94 research outputs found
Understanding antral contraction in human stomach through comparison with soft elastic reactor
IntroductionHuman digestion, a major concern due to the rapid development of nutrition-related chronic diseases,rely apart from enzymatic reactions on homogenization of the gastric content by antral contractions.Although recent CFD studies made it possible to explore the influence of the rheologicalproperties of the gastric content on the efficiency of gastric mixing, this key step is yet far from beingfully understood.ObjectiveThis work aims at discussing the influences of contraction frequency and viscosity of the digestain human gastric mixing by comparison with the mixing efficiency of an innovative soft elastic reactor(SER), that induces mixing by vibration of its wall in a similar way as antral contraction waves(ACWs) promote stomach motility.MethodologyIn this view, the SER mixing curve, recently established by Delaplace et al. (2018) using a dimensionalanalysis approach, was considered in order to determine the flow regime under which thegastric mixing of foods (viscosity ranging from 10-3 to 1 Pa.s) was performedMain findingsIt was shown that depending on the viscosity of the SER/stomach content and the amplitude of penetration/ACWs, the number of strikes/contractions required to achieve homogenization was largelydifferent. Moreover, the operating points of SER and ACWs mixing were close, justifying the comparisonbetween both reactors.ConclusionBased on this, the level of mechanical solicitation provided by human peristalsis was shown to benot as high as expected, and the mixing performance of distal region, confined in laminar regime,was found limited and not only due to mechanical solicitations. Further efforts are needed to investigatethe role of other physiological processes such as gastric secretions and gastric emptying inmixing performance of intragastric fluid homogenized by the antral contraction
Morphology of two dimensional fracture surface
We consider the morphology of two dimensional cracks observed in experimental
results obtained from paper samples and compare these results with the
numerical simulations of the random fuse model (RFM). We demonstrate that the
data obey multiscaling at small scales but cross over to self-affine scaling at
larger scales. Next, we show that the roughness exponent of the random fuse
model is recovered by a simpler model that produces a connected crack, while a
directed crack yields a different result, close to a random walk. We discuss
the multiscaling behavior of all these models.Comment: slightly revise
Fuzzy Intervals for Designing Structural Signature: An Application to Graphic Symbol Recognition
Revised selected papers from Eighth IAPR International Workshop on Graphics RECognition (GREC) 2009.The motivation behind our work is to present a new methodology for symbol recognition. The proposed method employs a structural approach for representing visual associations in symbols and a statistical classifier for recognition. We vectorize a graphic symbol, encode its topological and geometrical information by an attributed relational graph and compute a signature from this structural graph. We have addressed the sensitivity of structural representations to noise, by using data adapted fuzzy intervals. The joint probability distribution of signatures is encoded by a Bayesian network, which serves as a mechanism for pruning irrelevant features and choosing a subset of interesting features from structural signatures of underlying symbol set. The Bayesian network is deployed in a supervised learning scenario for recognizing query symbols. The method has been evaluated for robustness against degradations & deformations on pre-segmented 2D linear architectural & electronic symbols from GREC databases, and for its recognition abilities on symbols with context noise i.e. cropped symbols
On the complexity of acyclic modules in automata networks
Modules were introduced as an extension of Boolean automata networks. They
have inputs which are used in the computation said modules perform, and can be
used to wire modules with each other. In the present paper we extend this new
formalism and study the specific case of acyclic modules. These modules prove
to be well described in their limit behavior by functions called output
functions. We provide other results that offer an upper bound on the number of
attractors in an acyclic module when wired recursively into an automata
network, alongside a diversity of complexity results around the difficulty of
deciding the existence of cycles depending on the number of inputs and the size
of said cycle.Comment: 21 page
Width distribution of contact lines on a disordered substrate
We have studied the roughness of a contact line of a liquid meniscus on a
disordered substrate by measuring its width distribution. The comparison
between the measured width distribution and the width distribution calculated
in previous works, extended here to the case of open boundary conditions,
confirms that the Joanny-de Gennes model is not sufficient to describe the
dynamics of contact lines at the depinning threshold. This conclusion is in
agreement with recent measurements which determine the roughness exponent by
extrapolation to large system sizes.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure
Bursts in a fiber bundle model with continuous damage
We study the constitutive behaviour, the damage process, and the properties
of bursts in the continuous damage fiber bundle model introduced recently.
