Microbial biosynthesis of biopolymers and applications in the biopharmaceutical, biomedical and food industries

Biopolymers can be produced through a variety of mechanisms. They can be derived from microbial systems, extracted from higher organisms such as plants, or synthesized chemically from basic biological building blocks. A wide range of emerging applications rely on all three of these production techniques. In recent years, considerable attention has been given to biopolymers produced by microbes. It is on the microbial level where the tools of genetic engineering can be most readily applied. A number of novel materials are now being developed or introduced into the market. Biopolymers are being developed for use as medical materials, packaging, cosmetics, food additives, clothing fabrics, water treatment chemicals, industrial plastics, absorbents, biosensors, and even data storage elements. This review identifies the possible commercial applications and describes the various methods of production of microbial biopolymers.

Potential of textile hemp in biomedical and composite applications

The fabrication of hemp fine powder was documented for the first time. The antibacterial properties of hemp powders and hemp plant extracts from textile hemp were investigated for the first time. Fabrication and characteristics of hemp powder blended polypropylene polymer composite filaments were investigated for the first time.

Proactive evaluation : new perspectives for ensuring quality in online learning applications

A major issue confronting educators is the extent to which they wish to conform to so-called paradigm shifts in teaching and learning. In the contemporary world of tertiary education these shifts embrace both pedagogy (from instructivist to constructivist) and technology (classroom to online). As teachers and learners are faced with the potential of these new learning environments, the extent to which the learning outcomes are achieved remains a high priority and subject to a wide range of evaluation strategies. Conventionally, evaluation is often conceptualised as occurring at the end of the development process, to assess first (formatively) whether or not the creative effort has achieved the original product goals and second (summatively) whether or not the desired learning outcomes were achieved. However, in the context of imperatives to implement online learning paradigms, the level of understanding teachers and developers have of the medium can impact the effectiveness of the product. This paper presents an additional perspective to the post-development, reactive evaluation processes in proposing the concept of proactive evaluation, a framework that identifies critical online learning factors and influences to better inform the development of learning resources. In essence, the proposal advocates an approach where development is undertaken within an environment where all activities are assessed using the evaluation criteria that would be applied when the product is assessed reactively. By performing these checks proactively, online learning resources will, in principle, work first time as all relevant factors and issues will have been considered and resolved.

Nanofibers - production, properties and functional applications

With the rapid development of nanoscience and nanotechnology over the last decades, great progress has been made not only in the preparation and characterization of nanomaterials, but also in their functional applications. As an important one-dimensional nanomaterial, nanofibers have extremely high specific surface area because of their small diameters, and nanofiber membranes are highly porous with excellent pore interconnectivity. These unique characteristics plus the functionalities from the materials themselves impart nanofibers with a number of novel properties for applications in areas as various as biomedical engineering, wound healing, drug delivery and release control, catalyst and enzyme carriers, filtration, environment protection, composite reinforcement, sensors, optics, energy harvest and storage , and many others. More and more emphasis has recently been placed on large-scale nanofiber production, the key technology to the wide usages of nanofibers in practice. Tremendous efforts have been made on producing nanofibers from special materials. Concerns have been raised to the safety issue of nanofibrous materials. This book is a compilation of contributions made by experts who specialize in their chosen field. It is grouped into three sections composed of twenty-one chapters, providing an up-to-date coverage of nanofiber preparation, properties and functional applications. I am deeply appreciative of all the authors and have no doubt that their contribution will be a useful resource of anyone associated with the discipline of nanofibers.

Machinability assessment of Ti-6Al-4V for aerospace applications

Titanium alloy Ti-6Al-4V is the most commonly used titanium alloy in the aerospace and biomedical industries due to its superior material properties. An experimental investigation has been carried out to evaluate the machinability of high performance aerospace alloys (Ti-6Al-4V) to determine their in service performance characteristics based on different machining strategies. Nearly 80-90% of the titanium used in airframes is Ti-6Al-4V. The experimental design consist of face milling Ti-6Al-4V at 12 different combinations of cutting parameters consisting of Depth Of Cut (DoC)- 1, 2 and 3 mm; speeds- 60 and 100 m/min; coolant on/off and at constant feed rate of 0.04mm/tooth. Post machining analysis consists of cutting force measurement, surface texture analysis and metallographic analysis. The future work consists of in-depth investigation into the phase transformational reactions during machining.

