Biodegradable polyurethane based on random copolymer of L-lactide and epsilon-caprolactone and its shape-memory property

A series of biodegradable polyurethanes (PUs) are synthesized from the copolymer diols prepared from L-lactide and epsilon-caprolactone (CL), 2,4-toluene diisocyanate, and 1,4-butanediol. Their thermal and mechanical properties are characterized via FTIR, DSC, and tensile tests. Their T(g)s are in the range of 28-53 degrees C. They have high modulus, tensile strength, and elongation ratio at break. With increasing CL content, the PU changes from semicrystalline to completely amorphous. Thermal mechanical analysis is used to determine their shape-memory property. When they are deformed and fixed at proper temperatures, their shape-recovery is almost complete for a tensile elongation of 150% or a compression of 2-folds. By changing the content of CL and the hard-to-soft ratio, their T(g)s and their shape-recovery temperature can be adjusted. Therefore, they may find wide applications.

Synthesis and characterization of new carbazole/fluorene-based derivatives for blue-light-emitting devices

2,7-Bis(9-ethylcarbazol-3-yl)-9,9-di(2-ethylhexyl)fluorene and a segmented copolymer composed of the same chromophores alternated with hexamethylene fragments were synthesized. The obtained materials possess good solubility in common organic solvents, high thermal stability with 1% weight loss temperature of 350-370 degrees C, and suitable glass transition temperatures. Both derivatives show blue fluorescence in dilute solutions as well as in solid state, demonstrating that excimers are not formed in the thin films. The fluorescence spectra of the materials do not show any peaks in the long-wavelength region even after annealing at 200 degrees C in air. An organic LED with the configuration of ITO/copolymer/Al generates blue electroluminescence with the maximum peak at 416 nm, rather low turn-on voltage (4.0 V), and brightness of about 400 cd/m(2). The heterostructure device based on model derivative emitted stable blue light with low operation voltage (100 cd/m(2) at similar to 11 V) and demonstrated luminescence efficiency of 0.8 cd/A.

Polylactide-based polyurethane and its shape-memory behavior

A series of polylactide polyurethanes (PLAUs) were synthesized from poly(L-lactide) diols, hexamethylene diisocyanate (HDI), and 1,4-butanediol (BDO). Their thermal and mechanical properties and shape-memory behavior were studied by infrared spectroscopy (IR), differential scanning calorimetry (DSC), wide angle X-ray diffraction (WAXID), tensile testing, and thermal mechanical analysis (TMA). The T(g)s of these polymers were in the range of 33-53 degrees C, and influenced by the Mn of the PLA diol and the ratio of the soft-segment to the hard-segment. These materials can restore their shapes almost completely after 150% elongation or twofold compression. By changing the M-n of the PLA diol and the ratio of the hard-to-soft-segment, their Ts and shape-recovery temperatures can be adjusted to the neighborhood of the body temperature. Therefore, these PLAUs are expected to find practical medical applications.

