Search Results (2,359)

Background/Objectives: With the increasing incidence of drug counterfeiting and the emergence of personalized medicine, the need for unique marking of solid dosage forms, e.g., tablets, has attracted considerable interest in the current research and development landscape. Besides traditional printing methods, laser marking offers several advantages, as it eliminates the need for organic solvents and enables the generation of precise patterns. However, laser exposure may raise safety concerns regarding the stability of photosensitive drugs in the irradiated dosage forms. Therefore, the aim of the present study was to test the photoprotective effect of titanium dioxide (TiO₂) and its various alternatives, e.g., talc, calcium carbonate (CaCO₃), zinc oxide (ZnO), and black iron oxide (Fe₃O₄), alongside a ready-to-use reference formulation, Opadry^® Brown, which contains TiO₂ (titanium-containing, TC) on nifedipine, a light-sensitive model drug. Methods: Laser marking or short-term laser ablation at different wavelengths (193 nm, 248 nm, 532 nm, and 781 nm) was applied to different coating formulations. As a positive control, prolonged exposure to daylight was applied. The properties and photostability of these formulations were evaluated using several analytical methods (i.e., surface profilometry, Raman spectroscopy, and high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC)). Results: The TiO₂, ZnO, Fe₃O₄, and Opadry^® TC Brown coatings maintained their color during the long-term study under all conditions. Furthermore, the prepared formulations exhibited different ablation depths and morphological changes depending on the coating and laser type. HPLC measurements confirmed significant differences in the protective ability of various pigments against sunlight and different types of lasers. Nevertheless, the obtained Raman spectra were not in complete agreement with HPLC results, which can be attributed to spectral overlap between key nifedipine degradation markers and excipient signals in the tablet core. Conclusions: Overall, laser treatment of tablets containing photosensitive drugs may induce API decomposition; however, this effect can be minimized or avoided by careful selection of the appropriate combination of laser type and photoprotective pigment. Under the applied experimental conditions, Ti:Sa laser treatment was associated with the lowest degree of nifedipine degradation among all formulations, while ZnO-containing coatings demonstrated the most consistent photoprotective performance against the majority of the tested laser types, while Fe₃O₄-containing coatings provided superior protection during prolonged sunlight exposure and Nd:YAG laser irradiation. Full article

As a prominent high-efficiency metal cutting process, plunge milling has found increasing applications in the rough machining of integral impellers. However, challenges arise due to the time-consuming process of avoiding interference-induced overcutting at the blade-root fillet, leading to excessive residual material. Consequently, the full potential of plunge milling’s high-efficiency advantages is constrained. To address these issues, a method to avoid overcutting caused by cutter interference at the blade-root fillet in integral impeller plunge milling is proposed. First, a parameterized model of the blade-root fillet is established using a rolling ball model. Second, a semi-analytical model for identifying cutter interference at the blade-root fillet is established through micro-element discretization. Lastly, the cutter position is adjusted along the direction of the vertical cutter axis vector to avoid overcutting. The modeling error of the blade-root fillet remains within 0.1%, ensuring high accuracy in overcut detection. Furthermore, the identification process is completed in less than 1s, demonstrating its computational efficiency. Compared with the conventional depth-reduction method, the proposed interference elimination strategy reduces the excessive residual material volume by 66% while avoiding overcutting, with only a 26% increase in plunge roughing time. Simulation and experimental validation on an 820 mm diameter impeller confirm the method’s effectiveness in balancing interference avoidance and material removal efficiency. Full article

Background/Objectives: This prospective, randomised controlled trial aimed to evaluate whether using a real-time feedback device during basic life support (BLS) training for laypersons improves chest compression quality immediately after training and at the four-month follow-up. Methods: Participants were randomly assigned to a control group (standard BLS training) or an intervention group (BLS training with a real-time feedback device). All participants completed a standardised 2-h BLS course, followed by a 4-min practical assessment immediately after training and at the four-month follow-up. The primary outcomes were chest compression rate and depth, while the secondary outcomes were correct hand position, full chest recoil and flow fraction. These compression parameters were compared within and between groups at both time points. Results: Data from 101 participants were analysed. Both groups showed significantly decreased mean and adequate compression rates over time, but only the intervention group demonstrated significantly better performance at follow-up. The mean compression depth was approximately 5 cm in both groups; however, the proportion of adequate compression depth was low and did not differ significantly within or between groups. Correct hand position was consistently higher in the intervention group across both assessments. Full chest recoil improved in both groups, whereas flow fraction increased only in the control group. Conclusions: Incorporating real-time feedback devices into layperson BLS training leads to superior performance in selected chest compression parameters, particularly compression rate and hand position. Therefore, real-time feedback devices can be a valuable adjunct to standard BLS training to enhance skill retention over time. Full article

