Objectives: Recently, there have been important advances in the clinical application of targeted hybrid near-infrared (NIR) fluorescent-radioactive tracers. ICG-99mTc-nanocolloid, for example, is already being used by some centres for sentinel lymph node biopsy in head and neck cancer. The radioactive component allows imaging at depths which would not be possible with NIR alone and, once exposed, the NIR fluorescence reporter can be imaged at very high resolution. Gamma detection is currently carried out with a separate hand-held gamma camera or with a non-imaging probe. Visualisation of NIR fluorescence during surgery requires a dedicated NIR camera, several of which are available commercially. We describe a novel hand-held hybrid NIR-gamma small field of view camera, capable of displaying co-aligned images from both modalities, which can be fused into one image or viewed separately. This study is a preliminary investigation of the performance of the fluorescence component of this camera, including phantom studies and first images from a preclinical pilot study. Methods: The hybrid camera consists of a 1500 µm thick thallium doped caesium iodide columnar (CsI:Tl) scintillator coupled to an electron multiplying charged coupled device (EMCCD). A 1.0mm diameter tungsten pinhole collimator gives a 40mm x 40mm nominal field of view for an 8mm x 8mm CCD detection area. A fluorescence camera was aligned to provide the same field of view as the gamma camera with an LED ring as the excitation source. The performance of the fluorescence imaging was quantified in this study for the fluorophores ICG and IRDye800CW (CW800) using a range of bespoke phantom experiments. In vivo images were also obtained from a preclinical study of a targeted hybrid tracer (cRGD-CW800-TCO + TCO-DOTA-111In) in mice with HT29 colorectal cancer xenografts. RESULTS AND CONCLUSION: The portable hybrid camera prototype has been shown to successfully image dual NIR-gamma tracers using both in vitro and in vivo experimental models. With further development, this camera could be used intraoperatively, offering the benefits of gamma imaging at depth in tissues and high resolution surface NIR fluorescence imaging in a single imaging system.
The creation and characterisation of biodegradable blend films based on chitosan and polyvinyl alcohol for application in a range of packaging is described. The compatibility between the chitosan and PVA polymers was good. Composite films had a compact and homogeneous structure, according to the morphology analysis. The mechanical test result of PVA/CH at concentrations 5% showed, that The higher values of TS recorded in sample (p1, with 40 MPa) while the lower values appeared in sample (p9, with 22.09 MPa), the TS decreased gradually as the amount of PVA increased in blend film. While the blend film of pure Chitosan exhibits a poor mechanical strength which makes it a poor candidate for packaging but Blending CH with PVA together improved
... Show MoreRecently, the phenomenon of the spread of fake news or misinformation in most fields has taken on a wide resonance in societies. Combating this phenomenon and detecting misleading information manually is rather boring, takes a long time, and impractical. It is therefore necessary to rely on the fields of artificial intelligence to solve this problem. As such, this study aims to use deep learning techniques to detect Arabic fake news based on Arabic dataset called the AraNews dataset. This dataset contains news articles covering multiple fields such as politics, economy, culture, sports and others. A Hybrid Deep Neural Network has been proposed to improve accuracy. This network focuses on the properties of both the Text-Convolution Neural
... Show MoreDue to the high mobility and dynamic topology of the FANET network, maintaining communication links between UAVs is a challenging task. The topology of these networks is more dynamic than traditional mobile networks, which raises challenges for the routing protocol. The existing routing protocols for these networks partly fail to detect network topology changes. Few methods have recently been proposed to overcome this problem due to the rapid changes of network topology. We try to solve this problem by designing a new dynamic routing method for a group of UAVs using Hybrid SDN technology (SDN and a distributed routing protocol) with a highly dynamic topology. Comparison of the proposed method performance and two other algorithms is simula
... Show MoreIn cognitive radio system, the spectrum sensing has a major challenge in needing a sensing method, which has a high detection capability with reduced complexity. In this paper, a low-cost hybrid spectrum sensing method with an optimized detection performance based on energy and cyclostationary detectors is proposed. The method is designed such that at high signal-to-noise ratio SNR values, energy detector is used alone to perform the detection. At low SNR values, cyclostationary detector with reduced complexity may be employed to support the accurate detection. The complexity reduction is done in two ways: through reducing the number of sensing samples used in the autocorrelation process in the time domain and through using the Slid
... Show MoreIn modern era, which requires the use of networks in the transmission of data across distances, the transport or storage of such data is required to be safe. The protection methods are developed to ensure data security. New schemes are proposed that merge crypto graphical principles with other systems to enhance information security. Chaos maps are one of interesting systems which are merged with cryptography for better encryption performance. Biometrics is considered an effective element in many access security systems. In this paper, two systems which are fingerprint biometrics and chaos logistic map are combined in the encryption of a text message to produce strong cipher that can withstand many types of attacks. The histogram analysis o
... Show MoreIn this paper, two new simple, fast and efficient block matching algorithms are introduced, both methods begins blocks matching process from the image center block and moves across the blocks toward image boundaries. With each block, its motion vector is initialized using linear prediction that depending on the motion vectors of its neighbor blocks that are already scanned and their motion vectors are assessed. Also, a hybrid mechanism is introduced, it depends on mixing the proposed two predictive mechanisms with Exhaustive Search (ES) mechanism in order to gain matching accuracy near or similar to ES but with Search Time ST less than 80% of the ES. Also, it offers more control capability to reduce the search errors. The experimental tests
... Show MoreThe spectral response of the Si solar cell does not coincidence with the sun irradiance spectrum, so the efficiency of the Si solar cell is not high. To improve the Si solar cell one try to make use of most region of the sun spectrum by using dyes which absorb un useful wavelengths and radiate at useful region of spectrum (by stock shift). Fluorescence's dye is used as luminescent concentrator to increase the efficiency of the solar cell. The results show that the performance efficiency and out power for crystalline silicon solar cells are improved.
Cloud computing provides huge amount of area for storage of the data, but with an increase of number of users and size of their data, cloud storage environment faces earnest problem such as saving storage space, managing this large data, security and privacy of data. To save space in cloud storage one of the important methods is data deduplication, it is one of the compression technique that allows only one copy of the data to be saved and eliminate the extra copies. To offer security and privacy of the sensitive data while supporting the deduplication, In this work attacks that exploit the hybrid cloud deduplication have been identified, allowing an attacker to gain access to the files of other users based on very small hash signatures of
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