三种海水经济鱼类早期发育生物学的研究

海水经济鱼类的养殖在我国已经形成第四次海水养殖浪潮，经济效益显著，有力地推动了我国海水养殖的产业结构调整和可持续发展。然而在海水养殖发展过程中也存在着诸多问题，尤其是早期发育阶段的高死亡率，严重制约了我国海水养殖产业的稳定和健康发展。 海水鱼类养殖的关键为高质量，高存活率苗种的生产和培育，由于鱼类种类繁多，生物多样性丰富，对应实际的繁育技术，尤其是新品种的开发，必须要做出相应的调整。这就要求我们必须对每一种鱼类早期发育有所了解，并将形态和组织上的数据用于指导生产。 本文通过显微观察和组织学研究，主要描述和研究了我国北方三种重要的海水经济鱼类(条斑星鲽、杂交鲆、条石鲷)的早期发育生物学，并结合实际生产进一步阐明关键期的产生原因，机理以及采用相应的对策。具体结果如下： 1.条斑星鲽：作为冷温性鲆鲽鱼类，条斑星鲽早期发育过程的特征主要有： ① 条斑星鲽受精卵无油球，卵子呈半浮性；不同步卵裂现象提前，发生在第三次卵裂；卵裂期裂球大小差异大。孵化过程较长，在水温8 ± 0.3℃，盐度33的条件下，经9 d孵化。条斑星鲽胚胎发育的不同时期对温度的敏感性不同，其中原肠期对温度比较敏感。 ②在8-10℃，盐度33的条件下，8-9 dph开口摄食。且开口时，其吻前端出现有一点状黑褐色素，构成了条斑星鲽仔鱼“开口期”的重要标志。卵黄囊于消失。在后期仔鱼末期，背鳍和臀鳍上形成特有的黑褐色条斑带。 ③杯状细胞首先出现在咽腔后部和食道前段，胃腺和幽门盲囊出现于29 dph，变态期始于30dph。在条斑星鲽早期发育过程中，观察到其直肠粘膜层细胞质出现大量嗜伊红颗粒，为仔鱼肠道上皮吸收的蛋白质。 ④首先淋巴化的免疫器官是头肾，然后是胸腺和脾脏，这与大部分硬骨鱼类不同。条斑星鲽除头肾和脾脏外，胸腺实质也形成MMCs。其中以脾脏形成MMCs最为丰富，形态多样。 2. 杂交鲆：为同属的牙鲆和夏鲆间的远缘杂交种，其发育过程的特点为： ① 在温度为15.4～16.0℃，杂交鲆胚胎从受精到孵化所需的时间为76 h左右，胚孔关闭前期，胚胎先出现视囊及克氏囊，而后形成体节。孵出前胚体在卵膜内环绕不到1周。 ② 孵化后消失。杂交鲆群体变态间隔长(34-60 dph)，且变态高峰期出现的冠状幼鳍不明显(与母本牙鲆相比)，数量为7-8根。 ③组织学观察发现，其消化系统中胃腺出现较晚，且胃腺发育过程缓慢(与母本牙鲆相比)。甲状腺滤泡增生不明显，颜色较浅，数量较少。杂交鲆在早期发育过程中，并没有出现鳔原基。 3. 条石鲷作为岩礁性的暖水性鱼类，早期发育过程也较为特殊，包括外形以及内部的器官结构。主要特点有： ① 受精卵：受精卵卵黄上具有龟裂结构，为鱼卵的分类特征之一。 ② 初孵仔鱼：初孵仔鱼背鳍膜上的黑色素，从体背面向背鳍膜边缘移动，到3dph仔鱼基本消失，此为本种仔鱼发育所特有的特点。 ③ 后期仔鱼和稚鱼：肠道肌肉层加厚明显，仔稚鱼胃肠排空率急剧上升，死亡率增加，通过改善常规的投饵方式部分解决了这个死亡高峰的问题。在幼鱼初期，牙齿融合为骨喙，为石鲷科鱼类的特征。 ④胸腺上皮分泌细胞：类似的现象同样在虹鳟鱼中发现，但是虹鳟鱼胸腺上皮分泌细胞不如条石鲷的丰富，同样也不如条石鲷的排列整齐，而是零星分布在胸腺上皮与咽腔接触的表面。除了正常的造血器官—脾脏和头肾外，肝脏、胰腺和鳔等多种组织等也出现MMCs，此现象在硬骨鱼类不多见，一般发生在软骨鱼类。

一种多移动机器人避碰规划方法

本文采用集中预规划方法 ,通过调整机器人的运动速度实现多机器人避碰 ,所提算法的基本思想为 :将机器人的运动路径分段 ,然后按避碰要求对机器人通过各段的时间进行约束 ,从而将避碰问题转化为高维线性空间的优化问题 ,并进一步将其转化为线性方程的求解 ,使问题具有明确的解析解 .由于该方法的复杂度较高 ,在实现过程中采用了多种方法降低复杂度 ,简化计算 .本文给出了该算法的基本思路 ,有关定理及证明 ,算法的化简方法 ,最后给出了实验结果及分析 .

