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A four-year-old male Saint Bernard dog with a scrotal hydrocele was referred with a history of scrotal swelling and emaciation. Physical and hematological evaluation revealed dirofilaria infestation and liver function abnormalities. Ultrasonography showed fluid collection in each peritesticular area and in the peritoneal cavity. The dog survived only 10 days after the initial presentation. At necropsy, umbilicated nodular masses in the liver, hemorrhagic ascites, heart dirofilariasis, and accumulated transudate in the scrotum were observed. Histopathologic and immunofluorescence examination revealed cholangiocarcinoma in the liver, indicating the cause of liver failure and ascites accumulation. Severe edema was seen in the mediastinal connective tissue of spermatic cord and heartworm DNA from the spermatic cord tissue was detected by polymerase chain reaction (PCR) analysis. In the present case, it was suspected that the acquired hydrocele might have been caused by ectopic migration of filarial worms or by severe hypoproteinemia induced by liver failure.

We propose herein an algorithm to resample the Raman spectra which aims to correct the predicted error induced by spectral shift. The same set of training data for both human and nonhuman blood Raman spectra was applied to build the model using partial least squares (PLS) method. Several kinds of Raman spectra of the blood samples originating from human, goose, monkey, chicken, sheep and duck without spectral shift were used to validate the model. The Raman spectra of the same blood samples with a shift of 9.18 cm-1 were used to illustrate the influence of the spectral shift to the model. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the algorithm proposed, Raman spectra with spectral shift were resampled. The results show that the resampling algorithm can improve both the stability and accuracy of the model and reduce the impact of the spectral shift, which is promising for quantitative or qualitative analysis in Raman spectroscopy for complex samples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Atomic-scale [Fe/Pt]n multilayer films with different total thickness were prepared on thermally oxidized Si (100) substrates at room temperature by monatomic layer deposition using dc-magnetron and rf-magnetron sputtering. Effects of the total thickness on (001) texture, surface morphology, and magnetic properties of the postannealed films have been investigated. It is found that the particlelike structure films with perfect (001) texture and perpendicular magnetic anisotropy are obtained with a thickness of less than or equal to 6.5 nm. After 500 °C annealing, the films with thickness of 6.5 and 11.9 nm show very smooth surface. In addition, with increasing total thickness of the films, (001) texture and perpendicular magnetic anisotropy of the annealed films deteriorate, and the films become continuous in structure. The total thickness of the films also affects the exchange-coupling interaction among FePt magnetic grains and the magnetization reversal process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pure and Mg doped ZnO thin films were deposited at 400 °C on glass substrates by pulsed laser deposition. An x-ray diffractometer (XRD) was used to investigate the structural properties of the thin films. It is found that all the thin films have a preferred (002) orientation. The peak position of (002) orientation is found to shift from 34.39° to 34.55°. The lattice constants of ZnO thin films were also obtained from XRD data. It is found that, with the increase of the dopant concentration, the lattice constant a decreases from 3.25 to 3.23 Å, and c decreases from 5.20 to 5.16 Å. From the spectrophotometer transmittance data, the band gap energies of the thin films were calculated by a linear fitting process. The band gap energy of Mg doped ZnO thin film increases with increasing dopant concentration. In photoluminescence (PL) spectra, two PL emission peaks are found in pure ZnO thin films, one is the near band edge (NBE) emission at 3.28 eV, and the other is green-yellow-red emission at around 2.4 eV. However, with the increase of the dopants, no green-yellow-red emissions are found in PL of Mg doped ZnO thin films. The NBE emission has a blueshift compared with that of pure ZnO thin film (as much as 0.12 eV). As time goes on, NBE emission in pure ZnO thin film is enhanced, and the green-yellow-red emissions disappear. © 2004 American Institute of Physics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A quantum dot transistors (QDT) and a nanowire transistor from a metal-semiconductor field-effect-transistors (MESFET)-type GaAs wafer was fabricated and characterized at low temperatures. The nanodevices showed a quantum mechanical effect like scanning electron microscope (SET) through excited states and negative differentail resistance (NDR).

This paper presents an online method for calculating the glucose concentration based on laser ranging and radio frequency identification (RFID). We derive a theoretical formula on the reading distance and received signal backscattering power of the RFID tag attached to the surface of glucose solution. Subsequently, the former measurement values are converted to the corresponding glucose concentration. Finally, a fitted model of the relationship of glucose concentration, reading distances and received power is established. The experimental data are compliant to the theoretical counterparts. This online method could be applied to dynamic measurement in automatic assembly line and has the advantages of excellent versatility, high measuring accuracy, stable performance and quick response speed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

NiTi shape-memory alloys may release poisonous Ni ions at the alloys’ surface. In an attempt to prepare a well-performing surface layer on an NiTi sample, the thermally grown TiO2 layer, which formed during the heat treatment of NiTi, was removed and replaced with a new TiO2 layer prepared using the atomic layer deposition (ALD) method. Using x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, it was found that the ALD layer prepared at as low a temperature as 100 °C contained Ti in oxidation states + 4 and + 3. As for static corrosion properties of the ALD-coated NiTi samples, they further improved compared to those covered by thermally grown oxide. The corrosion rate of samples with thermally grown oxide was 1.05 × 10−5 mm/year, whereas the corrosion rate of the ALD-coated samples turned out to be about five times lower. However, cracking of the ALD coating occurred at about 1.5% strain during the superelastic mechanical loading in tension taking place via the propagation of a localized martensite band. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dynamic performance parameters of multiple tags in radio frequency identification (RFID) system include reading efficiency, reading distance, and so on. The reading performance of multiple tags could be hardly satisfied due to existing algorithms, so the geometric distribution of multiple tags is arranged reasonably to improve the reading performance of RFID system in this paper. An online detection system based on laser ranging is designed to measure the reading distance and extract the location of RFID tags. Simultaneously, a support vector machine (SVM) is used to analyse and predict the reading distance of RFID tags under various geometric distributions. The results show that the optimal geometric distribution of tags could be obtained by analysing the predicted reading distance of tags. This method could improve the dynamic performance of multiple tags and reduce the corresponding reading error in RFID system effectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to the function of self-diagnosis and self-healing for smart composite structures health monitoring system, this paper proposed a smart structure based on liquid core optical fibre (LCOF) sensor network. A model of loads recognition algorithm based on particle swarm optimization-support vector regression (PSO-SVR) is presented to achieve the self-diagnosis of the LCOF sensor system. Furthermore, the loading experiments were conducted on the E-51 composite structures plate embedded with eight liquid core fibre sensors. The relationship between the changes of light intensity in fibre sensor and loads positions was researched on. The support vector regression (SVR) model was established using sample data to predict loads position. And the parameters were optimized by particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm. And the test error is 0.245%. The study showed that this method can effectively determine the loads positions with small size training sample. It realized the self-diagnosis system for liquid core fibre sensors and it provides a foundation for the future research on the self-repairing for smart composite structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]