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-gamm

This paper proposes a compact, plasmonic-based 4 × 4 nonblocking switch for optical networks. This device uses six 2 × 2 plasmonic Mach-Zehnder switch (MZS), whose arm waveguide is supported by a JRD1 polymer layer as a high electro-optic coefficient material. The 4 × 4 switch is designed in COMSOL environment for 1550 nm wavelength operation. The performance of the proposed switch outperforms those of conventional (nonplasmonic) counterparts. The designed switch yields a compact structure ( 500 × 70   µ m 2 ) having V π L = 12   V · µ m , 1.5 THz optical bandwidth, 7.7 dB insertion loss, and −26.5 dB crosstalk. The capability of the switch to route 8 × 40 Gbps WDM signal is demonstrated successfully.

To investigate the flexural behavior of self-consolidating hybrid fiber-reinforced concrete beams containing voids experimentally, six RC beams were tested, one solid without fiber and the others containing hooked-steel and macro-polypropylene fibers with a volume fraction of 1 and 0.5%, respectively. One of the five fibrous beams was solid; two contain a series of recycled plastic balls of diameters 110 and 120 mm, and another two contain a single longitudinal circular void created by PVC pipes of diameters 90 and 110 mm. The flexural behavior of the beams was assessed depending on the load-deflection curve, load-strain curve, ductility, toughness, stiffness, and crack patterns. The experimental outcomes showed that all the tested