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TiO2 nanotube arrays (TiO2 NTs) were regarded as the outstanding semiconductors for the photocatalytic application in waste water treatment and H2 generation, and CdS nanoparticles as the visible light sensitizers were traditionally used to enhance the photocatalytic performance. In this paper, CdS–CuS co-sensitizers were deposited on TiO2 NTs by one-pot hydrothermal method, and the Cu/Cd ratio was changed to adjust the hybrid photocatalyst composition and electron transfer. The photocatalytic data indicated that suitable CdS–CuS composition could effectively enhance the photocatalytic pollutant removal and photocurrent/H2 evolution and the hybrid photocatalyst also exhibited the high stability by the inhibition of CdS photocorrosion. The p-n heterojunction construction of TiO2 NTs/CdS–CuS benefited the solar response, photoelectron separation and photocatalytic reaction, and the photocatalytic mechanism and photoelectron transfer were investigated. The p-n heterojunctional photocatalyst is supposed to apply in environmental remediation and new energy development.

In this work, a green Fe-doped TiO2 photocatalyst was successfully synthesized on Ti mesh through the chemical impregnation and anodization method. The influence of sample Fe-content on the photocatalytic performance was investigated in detail. Ordered TiO2 nanomesh was compactly decorated with nanospheres to form a novel photocatalyst Fe-doped TiO2 with anatase phase. Simultaneously, it exhibits higher light absorption intensity compared to the pristine TiO2 within the visible light range, and its absorption peak has a redshift. The VSM results showed that the sample has excellent magnetic properties. It is hard to achieve magnetic agglomeration after magnetic field removal, which benefits the strong recyclability and reusability of Fe-doped TiO2 photocatalyst. Importantly, this higher visible-light photoresponse of TiO2 was clearly obtained after Fe doping. When the Fe-content was 0.6 wt%, the degradation rate of methylene blue reached 87.9% under simulated sunlight irradiation for 2.5 h. The prepared nanocrystalline photocatalyst demonstrated excellent photocatalysis because of its prominent crystal morphology, strengthen light-absorption capacity, and commendable inhibition recombination of photo-induced electron-hole.

Developmental dysplasia of the hip is a medical term representing the hip joint instability that appears mainly in infants. The assessment metric of physician is based on the femoral head coverage rate, which needs to segment the femoral head area in 2D ultrasound images. In this paper, we propose an approach to automatically segment the femoral head. The proposed method consists of two parts, firstly, mean filtering, morphological processing and least squares operation are used to detect the ilium and acetabular bone baseline to coarsely obtain the region of interest of the femoral head, then followed by an improved fully convolutional neural network named FNet which integrates the convolution encoder–decoder architecture, pooling indices and residual connection operation for more accurate segmentation. FNet is trained in a cascaded way, which can help the network learn more features with a limited dataset and thus further improve the segmentation performance. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieved an average dice, recall and IoU value of 0.946, 0.937 and 0.897. Moreover, the features learned by convolutional layers are visualized to demonstrate that FNet can focus on significant features, which is helpful to restore the contour of the femoral head more precisely. In conclusion, the proposed method is capable of segmenting femoral head accurately and guiding the diagnosis of developmental dysplasia of the hip.

Ti

Ti3+ self-doped TiO2-x nanotube arrays (TiO2-x NTs) were prepared by solvothermal treatment in KBH4 ethanol solution followed by calcination, and were characterized by field-emission scanning electron microscopy (FE-SEM), X-ray diffraction (XRD), X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) and UV–vis diffusion reflection spectroscopy (DRS). The photoelectrochemical properties of TiO2-x NTs prepared in different KBH4 concentrations were investigated. The TiO2-x NTs exhibited high visible light response, visible light photocurrent and photoelectrocatalytic activities. The active species and photocatalytic mechanism for the dye degradation were proposed, and the improved photoelectrochemical performance was attributed to the synergistic effect of the narrowed energy gap and enhanced electron transportation. The ability to improve the photoelectrochemical properties of TiO2-x electrode materials should open up new opportunities for high-performance solar cells and photocatalysts.