Improving detection performance across diverse synthetic aperture radar (SAR) scenes remains challenging because different datasets exhibit different levels of target–background separability. To address this issue, we propose a constant false alarm rate (CFAR)-guided mode-selective network (CGMSN), which selects an appropriate feature-fusion mode according to the CFAR target–background separation margin. Specifically, CFAR is used as an interpretable statistical tool to construct an anomaly response map. The separation margin is then calculated by comparing the average CFAR anomaly responses of annotated target regions and their surrounding contextual backgrounds. Based on this indicator, a You Only Look Once version 8 (YOLOv8)-based mode-selective detector is constructed with three key components. First, a lightweight representation-enhanced backbone that integrates ResNet18 and a dilated convolutional spatial pyramid (DCSP) module is adopted to improve contextual representation while maintaining moderate model complexity. Second, a mode-selective neck (MSN) is designed with three predefined fusion modes, where the appropriate fusion depth is selected according to the CFAR-guided target–background separation margin of each dataset. Third, a complete intersection over the union modulated head (CMH) is developed to enhance classification-regression alignment and suppress clutter-induced responses. Experiments on SAR-Aircraft-1.0, High-Resolution SAR Images Dataset (HRSID), and SAR Ship Detection Dataset (SSDD) indicate that datasets with smaller CFAR target–background separation margins benefit from deeper fusion, while datasets with larger separation margins can adopt shallower fusion. Moreover, the proposed CGMSN achieves superior performance over representative detectors, demonstrating its effectiveness on the evaluated SAR datasets with diverse scene characteristics. Full article

Mitochondrial genomes are widely used in insect taxonomy and phylogenetics, but their signals may conflict with morphology and nuclear genomic evidence because the mitochondrial genome represents a single maternally inherited locus. Here, we assembled complete mitochondrial genomes of four pygmy grasshoppers, Zhengitettix transpicula, Formosatettix sp., Gibbotettix parvipulvillus, and Bolivaritettix sp., using PacBio HiFi reads. The four mitogenomes ranged from 15,152 to 17,976 bp and contained the typical 37 mitochondrial genes. Mitochondrial phylogenies inferred by maximum likelihood and Bayesian methods were topologically identical and recovered several well-supported tetrigid relationships, including a close relationship between Formosatettix sp. and Bolivaritettix sp. However, Z. transpicula was unexpectedly placed near Macromotettixoides rather than close to other Zhengitettix representatives. In contrast, a morphology-based tree recovered Z. transpicula with Z. triangularis, and comparison with a published nuclear single-copy ortholog tree based on 1962 loci supported a non-mitochondrial placement of Zhengitettix inconsistent with the anomalous mitochondrial position of Z. transpicula. Independent assembly from the original HiFi reads, read-depth inspection, protein-coding gene checks, and nuclear-genome screening for NUMT-like sequences supported the authenticity of the assembled Z. transpicula mitogenome. These results document mito–nuclear and cyto-morphological discordance in Tetrigidae and highlight the need for integrative interpretation of mitochondrial phylogenies in taxonomically complex insect groups. Full article

Computer vision (CV) has significantly advanced in object detection and multi-object tracking; however, its application to modeling safety-critical social behaviors for blind and low-vision (BLV) individuals remains limited. In particular, sustained behaviors such as stalking—characterized by persistent proximity and trajectory consistency—have not been systematically addressed within wearable assistive systems. To investigate this gap, we first conducted a formative user study combining semi-structured interviews and behavioral observations to identify safety concerns and wearable design requirements among BLV participants. The findings reveal recurring concerns regarding prolonged following behaviors and highlight the importance of privacy-preserving, socially unobtrusive device configurations. Guided by these insights, we develop a shoulder-slung wearable system integrating dual-camera sensing with an edge-based vision processing pipeline. We reformulate stalking detection as a temporal behavioral persistence problem built upon multi-object tracking (MOT). Leveraging FairMOT for identity-preserving tracking and monocular depth estimation for spatial modeling, we introduce an online temporal persistence-based risk scoring mechanism that accumulates proximity and directional consistency over time. The complete pipeline operates in real time on an embedded platform without cloud dependency. By bridging user-centered design and behavior-oriented visual inference, this work demonstrates how MOT outputs can be extended beyond identity preservation to support temporally coherent safety assessment in wearable assistive contexts. Full article

