Quaternized wood as sorbent for hexavalent chromium

The potential of quaternized wood (QW) chips in removing hexavalent chromium from synthetic solution and chrome waste under both batch and continuous-flow conditions was investigated. Sorption was found to be dependent on pH, metal concentration, and temperature. QW chips provide higher sorption capacity and wider pH range compared with untreated wood chips. The equilibrium data could be fitted into the Langmuir isotherm model, and maximum sorption capacities were calculated to be 27.03 and 25.77 mg/g in synthetic chromate solution and chrome waste, respectively. The presence of sulfate in high concentration appeared to suppress the uptake of chromium by QW chips. Column studies showed that bed depth influenced the breakthrough time greatly whereas flow rate of influent had little effect on its sorption on the column

A Mining-Based System Framework for Deploying Knowledge Maps of Composite E-Services

Providing e-services and composite e-services on the Internet is an important trend of e-business. Composite e-services are complex processes which consist of various e-services provided by different e-service providers. In such complex environments, the flexibility and success of e-business depend on effective knowledge supports to access related information and resources of composite e-services. This work proposes a knowledge map platform to provide an effective knowledge support for utilizing composite e-services. A mining-based system framework is proposed to construct the knowledge map. Moreover, the proposed knowledge map is integrated with recommendation capability to provide users customized decision support in utilizing composite e-services

Branching, Capping, and Severing in Dynamic Actin Structures

Branched actin networks at the leading edge of a crawling cell evolve via protein-regulated processes such as polymerization, depolymerization, capping, branching, and severing. A formulation of these processes is presented and analyzed to study steady-state network morphology. In bulk, we identify several scaling regimes in severing and branching protein concentrations and find that the coupling between severing and branching is optimally exploited for conditions in vivo. Near the leading edge, we find qualitative agreement with the in vivo morphology

Agent based mobile negotiation for personalized pricing of last minute theatre tickets

This is the post-print version of the final paper published in Expert Systems with Applications. The published article is available from the link below. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. Copyright @ 2012 Elsevier B.V.This paper proposes an agent based mobile negotiation framework for personalized pricing of last minutes theatre tickets whose values are dependent on the time remaining to the performance and the locations of potential customers. In particular, case based reasoning and fuzzy cognitive map techniques are adopted in the negotiation framework to identify the best initial offer zone and adopt multi criteria decision in the scoring function to evaluate offers. The proposed framework is tested via a computer simulation in which personalized pricing policy shows higher market performance than other policies therefore the validity of the proposed negotiation framework.The Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (Korea

Comparison of MRI features and surgical outcome among the subtypes of focal cortical dysplasia

AbstractPurposeFocal cortical dysplasia (FCD) is the most common pathological diagnosis in patients who have undergone surgical treatment for intractable neocortical epilepsy. However, presurgical identification of MRI abnormalities in FCD patients remains difficult, and there are no highly sensitive imaging parameters available that can reliably differentiate among FCD subtypes. The purpose of our study was to investigate the surgical outcome in FCD patients with identifiable MRI abnormalities and to evaluate the prognostic role of the various MRI features and the characteristics of FCD pathology.MethodsWe retrospectively recruited epilepsy patients who had undergone surgical treatment for refractory epilepsy with focal MRI abnormalities and the pathological diagnosis of FCD. We evaluated the surgical outcome according to the pathological subtypes, and studied the prognostic roles of various MRI features. We used recently proposed three-tiered FCD classification system which included FCD type III when FCD occurs in association with other potentially epileptogenic pathologies.ResultsA total of 69 patients were included, and 68.1% of patients became seizure free. Patients with FCD type III had a lower chance for achieving seizure freedom (7/15) than in patients with isolated FCD (FCD types I and II) (40/54, p=0.044). Cortical thickness and blurring of gray–white matter junction were more common in isolated FCD than in FCD type III, but most MRI features failed to differentiate between FCD types I and II, and only the transmantle sign was specific for FCD type II. We failed to find a prognostic value of specific MRI abnormalities of prognostic value in terms of post-epilepsy surgery outcome in FCD patients.ConclusionsOur study showed that patients with FCD III have poor surgical outcome. Typical MRI features of isolated FCD such as cortical thickness and blurring of gray–white matter junction were less common in FCD type III and only transmantle sign was helpful in differentiating between FCD types I and II

Branching, Capping, and Severing in Dynamic Actin Structures

Branched actin networks at the leading edge of a crawling cell evolve via protein-regulated processes such as polymerization, depolymerization, capping, branching, and severing. A formulation of these processes is presented and analyzed to study steady-state network morphology. In bulk, we identify several scaling regimes in severing and branching protein concentrations and find that the coupling between severing and branching is optimally exploited for conditions {\it in vivo}. Near the leading edge, we find qualitative agreement with the {\it in vivo} morphology.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figure

