Active fixturing: literature review and future research directions

Fixtures are used to fixate, position and support workpieces and represent a crucial tool in manufacturing. Their performance determines the result of the whole manufacturing process of a product. There is a vast amount of research done on automatic fixture layout synthesis and optimisation and fixture design verification. Most of this work considers fixture mechanics to be static and the fixture elements to be passive. However, a new generation of fixtures has emerged that has actuated fixture elements for active control of the part–fixture system during manufacturing operations to increase the end product quality. This paper analyses the latest studies in the field of active fixture design and its relationship with flexible and reconfigurable fixturing systems. First, a brief introduction is given on the importance of research of fixturing systems. Secondly, the basics of workholding and fixture design are visited, after which the state-of-the-art in active fixturing and related concepts is presented. Fourthly, part–fixture dynamics and design strategies which take these into account are discussed. Fifthly, the control strategies used in active fixturing systems are examined. Finally, some final conclusions and prospective future research directions are presented

31st Annual Meeting and Associated Programs of the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC 2016) : part two

Background The immunological escape of tumors represents one of the main ob- stacles to the treatment of malignancies. The blockade of PD-1 or CTLA-4 receptors represented a milestone in the history of immunotherapy. However, immune checkpoint inhibitors seem to be effective in specific cohorts of patients. It has been proposed that their efficacy relies on the presence of an immunological response. Thus, we hypothesized that disruption of the PD-L1/PD-1 axis would synergize with our oncolytic vaccine platform PeptiCRAd. Methods We used murine B16OVA in vivo tumor models and flow cytometry analysis to investigate the immunological background. Results First, we found that high-burden B16OVA tumors were refractory to combination immunotherapy. However, with a more aggressive schedule, tumors with a lower burden were more susceptible to the combination of PeptiCRAd and PD-L1 blockade. The therapy signifi- cantly increased the median survival of mice (Fig. 7). Interestingly, the reduced growth of contralaterally injected B16F10 cells sug- gested the presence of a long lasting immunological memory also against non-targeted antigens. Concerning the functional state of tumor infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs), we found that all the immune therapies would enhance the percentage of activated (PD-1pos TIM- 3neg) T lymphocytes and reduce the amount of exhausted (PD-1pos TIM-3pos) cells compared to placebo. As expected, we found that PeptiCRAd monotherapy could increase the number of antigen spe- cific CD8+ T cells compared to other treatments. However, only the combination with PD-L1 blockade could significantly increase the ra- tio between activated and exhausted pentamer positive cells (p= 0.0058), suggesting that by disrupting the PD-1/PD-L1 axis we could decrease the amount of dysfunctional antigen specific T cells. We ob- served that the anatomical location deeply influenced the state of CD4+ and CD8+ T lymphocytes. In fact, TIM-3 expression was in- creased by 2 fold on TILs compared to splenic and lymphoid T cells. In the CD8+ compartment, the expression of PD-1 on the surface seemed to be restricted to the tumor micro-environment, while CD4 + T cells had a high expression of PD-1 also in lymphoid organs. Interestingly, we found that the levels of PD-1 were significantly higher on CD8+ T cells than on CD4+ T cells into the tumor micro- environment (p < 0.0001). Conclusions In conclusion, we demonstrated that the efficacy of immune check- point inhibitors might be strongly enhanced by their combination with cancer vaccines. PeptiCRAd was able to increase the number of antigen-specific T cells and PD-L1 blockade prevented their exhaus- tion, resulting in long-lasting immunological memory and increased median survival

Thoracoscopically-assisted doxycycline sclerotherapy for a microcystic thoracoabdominal lymphatic malformation in a 3-month-old patient

Here we report successful thoracoscopic-assisted sclerotherapy of a large, prenatally diagnosed microcystic thoracoabdominal lymphatic malformation in a 3-month-old infant born at 38 weeks gestational age. Compression of the inferior vena cava and aortic displacement was demonstrated on imaging. Treatment options include medical management, percutaneous sclerotherapy, or surgical resection. The latter options were complicated by the location of this lesion. Therefore, sclerotherapy under direct visualization via thoracoscopy was performed with near resolution of the lesion after one treatment. This is the first description of treatment of a lymphatic malformation via this approach reported in the literature

A Fuzzy Ontological Knowledge Document Clustering Methodology

[[abstract]]© 2009 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers - This correspondence presents a novel hierarchical clustering approach for knowledge document self-organization, particularly for patent analysis. Current keyword-based methodologies for document content management tend to be inconsistent and ineffective when partial meanings of the technical content are used for cluster analysis. Thus, a new methodology to automatically interpret and cluster knowledge documents using an ontology schema is presented. Moreover, a fuzzy logic control approach is used to match suitable document cluster(s) for given patents based on their derived ontological semantic webs. Finally, three case studies are used to test the approach. The first test case analyzed and clustered 100 patents for chemical and mechanical polishing retrieved from the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). The second test case analyzed and clustered 100 patent news articles retrieved from online Web sites. The third case analyzed and clustered 100 patents for radio-frequency identification retrieved from WIPO. The results show that the fuzzy ontology-based document clustering approach outperforms the K-means approach in precision, recall, F-measure, and Shannon&apos;s entropy.[[department]]工業工程與工程管理學