Convolutional neural networks (CNN) have transformed visual recognition, yet robust geometric reasoning, reliable out-of-distribution generalization, and recognition from limited data remain substantially unsolved. CNNs draw their architectural inspiration from the mammalian visual cortex, but the translation from biology to engineering was selective and, in places, imprecise, and those imprecisions have consequences that are well documented. This paper examines where the biological fidelity holds and where it gives way, grounding the analysis in formal results that predate deep learning and in recent empirical findings on CNN failure modes. We identify three diagnosable architectural limitations. First, CNNs conflate visual modalities that the biological system separates structurally at the lateral geniculate nucleus, feeding raw RGB pixels into a single undifferentiated filter bank and entangling orientation, color, and texture signals from the first layer onward. Second, CNNs repeat a spatial subsampling operation across the full depth of the network, far beyond the early visual cortex stages where it has biological warrant. Barnard and Casasent established formally in 1990 that this operation discards positional information irreversibly at every layer where it is applied, and repeating it into regions that correspond to V4 and inferotemporal cortex compounds this loss without the compensating transition to qualitatively different computations that the biological hierarchy performs. Third, the pooling-as-complex-cell analogy that motivated this design reflects a misreading of what complex cells compute. The spatiotemporal energy model formalizes complex cell behavior as geometry extraction: detecting the presence and orientation of a local edge structure robustly, abstracting over photometric accidents of contrast polarity and sub-wavelength phase that are not geometrically meaningful. Pooling is a tolerable first-stage approximation of this behavior, but as a general-purpose invariance mechanism repeated across the full depth of the network, it is attempting something categorically different, namely object-level position invariance through spatial subsampling, which achieves its goal by discarding exactly the geometric information that the energy model preserves. Treating pooling as a scalable, indefinitely repeatable implementation of complex cell behavior—rather than as a first-stage approximation with a natural biological endpoint at V3—conflates two operations that differ not in degree but in kind, and crucially it removed the principled criterion for confining the S-C operation to early visual cortex: because pooling was understood as a general-purpose invariance mechanism, the field had no architectural reason to stop repeating it. We survey how capsule networks, group-equivariant CNNs, PDE-based networks, and vision transformers each address one or two of these limitations while leaving the others intact. We propose six desiderata that a more biologically complete architecture would need to satisfy and argue that satisfying them requires treating the visual cortex’s solution as a coherent package in which each component depends on the others working correctly, rather than as a menu of independently selectable principles. Full article

Lymphatic malformations (LMs) are rare congenital low-flow vascular anomalies that frequently involve the head and neck and may be managed with surgery, laser therapy, sclerotherapy, or multimodal approaches depending on lesion type, size, depth, and relationship with adjacent structures. Ultrasound-guided sclerotherapy with doxycycline is an established treatment option for macrocystic lesions, whereas the practical role of high-frequency superficial ultrasound as a technical adjunct has been less specifically discussed. We report the case of a 32-year-old man presenting with a painless left submandibular swelling of approximately two years’ duration. Magnetic resonance imaging showed a well-encapsulated cystic lesion measuring 56 × 35 mm in the left submandibular region, extending into the internal paralaryngeal space and causing mild compression of the laryngeal wall. Previous fine-needle aspiration cytology had not conclusively established the lymphatic nature of the lesion; therefore, an incisional biopsy was performed and confirmed a macrocystic LM. The patient underwent day-surgery intralesional doxycycline sclerotherapy under real-time high-frequency ultrasound guidance using an 18 MHz hockey-stick transducer. After aspiration of the main cystic compartment through a 25-gauge needle, 100 mg of doxycycline diluted to 10 mg/mL in normal saline was slowly injected under continuous visualization. The procedure was well tolerated under topical local anesthesia, without pain, complications, or adverse effects. A partial clinical reduction was observed after the first session; the treatment was repeated after three months, resulting in apparent complete clinical resolution at one-year follow-up; no post-treatment imaging was available to confirm radiological resolution. This case highlights the potential technical value of high-frequency superficial ultrasonography, particularly for needle positioning, improved delineation of superficial locules, and real-time monitoring of sclerosant distribution. Full article

