Beijing converters: bridge converters with a capacitor added to reduce leakage currents, DC-bus voltage ripples, and total capacitance required

Abstract: Isolation transformers and bulky electrolytic capacitors are often used in power electronic converters to reduce leakage currents and voltage ripples but this leads to low power density and reduced reliability. In this paper, an auxiliary capacitor is added to the widely used conventional full-bridge converter to provide a path for, and hence significantly reduce, the leakage current. The operation of the full-bridge converter is split into the operation of a half-bridge converter and a dc-dc converter so that the ripple energy can be diverted from the dc-bus capacitor to the auxiliary capacitor. Hence, the dc-bus capacitor can be significantly reduced while maintaining very low voltage ripples on the dc bus because it is only required to filter out switching ripples. The auxiliary capacitor is designed to allow high voltage ripples because its voltage is not supplied to any load. Accordingly, the auxiliary capacitor can also be very small as well. As a result, the total required capacitance becomes very small. The reduction ratio of the total capacitance is significant, which makes it cost-effective to use film capacitors instead of electrolytic capacitors. The proposed converters can be also operated as an inverter without any restriction on power factor because the adopted four switches are all bidirectional in terms of power flow. Experimental results for both rectification and inversion modes are presented to demonstrate the performance of the proposed converter in reducing the ripples, the leakage currents, and the total capacitance needed, with comparison to the conventional bridge converter without the auxiliary capacitor

Rectal hemangiopericytoma in a 37-year-old woman: a case report and review of the literature

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Introduction</p> <p>Hemangiopericytoma is an uncommon perivascular tumor. Rectal Hemangiopericytomas are extremely rare. To the best of our knowledge, only two cases have been reported in the literature.</p> <p>Case presentation</p> <p>We report the case of a 37-year-old Asian woman with an Hemangiopericytoma rising from the anterior wall of her rectum. Abdominopelvic computed tomography showed a 7.4 cm solid mass between her uterus and her rectum. Heterogeneous gradual enhancement after intravenous injection of contrast material was noted with several tortuous vessels around her tumor. Intra-operative findings indicated a capsule and well-circumscribed solid tumor connecting with the anterior wall of her rectum by a small pedicle. With immunohistochemical stains, her tumor cells reacted positive for Bcl-2, CD34, and ki67 and negative for CD10, CD117, S100, and Desmin. Follow-up computed tomography scans have shown no tumor recurrence or metastasis signs.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Rectal Hemangiopericytoma is a rare tumor with non-specific imaging findings. Hemangiopericytomas should be included in the differential list when a massive tumor with heterogeneously gradual enhancement in the regions of the rectum is encountered.</p

Diagnosis Code Assignment Using Sparsity-Based Disease Correlation Embedding

© 1989-2012 IEEE. With the latest developments in database technologies, it becomes easier to store the medical records of hospital patients from their first day of admission than was previously possible. In Intensive Care Units (ICU), modern medical information systems can record patient events in relational databases every second. Knowledge mining from these huge volumes of medical data is beneficial to both caregivers and patients. Given a set of electronic patient records, a system that effectively assigns the disease labels can facilitate medical database management and also benefit other researchers, e.g., pathologists. In this paper, we have proposed a framework to achieve that goal. Medical chart and note data of a patient are used to extract distinctive features. To encode patient features, we apply a Bag-of-Words encoding method for both chart and note data. We also propose a model that takes into account both global information and local correlations between diseases. Correlated diseases are characterized by a graph structure that is embedded in our sparsity-based framework. Our algorithm captures the disease relevance when labeling disease codes rather than making individual decision with respect to a specific disease. At the same time, the global optimal values are guaranteed by our proposed convex objective function. Extensive experiments have been conducted on a real-world large-scale ICU database. The evaluation results demonstrate that our method improves multi-label classification results by successfully incorporating disease correlations

Ceramic Nano-particle/Substrate Interface Bonding Formation Derived from Dynamic Mechanical Force at Room Temperature: HRTEM Examination

The bonding of TiO nano-particle/substrate is a critical factor influencing the performance of dye-sensitized solar cells. In order to reveal the bonding properties at TiO nano-particle/substrate interface, high-resolution transmission electron microscopy (HRTEM) analysis was adopted to TiO coatings prepared by three different approaches. In the HRTEM analysis, the effective bonding mode is allowed to distinguish from the false image overlapping. Results show that large areas of effective bonding between nano-TiO particles and the substrate surface formed in the room temperature cold sprayed coating and mechanically pressed coating, while only limited interface areas with the effective bonding were observed in the coating deposited by non-pressed method. These results confirm that both high impact pressure during the room temperature cold spraying and mechanical pressure contribute to the bonding formation at the particle/substrate interface