双聚焦偏移速度估计与可分表示叠前弹性反演

In exploration seismology, the geologic target of oil and gas reservoir in complex medium request the high accuracy image of the structure and lithology of the medium. So the study of the prestack image and the elastic inversion of seismic wave in the complex medium come to the leading edge. The seismic response measured at the surface carries two fundamental pieces of information: the propagation effects of the medium and the reflections from the different layer boundaries in the medium. The propagation represent the low-wavenumber component of the medium, it is so-called the trend or macro layering, whereas the reflections represent the high-wavenumber component of the medium, it is called the detailed or fine layering. The result of migration velocity analysis is the resolution of the low-wavenumber component of the medium, but the prestack elastic inversion provided the resolution of the high-wavvenumber component the medium. In the dissertation, the two aspects about the migration velocity estimation and the elastic inversion have been studied.Firstly, any migration velocity analysis methods must include two basic elements: the criterion that tell us how to know whether the model parameters are correct and the updating that tell us how to update the model parameters when they are incorrect, which are effected on the properties and efficiency of the velocity estimation method. In the dissertation, a migration velocity analysis method based on the CFP technology has been presented in which the strategy of the top-down layer stripping approach are adapted to avoid the difficult of the selecting reduce .The proposed method has a advantage that the travel time errors obtained from the DTS panel are defined directly in time which is the difference with the method based on common image gather in which the residual curvature measured in depth should be converted to travel time errors.In the proposed migration velocity analysis method, the four aspects have been improved as follow:? The new parameterization of velocity model is provided in which the boundaries of layers are interpolated with the cubic spline of the control location and the velocity with a layer may change along with lateral position but the value is calculated as a segmented linear function of the velocity of the lateral control points. The proposed parameterization is suitable to updating procedure.? The analytical formulas to represent the travel time errors and the model parameters updates in the t-p domain are derived under local lateral homogeneous. The velocity estimations are iteratively computed as parametric inversion. The zero differential time shift in the DTS panel for each layer show the convergence of the velocity estimation.? The method of building initial model using the priori information is provided to improve the efficiency of velocity analysis. In the proposed method, Picking interesting events in the stacked section to define the boundaries of the layers and the results of conventional velocity analysis are used to define the velocity value of the layers? An interactive integrate software environment with the migration velocity analysis and prestack migration is built.The proposed method is firstly used to the synthetic data. The results of velocity estimation show both properties and efficiency of the velocity estimation are very good.The proposed method is also used to the field data which is the marine data set. In this example, the prestack and poststack depth migration of the data are completed using the different velocity models built with different method. The comparison between them shows that the model from the proposed method is better and improves obviously the quality of migration.In terms of the theoretical method of expressing a multi-variable function by products of single-variable functions which is suggested by Song Jian (2001), the separable expression of one-way wave operator has been studied. A optimization approximation with separable expression of the one-way wave operator is presented which easily deal with the lateral change of velocity in space and wave number domain respectively and has good approach accuracy. A new prestack depth migration algorithm based on the optimization approximation separable expression is developed and used to testing the results of velocity estimation.Secondly, according to the theory of the seismic wave reflection and transmission, the change of the amplitude via the incident angle is related to the elasticity of medium in the subsurface two-side. In the conventional inversion with poststack datum, only the information of the reflection operator at the zero incident angles can be used. If the more robust resolutions are requested, the amplitudes of all incident angles should be used.A natural separable expression of the reflection/transmission operator is represented, which is the sum of the products of two group functions. One group function vary with phase space whereas other group function is related to elastic parameters of the medium and geological structure.By employing the natural separable expression of the reflection/transmission operator, the method of seismic wave modeling with the one-way wave equation is developed to model the primary reflected waves, it is adapt to a certain extent heterogeneous media and confirms the accuracy of AVA of the reflections when the incident angle is less than 45'. The computational efficiency of the scheme is greatly high.The natural separable expression of the reflection/transmission operator is also used to construct prestack elastic inversion algorithm. Being different from the AVO analysis and inversion in which the angle gathers formed during the prstack migration are used, the proposed algorithm construct a linear equations during the prestack migration by the separable expression of the reflection/transmission operator. The unknowns of the linear equations are related to the elasticity of the medium, so the resolutions of them provided the elastic information of the medium.The proposed method of inversion is the same as AVO inversion in , the difference between them is only the method processing the amplitude via the incident angle and computational domain.

Learning object segmentation from video data

This memo describes the initial results of a project to create a self-supervised algorithm for learning object segmentation from video data. Developmental psychology and computational experience have demonstrated that the motion segmentation of objects is a simpler, more primitive process than the detection of object boundaries by static image cues. Therefore, motion information provides a plausible supervision signal for learning the static boundary detection task and for evaluating performance on a test set. A video camera and previously developed background subtraction algorithms can automatically produce a large database of motion-segmented images for minimal cost. The purpose of this work is to use the information in such a database to learn how to detect the object boundaries in novel images using static information, such as color, texture, and shape. This work was funded in part by the Office of Naval Research contract #N00014-00-1-0298, in part by the Singapore-MIT Alliance agreement of 11/6/98, and in part by a National Science Foundation Graduate Student Fellowship.

A novel breast tissue density classification framework

Oliver, A., Freixenet, J., Marti, R., Pont, J., Perez, E., Denton, E. R. E., Zwiggelaar, R. (2008). A novel breast tissue density classification framework. IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in BioMedicine, 12 (1), 55-65

Volcanic rifting at Martian grabens

Cook, Anthony; Mege, D.; Garel, E.; Lagabrielle, Y., (2003) 'Volcanic rifting at Martian grabens', Journal of Geophysical Research 108(E5) pp. 1-33 RAE2008

Constructing Visual Taxonomies by Shape

Cook, Anthony; Gibbens, M.J., (2006) 'Constructing Visual Taxonomies by Shape', 18th International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR'06) Volume 2, pp. 732 - 735 RAE2008

Biobased additives as biodegradability enhancers with application in TPU-based footwear components