Nanocolloid research has undergone a complete transformation, renouncing the empirical estimation of properties and relying on real case scenarios. The main objective of this paper is to compare a large number of samples that were experimentally studied in terms of thermophysical properties in order to be able to draw a conclusion in terms of the heat transfer efficiency of a certain surfactant addition to a 2 wt.% TiO₂ nanoparticle-enhanced fluid. The analysis discusses both the advantages and drawbacks in terms of surfactant type and concentration influence over the Prandtl number, thermal diffusivity, and Nusselt number, as well as the heat transfer coefficient for different Reynolds numbers in laminar flow. The investigation also includes a different figure of merits and performance evaluation criteria that are extensively employed in the literature in order to have a complete overview of the efficiency of surfactants in improving nanocolloids. In conclusion, even if surfactants are considered for improving nanocolloid stability, their drawbacks have not been debated in depth in the open literature. The main conclusion that arises from this study outlines that among all tested samples, F127 at a concentration of 0.25 wt.% consistently demonstrates the best overall performance, achieving an optimal balance between enhanced thermal properties and acceptable pumping requirements. Full article

Background and Clinical Significance: Advanced periodontitis destroys tooth-supporting structures and causes pathologic tooth migration (PTM) and functional and esthetic repercussions. This report illustrates how non-surgical periodontal therapy (NSPT) addresses such concerns. Case Presentation: A 34-year-old woman (healthy, who quit smoking) complained of a space between her upper front teeth. Based on clinical and radiographic data, she had localized periodontitis stage III grade C with intrabony defects, deep pockets, and a diastema between teeth # 12 and 11. The treatment plan involved improvement of self-performed oral hygiene measures and NSPT. Initially, improvements in plaque, bleeding, and pocket depth scores were observed. Non-surgical re-treatment of residual sites was associated with further improvements and complete closure of the diastema, along with patient satisfaction with the outcome. Conclusions: The potential of NSPT in improving periodontal clinical parameters and the association with spontaneous tooth repositioning and apparent filling of intrabony defects radiographically is demonstrated, ultimately addressing the patient’s functional and esthetic concerns. Full article

Magnetic anomaly detection is vulnerable to environmental noise and insufficient prior target information, making non-periodic anomaly signals difficult to detect at low-signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) conditions. This paper proposes a detection method based on a multi-parameter-constrained mirror dual-branch biased monostable stochastic resonance (SR) system. Nonlinear odd-order bias terms are introduced into the conventional biased monostable potential function to build a multi-parameter-controllable SR model. This improves regulation of potential-well width, depth, and wall morphology, enhancing noise-energy utilization and responses to non-periodic features. Considering peak-type, valley-type, and bipolar anomaly morphologies, a mirror dual-branch SR structure is developed to cooperatively detect features with different polarities. To preserve temporal waveforms and time–frequency structures during parameter optimization, a composite metric combining the correlation coefficient and wavelet-domain image structural similarity index is constructed. Multi-fidelity robust Bayesian optimization is used to obtain a unified robust parameter set for the magnetic anomaly signal family. Experiments with simulated colored noise and measured geomagnetic noise show that the proposed method effectively recovers magnetic anomaly features under strong noise. At −19 dB SNR, its detection probability remains above 80%. Compared with orthogonal basis function decomposition, empirical mode decomposition, and complete ensemble empirical mode decomposition with adaptive noise, the method achieves better noise suppression, feature preservation, and detection performance under low-SNR conditions. Full article

We study positive–negative guarded systems of language equations over a fixed finite alphabet. The ambient space is the complete ultrametric space of all formal languages equipped with a length-based distance, where two languages are close whenever they agree on all words up to a sufficiently large length. The systems considered here contain both positive recursive dependencies and negative dependencies expressed through language complements. To handle this mixed structure, we introduce a suitable product order on pairs of languages and prove that the associated system operator has the weak monotone property. We show that the complement is an isometry for the length-based ultrametric and establish a signed wrapping estimate for guarded positive and negative language terms. These estimates lead to an ordered contraction principle for comparable pairs. As a consequence, the canonical lower and upper Picard iterations converge to the same limit, which is the unique fixed pair of the system. We also derive an explicit convergence rate and a finite-depth certification result: after a prescribed number of iterations, the approximants agree with the fixed-point semantics on all words below a given length. Additional symmetry assumptions are shown to force the unique fixed pair to be diagonal, reducing the system to a single language equation. Finally, we discuss an application to trace-based policies for tool-using AI agents. In this interpretation, finite executions of an agent are represented as words over an alphabet of observable tool-events, and the two components of the fixed point provide a stable semantics for policy-defined admissible and risky trace classes. The resulting framework gives a mathematically certified method for finite-depth analysis of recursive trace-based policies based on ultrametric fixed-point techniques. Full article