Modeling Typhoon Event-Induced Landslides Using GIS-Based Logistic Regression: A Case Study of Alishan Forestry Railway, Taiwan

This study develops a model for evaluating the hazard level of landslides at Alishan Forestry Railway, Taiwan, by using logistic regression with the assistance of a geographical information system (GIS). A typhoon event-induced landslide inventory, independent variables, and a triggering factor were used to build the model. The environmental factors such as bedrock lithology from the geology database; topographic aspect, terrain roughness, profile curvature, and distance to river, from the topographic database; and the vegetation index value from SPOT 4 satellite images were used as variables that influence landslide occurrence. The area under curve (AUC) of a receiver operator characteristic (ROC) curve was used to validate the model. Effects of parameters on landslide occurrence were assessed from the corresponding coefficient that appears in the logistic regression function. Thereafter, the model was applied to predict the probability of landslides for rainfall data of different return periods. Using a predicted map of probability, the study area was classified into four ranks of landslide susceptibility: low, medium, high, and very high. As a result, most high susceptibility areas are located on the western portion of the study area. Several train stations and railways are located on sites with a high susceptibility ranking

Evolution and origin of merlin, the product of the Neurofibromatosis type 2 (NF2) tumor-suppressor gene

BACKGROUND: Merlin, the product of the Neurofibromatosis type 2 (NF2) tumor suppressor gene, belongs to the ezrin-radixin-moesin (ERM) subgroup of the protein 4.1 superfamily, which links cell surface glycoproteins to the actin cytoskeleton. While merlin's functional activity has been examined in mammalian and Drosophila models, little is understood about its evolution, diversity, and overall distribution among different taxa. RESULTS: By combining bioinformatic and phylogenetic approaches, we demonstrate that merlin homologs are present across a wide range of metazoan lineages. While the phylogenetic tree shows a monophyletic origin of the ERM family, the origin of the merlin proteins is robustly separated from that of the ERM proteins. The derivation of merlin is thought to be in early metazoa. We have also observed the expansion of the ERM-like proteins within the vertebrate clade, which occurred after its separation from Urochordata (Ciona intestinalis). Amino acid sequence alignment reveals the absence of an actin-binding site in the C-terminal region of all merlin proteins from various species but the presence of a conserved internal binding site in the N-terminal domain of the merlin and ERM proteins. In addition, a more conserved pattern of amino acid residues is found in the region containing the so-called "Blue Box," although some amino acid substitutions in this region exist in the merlin sequences of worms, fish, and Ciona. Examination of sequence variability at functionally significant sites, including the serine-518 residue, the phosphorylation of which modulates merlin's intra-molecular association and function as a tumor suppressor, identifies several potentially important sites that are conserved among all merlin proteins but divergent in the ERM proteins. Secondary structure prediction reveals the presence of a conserved α-helical domain in the central to C-terminal region of the merlin proteins of various species. The conserved residues and structures identified correspond to the important sites highlighted by the available crystal structures of the merlin and ERM proteins. Furthermore, analysis of the merlin gene structures from various organisms reveals the increase of gene length during evolution due to the expansion of introns; however, a reduction of intron number and length appears to occur in the merlin gene of the insect group. CONCLUSION: Our results demonstrate a monophyletic origin of the merlin proteins with their root in the early metazoa. The overall similarity among the primary and secondary structures of all merlin proteins and the conservation of several functionally important residues suggest a universal role for merlin in a wide range of metazoa

Improving the Performance of the Wireless Data Broadcast by the Cyclic Indexing Schemes

Abstract. Wireless data broadcast is an effective approach to disseminate information to a massive number of users. Indexing techniques for broadcasting data can reduce the battery power consumptions of mobile terminals by decreasing the tuning time. The organization of the indexes affects the efficiency of data searching. We investigate how the degree of the index node affects the tuning time, and thus minimize the power c o n s u mp t i o n o f u s e r &apos; s terminals. We proposed a performance measurement for the tuning time and a cyclic indexing algorithm. The numerical results suggest the degree of an index node be 3 when the access probabilities of the data tend to be uniformly distributed so that the expected tuning time is minimal. When the access distribution of the data nodes is skewer, the tuning time can be minimized by setting the degree in the index node 2