Depending on its two parameters, the model provides various types of
constitutive behaviours including also macroscopic plasticity. Analytic results
are obtained to characterize the damage process along the plastic plateau under
strain controlled loading, furthermore, for stress controlled experiments we
develop a simulation technique and explore numerically the distribution of
bursts of fiber breaks assuming infinite range of interaction. Simulations
revealed that under certain conditions power law distribution of bursts arises
with an exponent significantly different from the mean field exponent 5/2. A
phase diagram of the model characterizing the possible burst distributions is
constructed.Comment: 9 pages, 11 figures, APS style, submitted for publicatio
2-loop Functional Renormalization Group Theory of the Depinning Transition
We construct the field theory which describes the universal properties of the
quasi-static isotropic depinning transition for interfaces and elastic periodic
systems at zero temperature, taking properly into account the non-analytic form
of the dynamical action. This cures the inability of the 1-loop flow-equations
to distinguish between statics and quasi-static depinning, and thus to account
for the irreversibility of the latter. We prove two-loop renormalizability,
obtain the 2-loop beta-function and show the generation of "irreversible"
anomalous terms, originating from the non-analytic nature of the theory, which
cause the statics and driven dynamics to differ at 2-loop order. We obtain the
roughness exponent zeta and dynamical exponent z to order epsilon^2. This
allows to test several previous conjectures made on the basis of the 1-loop
result. First it demonstrates that random-field disorder does indeed attract
all disorder of shorter range. It also shows that the conjecture zeta=epsilon/3
is incorrect, and allows to compute the violations, as zeta=epsilon/3 (1 +
0.14331 epsilon), epsilon=4-d. This solves a longstanding discrepancy with
simulations. For long-range elasticity it yields zeta=epsilon/3 (1 + 0.39735
epsilon), epsilon=2-d (vs. the standard prediction zeta=1/3 for d=1), in
reasonable agreement with the most recent simulations. The high value of zeta
approximately 0.5 found in experiments both on the contact line depinning of
liquid Helium and on slow crack fronts is discussed.Comment: 32 pages, 17 figures, revtex
Matrix-Bound PAI-1 Supports Cell Blebbing via RhoA/ROCK1 Signaling
The microenvironment of a tumor can influence both the morphology and the behavior of cancer cells which, in turn, can rapidly adapt to environmental changes. Increasing evidence points to the involvement of amoeboid cell migration and thus of cell blebbing in the metastatic process; however, the cues that promote amoeboid cell behavior in physiological and pathological conditions have not yet been clearly identified. Plasminogen Activator Inhibitor type-1 (PAI-1) is found in high amount in the microenvironment of aggressive tumors and is considered as an independent marker of bad prognosis. Here we show by immunoblotting, activity assay and immunofluorescence that, in SW620 human colorectal cancer cells, matrix-associated PAI-1 plays a role in the cell behavior needed for amoeboid migration by maintaining cell blebbing, localizing PDK1 and ROCK1 at the cell membrane and maintaining the RhoA/ROCK1/MLC-P pathway activation. The results obtained by modeling PAI-1 deposition around tumors indicate that matrix-bound PAI-1 is heterogeneously distributed at the tumor periphery and that, at certain spots, the elevated concentrations of matrix-bound PAI-1 needed for cancer cells to undergo the mesenchymal-amoeboid transition can be observed. Matrix-bound PAI-1, as a matricellular protein, could thus represent one of the physiopathological requirements to support metastatic formation
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