Pictorial Essay: Pitfalls in Magnetic Resonance Imaging of the Shoulder

AbstractNumerous imaging pitfalls of normal variants due to imaging technique and artifacts can be seen on routine magnetic resonance imaging of the shoulder. Familiarity with these pitfalls is crucial to avoiding diagnostic errors. Understanding of the common causes of shoulder imaging artifacts will enable the radiologist to make rational changes in imaging technique to eliminate or reduce the effects of artifacts on magnetic resonance images. This pictorial essay highlights possible pitfalls that arise from imaging techniques, imaging artifacts, and normal variations, and how they may be recognized

Bioactive dairy ingredients for food and non-food applications

Lactobacilli and bifidobacteria are most commonly encountered in the dairy industries, either existing naturally in milk or inoculated as starters in fermented dairy products. Recent research suggests that fermented dairy products are a cocktail of bioactive ingredients. The objective of our study was to evaluate the bioactivity of cell wall fractions of Lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium grown in reconstituted skimmed milk, and the possibility of intra- and extracellular extracts of these bacteria for applications in foods and beyond. Intracellular and extracellular extracts of Lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium showed inhibitory activities against food and dermal pathogens. All strains were able to produce inhibitors, such as organic acids, antimicrobial peptides, diacetyl, and hydrogen peroxide. Most strains showed higher production of extracellular than intracellular inhibitors (P<0.05). Meanwhile, all strains were able to produce hyaluronic acid, lipoteichoic acid, peptidoglycan, neutral sphingomyelinase and acid sphingomyelinase at concentrations applicable for cosmeceutical application. Findings from our study demonstrated that inhibitors and bioactives from lactobacilli and bifidobacteria have the potential to be developed into formulations for food and non-food applications

BOOM: Broadcast Optimizations for On-chip Meshes

Future many-core chips will require an on-chip network that can support broadcasts and multicasts at good power-performance. A vanilla on-chip network would send multiple unicast packets for each broadcast packet, resulting in latency, throughput and power overheads. Recent research in on-chip multicast support has proposed forking of broadcast/multicast packets within the network at the router buffers, but these techniques are far from ideal, since they increase buffer occupancy which lowers throughput, and packets incur delay and power penalties at each router. In this work, we analyze an ideal broadcast mesh; show the substantial gaps between state-of-the-art multicast NoCs and the ideal; then propose BOOM, which comprises a WHIRL routing protocol that ideally load balances broadcast traffic, a mXbar multicast crossbar circuit that enables multicast traversal at similar energy-delay as unicasts, and speculative bypassing of buffering for multicast flits. Together, they enable broadcast packets to approach the delay, energy, and throughput of the ideal fabric. Our simulations show BOOM realizing an average network latency that is 5% off ideal, attaining 96% of ideal throughput, with energy consumption that is 9% above ideal. Evaluations using synthetic traffic show BOOM achieving a latency reduction of 61%, throughput improvement of 63%, and buffer power reduction of 80% as compared to a baseline broadcast. Simulations with PARSEC benchmarks show BOOM reducing average request and network latency by 40% and 15% respectively

Modeling the light-induced degradation (LID) in silicon due to ASi-Sii-defects

Light-induced degradation (LID) in silicon is one of the major problems that hamper the progress in silicon solar cell technology. We present a method to model the LID kinetics by a differential equation system based on the assumption of charge-state-change-induced configuration changes of the so-called ASi-Sii-defect. Assuming realistic transition rates, we solve this differential equation system under variation of some of the transition rates. It is found that the LID kinetics can in principle be modeled by this approach but care has to be taken if transition rates put into the model are directly extracted from time-dependent carrier lifetime measurements

Bioavailability enhancement of sulpiride by self-microemulsifying drug delivery system

The self-microemulsifying drug delivery system (SMEDDS) was employed to improve the bioavailability of sulpiride, a drug which is poorly soluble. The mean droplet size and emulsification time of the test formulation used for in vivo study were 9.27 ± 2.02 nm and 87 ± 5 s, respectively. When compared with Reference (Dogmatil®), the test formulation exhibited faster in-vitro drug release rate. The Cmax and AUC values of the test formulation were significantly higher than those of Reference, with an enhancement of 210.64% in the extent of absorption in rabbits. In conclusion, SMEDDS could be a potential drug delivery system to enhance the bioavailability of sulpiride.Colegio de Farmacéuticos de la Provincia de Buenos Aire

Dye-sensitized solar cell with a titanium-oxide-modified carbon nanotube transparent electrode

Cataloged from PDF version of article.Transparent and conductive carbon-based materials are promising for window electrodes in solid-state optoelectronic devices. However, the catalytic activity to redox reaction limits their application as a working electrode in a liquid-type dye-sensitized solar cell (DSSC). In this letter, we propose and demonstrate a transparent carbon nanotubes (CNTs) film as the working electrode in a DSSC containing iodide/triiodide redox couples. This implementation is realized by inhibiting the charge-transfer kinetics at CNT/redox solution interface with an aid of thin titanium oxide film that facilitates the unidirectional flow of electrons in the cell without sacrificing the electrical and optical properties of CNT. (C) 2011 American Institute of Physics. [doi: 10.1063/1.3610488

The expression of RUNX3 in colorectal cancer is associated with disease stage and patient outcome

RUNX3 is believed to have tumour suppressor properties in several cancer types. Inactivation of RUNX3 has been shown to occur by methylation-induced transcriptional silencing and by mislocalization of the protein to the cytoplasm. The aim of this study was to examine the clinical significance of RUNX3 expression in a large series of colorectal cancers using immunohistochemistry and tissue arrays. With advancing tumour stage, expression of RUNX3 in the nucleus decreased, whereas expression restricted to the cytoplasmic compartment increased. Nuclear RUNX3 expression was associated with significantly better patient survival compared to tumours in which the expression of RUNX3 was restricted to the cytoplasm (P=0.025). These results support a role for RUNX3 as a tumour suppressor in colorectal cancer