The rapid advancement of information technology and multimedia applications has led to an increasing demand for video data processing. In particular, video fusion technology in multi-camera environments, which integrates and optimizes video data from multiple camera viewpoints, plays a crucial role in enhancing visual quality and improving the completeness of information. This technology addresses the challenge of obtaining high-quality video content in complex and dynamic environments. By improving image clarity, expanding perspective information, and enhancing scene understanding, video fusion technology has shown significant potential for a wide range of applications, attracting considerable attention from both academia and industry. Despite the existence of several review articles on video fusion, they tend to focus on isolated aspects of the technology and often lack a comprehensive, systematic overview of the field. To fill this gap, this paper provides an in-depth review of the research on video fusion technology in multi-camera scenarios. The paper covers the definition of video fusion; offers a detailed classification of key technologies, such as geometric correction and alignment, perspective fusion, spatio-temporal fusion, and multi-modal fusion; and explores its applications in diverse fields including surveillance security, virtual reality, film and television production, intelligent transportation, medical imaging, robotics, and unmanned aerial vehicles. Additionally, the paper examines the role of edge caching in video fusion, highlights the current challenges faced by the field, and discusses the potential of video fusion technology for driving innovation across multiple industries. Full article

The majority of currently available hand kinematic databases have been gathered using expensive marker-based systems or are restricted to a particular gesture-recognition task, failing to capture the dynamic nature of joints when the hand is engaged with an object. To address this gap, we introduce the RGB-based Hand Joint Kinematics (RGB-HJK) dataset, a publicly available collection of continuous, frame-level 3D joint angle trajectories, recorded while ten healthy adults (six male, four female; age $25.8\pm 3.2$ years; BMI $22.8\pm 2.0$ kg/m²) performed five standardized object interaction grasps: Power Grasp (cylindrical bottle), Tripod Grasp (pen), Static Power Hold (smartphone), Precision Pinch (thin paper), and Lateral Pinch (book). Data were collected using a standard RGB camera and the MediaPipe Hands markerless pipeline at $26.95\pm 0.29$ Hz, a rate that was stable across all subjects. Each participant completed five trials for each grasp type. After filtering using active hold, 28,111 validated frames remained, with a 100% detection rate for all 250 trials. Intra-subject repeatability was good (mean SD $\le 7.9°$ across all joint grasp combinations) and inter-subject variability was within the range expected based on normal anatomical diversity. Importantly, kinematic validation of the Index Proximal Interphalangeal (PIP) joint (61.8° ± 18.4°) showed values consistent with ranges reported in previous studies using instrumented gloves and depth sensors. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) confirmed clear linear separability among the five grasp configurations. Unlike existing datasets, the RGB-HJK method does not compromise the natural sense of touch and is free of hardware occlusions, thereby providing an easily accessible ecological baseline. Full article

Corydalis ophiocarpa is a medicinally valuable plant, noted for its abundant alkaloid content. Despite its significance, the mitochondrial (mt) genome of this plant has not been characterized, which impedes both the phylogenetic understanding within the Corydalis genus and the comprehension of its full genetic potential. In this research, we successfully assembled the complete mitogenome of C. ophiocarpa by employing a hybrid method that integrates Oxford Nanopore long reads with Illumina short reads. The assembled genome forms a circular structure of 600,064 bp, with a GC content of 46.49%, and includes 63 genes, comprising 40 unique protein-coding genes (PCGs), 20 tRNAs, and three rRNAs. Through assembly and coverage analysis, we identified a 6383 bp forward repeat associated with a contig having approximately double the depth, indicating a repeat-mediated multipartite structure where the main circle may coexist with two smaller subgenomic forms. We discovered 775 C-to-U RNA editing sites across the 40 PCGs, with 95.4% being non-synonymous and favoring hydrophobic amino acid substitutions, particularly in Complex I subunits. Furthermore, we identified sixteen mt plastid DNA fragments constituting 2.43% of the mitogenome, a proportion more than double that found in the closely related C. saxicola. Phylogenetic analysis confirms that C. ophiocarpa is most closely related to C. saxicola, with C. pauciovulata as another close relative. This study presents the first complete mitogenome of C. ophiocarpa, providing a genomic basis for investigating the relationships between mt genome structure, post-transcriptional regulation, and specialized metabolism in the Corydalis genus. Full article