Our aim was to investigate the changes in the myocardium stiffness index for patients suffering from systemic hypertension, and to assess their left ventricular performance. We studied 263 hypertensive patients and 166 healthy subjects as a control group. By using conventional Doppler echocardiography, the following parameters were measured—Left ventricular end diastolic diameter, left ventricular end systolic diameter, transmitral early velocity, isovolumic relaxation time, and isovolumic contraction time. Tissue Doppler imaging (TDI) was used in the measurements of the early mitral annular velocity (Ea) and the diastolic stiffness was obtained by calculating the ratio E\Ea\LVIDd. Index myocardial performance (IMP) was calculated

This paper reports a fiber Bragg grating (FBG) as a biosensor. The FBGs were etched using a chemical agent,namely,hydrofluoric acid (HF). This implies the removal of some part of the cladding layer. Consequently, the evanescent field propagating out of the core will be closer to the environment and become more sensitive to the change in the surrounding. The proposed FBG sensor was utilized to detect toxic heavy metal ions aqueous medium namely, copper ions (Cu2+). Two FBG sensors were etched with 20 and 40 μm diameters and fabricated. The sensors were studied towards Cu2+ with different concentrations using wavelength shift as a result of the interaction between the evanescent field and copper ions. The FBG sensors showed

Membrane manufacturing system was operated using dry/wet phase inversion process. A sample of hollow fiber membrane was prepared using (17% wt PVC) polyvinyl chloride as membrane material and N, N Dimethylacetamide (DMAC) as solvent in the first run and the second run was made using (DMAC/Acetone) of ratio 3.4 w/w. Scanning electron microscope (SEM) was used to predict the structure and dimensions of hollow fiber membranes prepared. The ultrafiltration experiments were performed using soluble polymeric solute poly ethylene glycol (PEG) of molecular weight (20000 Dalton) 800 ppm solution 25 °C temperature and 1 bar pressure. The experimental results show that pure water permeation increased from 25.7 to 32.2 (L/m2.h.bar) by adding aceton

Hand-lay up method was used to prepare the samples made of epoxy (EP) as a matrix reinforced with chopped carbon fibers (CCF). The fatigue behavior of epoxy resin /chopped carbon fiber composites was studied with different weight percentage of chopped carbon fibers (2.5%,5%,7.5%,10%,12.5%). The fatigue test was carried out under alternate bending method, which was made by applying sinusoidal wave with constant displacement (15mm), stress ratio R=-1,and loading frequency 10Hz, which is believed to give a negligible temperature rise during the test. The results of the maximum stress, fatigue strength, fatigue limit and fatigue life of the tested composites are calculated from stress(S)-number of cycles(N) (S-N) curves.
It was shown that

In this paper, a miniaturized 2 × 2 electro-optic plasmonic Mach– Zehnder switch (MZS) based on metal–polymer–silicon hybrid waveguide is presented. Adiabatic tapers are designed to couple the light between the plasmonic phase shifter, implemented in each of the MZS arms, and the 3-dB input/output directional couplers. For 6 µm-long hybrid plasmonic waveguide supported by JRD1 polymer (r33= 390 pm/V), a π-phase shift voltage of 2 V is obtained. The switch is designed for 1550 nm operation wavelength using COMSOL software and characterizes by 2.3 dB insertion loss, 9.9 fJ/bit power consumption, and 640 GHz operation bandwidth

       Human detection represents a main problem of interest when using video based monitoring. In this paper, artificial neural networks, namely multilayer perceptron (MLP) and radial basis function (RBF) are used to detect humans among different objects in a sequence of frames (images) using classification approach. The classification used is based on the shape of the object instead of depending on the contents of the frame. Initially, background subtraction is depended to extract objects of interest from the frame, then statistical and geometric information are obtained from vertical and horizontal projections of the objects that are detected to stand for the shape of the object. Next to this step, two ty