A comparison of recently introduced instruments for measuring rice flour viscosity

The Rapid Visco-Analyser (RVA) and the Micro Visco-Amylograph (MVA) were compared in measuring the viscosity properties of rice flours. A total of 72 rice samples were procured from three cultivars harvested at two locations and three moisture contents and separated into thin, medium, and thick kernel-thickness fractions. A fast and a slow heating rate was used in the procedure for both instruments. Cultivar, kernel thickness, and harvest location affected rice viscosity. The RVA viscosity profiles using a fast heating rate were best correlated with those of the MVA using a slow heating rate. The RVA slow heating rate resulted in lower final viscosities than those using the MVA because of the spindle structure of the RVA. For both the RVA and the MVA, greater rice flour peak viscosities and less trough and final viscosities were obtained with a slow rather than a fast heating rat

Celeganser: Automated Analysis of Nematode Morphology and Age

The nematode Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans) serves as an important model organism in a wide variety of biological studies. In this paper we introduce a pipeline for automated analysis of C. elegans imagery for the purpose of studying life-span, health-span and the underlying genetic determinants of aging. Our system detects and segments the worm, and predicts body coordinates at each pixel location inside the worm. These coordinates provide dense correspondence across individual animals to allow for meaningful comparative analysis. We show that a model pre-trained to perform body-coordinate regression extracts rich features that can be used to predict the age of individual worms with high accuracy. This lays the ground for future research in quantifying the relation between organs' physiologic and biochemical state, and individual life/health-span.Comment: Computer Vision for Microscopy Image Analysis (CVMI) 202