Among the wide variety of materials employed in the manufacture of shoes, thermoplastic polyurethanes (TPUs) are one of the most widely used. Given its widespread use, and associated waste management problems, the development of more biodegradable and evironmentally compatible solutions is needed. In this work, a polyester-based TPU used in the footwear industry for outsoles production was modified by compounding with lignin, starch and cellulose at content of 4% (w/w). The biodegradability was evaluated by using agar plate tests with the fungi Aspergillus niger ATCC16404, the Gram-negative bacteria Pseudomonas aeruginosa ATCC9027 and an association of both (consortium), and soil tests at 37 °C and 58 °C. The obtained results evidenced a positive effect of the tested biobased additives, the most favourable results being registered with lignin. These results were corroborated by the structural modifications observed by FTIR analysis. Additionally, mechanical tests prove the suitability of using the lignin modified TPUs for footwear outsoles production.

An Appearance-Based Framework for 3D Hand Shape Classification and Camera Viewpoint Estimation

An appearance-based framework for 3D hand shape classification and simultaneous camera viewpoint estimation is presented. Given an input image of a segmented hand, the most similar matches from a large database of synthetic hand images are retrieved. The ground truth labels of those matches, containing hand shape and camera viewpoint information, are returned by the system as estimates for the input image. Database retrieval is done hierarchically, by first quickly rejecting the vast majority of all database views, and then ranking the remaining candidates in order of similarity to the input. Four different similarity measures are employed, based on edge location, edge orientation, finger location and geometric moments.

Inferring Body Pose without Tracking Body Parts

A novel approach for estimating articulated body posture and motion from monocular video sequences is proposed. Human pose is defined as the instantaneous two dimensional configuration (i.e., the projection onto the image plane) of a single articulated body in terms of the position of a predetermined set of joints. First, statistical segmentation of the human bodies from the background is performed and low-level visual features are found given the segmented body shape. The goal is to be able to map these, generally low level, visual features to body configurations. The system estimates different mappings, each one with a specific cluster in the visual feature space. Given a set of body motion sequences for training, unsupervised clustering is obtained via the Expectation Maximation algorithm. Then, for each of the clusters, a function is estimated to build the mapping between low-level features to 3D pose. Currently this mapping is modeled by a neural network. Given new visual features, a mapping from each cluster is performed to yield a set of possible poses. From this set, the system selects the most likely pose given the learned probability distribution and the visual feature similarity between hypothesis and input. Performance of the proposed approach is characterized using a new set of known body postures, showing promising results.

Foreground Object Segmentation from Binocular Stereo Video

Moving cameras are needed for a wide range of applications in robotics, vehicle systems, surveillance, etc. However, many foreground object segmentation methods reported in the literature are unsuitable for such settings; these methods assume that the camera is fixed and the background changes slowly, and are inadequate for segmenting objects in video if there is significant motion of the camera or background. To address this shortcoming, a new method for segmenting foreground objects is proposed that utilizes binocular video. The method is demonstrated in the application of tracking and segmenting people in video who are approximately facing the binocular camera rig. Given a stereo image pair, the system first tries to find faces. Starting at each face, the region containing the person is grown by merging regions from an over-segmented color image. The disparity map is used to guide this merging process. The system has been implemented on a consumer-grade PC, and tested on video sequences of people indoors obtained from a moving camera rig. As can be expected, the proposed method works well in situations where other foreground-background segmentation methods typically fail. We believe that this superior performance is partly due to the use of object detection to guide region merging in disparity/color foreground segmentation, and partly due to the use of disparity information available with a binocular rig, in contrast with most previous methods that assumed monocular sequences.

Processing of Synthetic Aperture Radar Images by a Multiscale Boundary Contour System and Feature Contour System

An improved Boundary Contour System (BCS) and Feature Contour System (FCS) neural network model of preattentive vision is applied to large images containing range data gathered by a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) sensor. The goal of processing is to make structures such as motor vehicles, roads, or buildings more salient and more interpretable to human observers than they are in the original imagery. Early processing by shunting center-surround networks compresses signal dynamic range and performs local contrast enhancement. Subsequent processing by filters sensitive to oriented contrast, including short-range competition and long-range cooperation, segments the image into regions. The segmentation is performed by three "copies" of the BCS and FCS, of small, medium, and large scales, wherein the "short-range" and "long-range" interactions within each scale occur over smaller or larger distances, corresponding to the size of the early filters of each scale. A diffusive filling-in operation within the segmented regions at each scale produces coherent surface representations. The combination of BCS and FCS helps to locate and enhance structure over regions of many pixels, without the resulting blur characteristic of approaches based on low spatial frequency filtering alone.