Embedding microfluidic architectures with microneedles enables fluid management capabilities that present new degrees of freedom for transdermal drug delivery. To this end, fabrication schemes that can simultaneously create and integrate complex millimeter/centimeter-long microfluidic structures and micrometer-scale microneedle features are necessary. Accordingly, three-dimensional (3D) printing techniques are suitable candidates because they allow the rapid realization of customizable yet intricate microfluidic and microneedle features. However, previously reported 3D-printing approaches utilized costly instrumentation that lacked the desired versatility to print both features in a single step and the throughput to render components within distinct length-scales. Here, for the first time in literature, we devise a fabrication scheme to create hollow microneedles interfaced with microfluidic structures in a single step. Our method utilizes stereolithography 3D-printing and pushes its boundaries (achieving print resolutions below the full width half maximum laser spot size resolution) to create complex architectures with lower cost and higher print speed and throughput than previously reported methods. To demonstrate a potential application, a microfluidic-enabled microneedle architecture was printed to render hydrodynamic mixing and transdermal drug delivery within a single device. The presented architectures can be adopted in future biomedical devices to facilitate new modes of operations for transdermal drug delivery applications such as combinational therapy for preclinical testing of biologic treatments.
A central challenge in the development of nanophotonic structures and metamaterials is identifying the optimal design for a sought target functionality, and understanding the physical mechanisms that enable the optimized device's capabilities. To this end, previously investigated design methods for nanophotonic structures have encompassed both conventional forward and inverse optimization approaches as well as nascent machine learning (ML) strategies. While in principle more computationally efficient than optimization processes, ML-based methods that are capable of generating complex nanophotonic structures are still 'black boxes' that lack explanations for their predictions. Motivated by this challenge, in this article we demonstrate that convolutional neural networks (CNN) trained to be highly accurate at forward design, can be explained to derive physics-driven insights by revealing the underlying light-matter relationships learned by network. We trained a CNN model with 10,000 images representative of a class of metal-dielectric-metal metamaterial resonators and their corresponding absorption spectra obtained from simulations. The trained CNN predicted the spectra of new and unknown designs with over 95% accuracy. We then applied the Shapley Additive Explanations (SHAP) algorithm to the trained model to determine features that made positive or negative contributions towards specific spectral points, thereby informing which features to create or eliminate in order to meet a new target spectrum. Our results reveal that the physical relationships between a nanophotonic structure and its electromagnetic response can be obtained -and new designs can be achieved -by exposing the valuable information hidden within a machine learning algorithm.
Complex nanophotonic structures hold the potential to deliver exquisitely tailored optical responses for a range of applications. Metal–insulator–metal (MIM) metasurfaces arranged in supercells, for instance, can be tailored by geometry and material choice to exhibit a variety of absorption properties and resonant wavelengths. With this flexibility, however, comes a vast space of design possibilities that classical design paradigms struggle to effectively navigate. To overcome this challenge, here, we demonstrate a tandem residual network approach to efficiently generate multiplexed supercells through inverse design. By using a training dataset with several thousand full-wave electromagnetic simulations in a design space of over three trillion possible designs, the deep learning model can accurately generate a wide range of complex supercell designs given a spectral target. Beyond inverse design, the presented approach can also be used to explore the structure–property relationships of broadband absorption and emission in such supercell configurations. Thus, this study demonstrates the feasibility of high-dimensional supercell inverse design with deep neural networks, which is applicable to complex nanophotonic structures composed of multiple subunit elements that exhibit coupling.
Understanding how nano‐ or micro‐scale structures and material properties can be optimally configured to attain specific functionalities remains a fundamental challenge. Photonic metasurfaces, for instance, can be spectrally tuned through material choice and structural geometry to achieve unique optical responses. However, existing numerical design methods require prior identification of specific material−structure combinations, or device classes, as the starting point for optimization. As such, a unified solution that simultaneously optimizes across materials and geometries has yet to be realized. To overcome these challenges, a global deep learning‐based inverse design framework is presented, where a conditional deep convolutional generative adversarial network is trained on colored images encoded with a range of material and structural parameters, including refractive index, plasma frequency, and geometric design. It is demonstrated that, in response to target absorption spectra, the network can identify an effective metasurface in terms of its class, materials properties, and overall shape. Furthermore, the model can arrive at multiple design variants with distinct materials and structures that present nearly identical absorption spectra. The proposed framework is thus an important step towards global photonics and materials design strategies that can identify combinations of device categories, material properties, and geometric parameters which algorithmically deliver a sought functionality.
A challenge for speech recognition for voice-controlled household devices, like the Amazon Echo or Google Home, is robustness against interfering background speech. Formulated as a far-field speech recognition problem, another person or media device in proximity can produce background speech that can interfere with the device-directed speech. We expand on our previous work on device-directed speech detection in the far-field speech setting and introduce two approaches for robust acoustic modeling. Both methods are based on the idea of using an anchor word taken from the device directed speech. Our first method employs a simple yet effective normalization of the acoustic features by subtracting the mean derived over the anchor word. The second method utilizes an encoder network projecting the anchor word onto a fixed-size embedding, which serves as an additional input to the acoustic model. The encoder network and acoustic model are jointly trained. Results on an in-house dataset reveal that, in the presence of background speech, the proposed approaches can achieve up to 35% relative word error rate reduction.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.