Biomedical time series analysis based on bag-of-words model

This research proposes a number of new methods for biomedical time series classification and clustering based on a novel Bag-of-Words (BoW) representation. It is anticipated that the objective and automatic biomedical time series clustering and classification technologies developed in this work will potentially benefit a wide range of applications, such as biomedical data management, archiving, retrieving, and disease diagnosis and prognosis in the future.

Multichannel biomedical time series clustering via hierarchical probabilistic latent semantic analysis

Biomedical time series clustering that automatically groups a collection of time series according to their internal similarity is of importance for medical record management and inspection such as bio-signals archiving and retrieval. In this paper, a novel framework that automatically groups a set of unlabelled multichannel biomedical time series according to their internal structural similarity is proposed. Specifically, we treat a multichannel biomedical time series as a document and extract local segments from the time series as words. We extend a topic model, i.e., the Hierarchical probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis (H-pLSA), which was originally developed for visual motion analysis to cluster a set of unlabelled multichannel time series. The H-pLSA models each channel of the multichannel time series using a local pLSA in the first layer. The topics learned in the local pLSA are then fed to a global pLSA in the second layer to discover the categories of multichannel time series. Experiments on a dataset extracted from multichannel Electrocardiography (ECG) signals demonstrate that the proposed method performs better than previous state-of-the-art approaches and is relatively robust to the variations of parameters including length of local segments and dictionary size. Although the experimental evaluation used the multichannel ECG signals in a biometric scenario, the proposed algorithm is a universal framework for multichannel biomedical time series clustering according to their structural similarity, which has many applications in biomedical time series management.

Bio-inspired nanotechnology: from surface analysis to applications

This book focuses on the use of bio-inspired and biomimetic methods for the fabrication and activation of nanomaterials. This includes studies concerning the binding of the biomolecules to the surface of inorganic structures, structure/function relationships of the final materials and extensive discussions on the final applications of such biomimetic materials in unique applications including energy harvesting/storage, biomedical diagnostics and materials assembly.

Biomedical sensing analyzer (BSA) for mobile-health (mHealth)-LTE

The rapid expansion of mobile-based systems, the capabilities of smartphone devices, as well as the radio access and cellular network technologies are the wind beneath the wing of mobile health (mHealth). In this paper, the concept of biomedical sensing analyzer (BSA) is presented, which is a novel framework, devised for sensor-based mHealth applications. The BSA is capable of formulating the Quality of Service (QoS) measurements in an end-to-end sense, covering the entire communication path (wearable sensors, link-technology, smartphone, cell-towers, mobile-cloud, and the end-users). The characterization and formulation of BSA depend on a number of factors, including the deployment of application-specific biomedical sensors, generic link-technologies, collection, aggregation, and prioritization of mHealth data, cellular network based on the Long-Term Evolution (LTE) access technology, and extensive multidimensional delay analyses. The results are studied and analyzed in a LabView 8.5 programming environment.

Advances in wrought magnesium alloys: Fundamentals of processing, properties and applications

This important book summarises the wealth of recent research on our understanding of process-property relationships in wrought magnesium alloys and the way this understanding can be used to develop a new generation of alloys for high-performance applications. After an introductory overview of current developments in wrought magnesium alloys, part one reviews fundamental aspects of deformation behaviour. These chapters are the building blocks for the optimisation of processing steps covered in part two, which discusses casting, extrusion, rolling and forging technologies. The concluding chapters cover applications of wrought magnesium alloys in automotive and biomedical engineering. With its distinguished editors, and drawing on the work of leading experts in the field, Advances in wrought magnesium alloys is a standard reference for those researching, manufacturing and using these alloys.

Mobile health (mHealth) biomedical imaging paradigm

Technology assisted methods for medical diagnosis and biomedical health monitoring are rapidly shifting from classical invasive methods to handheld-based non-invasive approaches. Biomedical imagining is one of the most prominent practices of non-invasive mechanisms in medical applications. This paper considers the medical imaging schemes for Mobile Health (mHealth) applications and studies the feasibility of future mobile systems for accommodating image informatics capabilities.