Effects of activated carbon characteristics on the electrosorption capacity of titanium dioxide/activated carbon composite electrode materials prepared by a microwave-assisted ionothermal synthesis method.

Titanium dioxide (TiO2)/ activated carbon (AC) composite materials, as capacitive deionization electrodes, were prepared by a two-step microwave-assisted ionothermal synthesis method. The electrosorption capacity of the composite electrodes was studied and the effects of AC characteristics were explored. These effects were investigated by multiple analytical techniques, including X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, thermogravimetry analysis and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy, etc.

Effects of insulin replacement on cardiac apoptotic and survival pathways in streptozotocin-induced diabetic rats.

Increased myocyte apoptosis in diabetic hearts has been previously reported. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to evaluate the effects of insulin on cardiac apoptotic, hypertrophic, and survival pathways in streptozotocin (STZ)-induced diabetic rats. Forty-eight male Wistar rats at 8 weeks of age were randomly divided into control group (Control), STZ-induced (65 mg/kg STZ i.

H2 production potential in thermophilic mixed fermentation.

The effect of pH on dark fermentative H(2) production at 55 degrees C was studied using three different inocula namely windrow yard waste compost (G), anaerobic organic waste compost (H) and activated sludge (A) and 2 g/L glucose as substrate. The sequential batch experiments were performed by controlling the pH at 5, 5.5 and 6.

Blind phase retrieval and source separation of electromagnetic fields.

Blind source separation of two electromagnetic fields is investigated. The difficulty of this task lies in the fact that only the power, which is the square of the sum of the electromagnetic fields, can be directly measured; the cross term of the electromagnetic fields is inevitable, and a strong correlation occurs in blind deconvolution. However, the relative phase is physically different from the field intensities, and, hence, extracting the phase during separation seems inconceivable.

Identification of speech transients using variable frame rate analysis and wavelet packets.

Speech transients are important cues for identifying and discriminating speech sounds. Yoo et al. and Tantibundhit et al.

Speech signal modification to increase intelligibility in noisy environments.

The role of transient speech components on speech intelligibility was investigated. Speech was decomposed into two components--quasi-steady-state (QSS) and transient--using a set of time-varying filters whose center frequencies and bandwidths were controlled to identify the strongest formant components in speech. The relative energy and intelligibility of the QSS and transient components were compared to original speech.

Automatic detection of region of interest based on object tracking in neurosurgical video.

Automatic detection of region of interest (ROIs) in a complex image or video, such as an angiogram or endoscopic neurosurgery video, is a critical task in many medical image and video processing applications. In this paper, we present a new method that addresses several challenges in automatic detection of ROI of neurosurgical video for ROI coding which is used for neurophysiological intraoperative monitoring (IOM) system. This method is based on an object tracking technique with multivariate density estimation theory, combined with the shape information of the object.