the context of flow fields, the shock filter, mean curvature flow, and Perona-Malik equation are reformulated. Many advantages over the original models can be obtained; these include numerical stability, large capture range, and high-order derivative estimation. In addition, a fairing process is introduced in the anisotropic diffusion, which contains a fourth-order derivative and is reformulated as the intrinsic Laplacian of curvature under the level set framework. By applying this fairing process, the shape boundaries will become more apparent. In order to overcome numerical errors, the intrinsic Laplacian of curvature is computed from the gradient vector flow fields instead of the observed images.