Tea Verification Using Triplet Loss Convolutional Network

To solve tea image classification problems, this study focuses on triplet loss convolutional neural network to classify six high-mountain oolong tea classes. In the experiment, instead of using traditional deep learning training approach for local feature of tea images, an innovative image verification approach is proposed to learn the global feature of tea images by integrating the distributed tea leaves’ features of all tea sub-images and using a majority voting mechanism to do classification. The results show that the proposed approach can work for small sample size dataset and have higher accuracy than normal transfer learning approach. The average accuracy of the proposed approach achieves 99.54%

Frontal lobe epilepsy: Clinical characteristics, surgical outcomes and diagnostic modalities

SummaryObjectiveTo identify surgical prognostic factors and to characterize clinical features according to the location of the intracranial ictal onset zone of frontal lobe epilepsy (FLE) in order to assess the role of various diagnostic modalities, including concordances with presurgical evaluations.MethodsWe studied 71 FLE patients who underwent epilepsy surgery and whose outcomes were followed for more than 2 years. Diagnoses were established by standard presurgical evaluation.ResultsClinical manifestations could be categorized into six types: initial focal motor (9 patients), initial versive seizure (15), frontal lobe complex partial seizure (14), complex partial seizure mimicking temporal lobe epilepsy (18), initial tonic elevation of arms (11), and sudden secondary generalized tonic–clonic seizure (4). Thirty-seven patients became seizure-free after surgery. Five patients were deleted in the analysis because of incomplete resection of ictal onset zones. The positive predictive value of interictal EEG, ictal EEG, MRI, PET, and ictal SPECT, respectively were 62.5%, 56.4%, 73.9%, 63.2%, and 63.6%, and the negative predictive value were 46.0%, 44.4%, 53.5%, 44.7%, and 51.7%. No significant relationship was found between the diagnostic accuracy of these modalities and surgical outcome, with the exception of MRI (p=0.029). Significant concordance of two or more modalities was observed in patients who became seizure-free (p=0.011). We could not find any clinical characteristic related to surgical outcome besides seizure frequency. No definite relationship was found between the location of intracranial ictal onset zone and clinical semiology.ConclusionAlthough various diagnostic methods can be useful in the diagnosis of FLE, only MRI can predict surgical outcome. Concordance between presurgical evaluations indicates a better surgical outcome

Managing cardiac arrest with refractory ventricular fibrillation in the emergency department: Conventional cardiopulmonary resuscitation versus extracorporeal cardiopulmonary resuscitation

AbstractAimRefractory ventricular fibrillation, resistant to conventional cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR), is a life threatening rhythm encountered in the emergency department. Although previous reports suggest the use of extracorporeal CPR can improve the clinical outcomes in patients with prolonged cardiac arrest, the effectiveness of this novel strategy for refractory ventricular fibrillation is not known. We aimed to compare the clinical outcomes of patients with refractory ventricular fibrillation managed with conventional CPR or extracorporeal CPR in our institution.MethodThis is a retrospective chart review study from an emergency department in a tertiary referral medical center. We identified 209 patients presenting with cardiac arrest due to ventricular fibrillation between September 2011 and September 2013. Of these, 60 patients were enrolled with ventricular fibrillation refractory to resuscitation for more than 10min. The clinical outcome of patients with ventricular fibrillation received either conventional CPR, including defibrillation, chest compression, and resuscitative medication (C-CPR, n=40) or CPR plus extracorporeal CPR (E-CPR, n=20) were compared.ResultsThe overall survival rate was 35%, and 18.3% of patients were discharged with good neurological function. The mean duration of CPR was longer in the E-CPR group than in the C-CPR group (69.90±49.6min vs 34.3±17.7min, p=0.0001). Patients receiving E-CPR had significantly higher rates of sustained return of spontaneous circulation (95.0% vs 47.5%, p=0.0009), and good neurological function at discharge (40.0% vs 7.5%, p=0.0067). The survival rate in the E-CPR group was higher (50% vs 27.5%, p=0.1512) at discharge and (50% vs 20%, p=0. 0998) at 1 year after discharge.ConclusionsThe management of refractory ventricular fibrillation in the emergency department remains challenging, as evidenced by an overall survival rate of 35% in this study. Patients with refractory ventricular fibrillation receiving E-CPR had a trend toward higher survival rates and significantly improved neurological outcomes than those receiving C-CPR