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Laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) is regarded as a promising technique for realtime sorting of scrap metals due to its capability of fast multi-elemental and in-air analysis. This work reports a method for signal processing which ensures high accuracy and high speed during similar metal sorting by LIBS. Similar metals such as aluminum alloys or stainless steel are characterized by nearly the same constituent elements with slight variations in elemental concentration depending on metal type. In the proposed method, the original data matrix is substantially reduced for fast processing by selecting new input variables (spectral lines) using the information for the constituent elements of similar metals. Specifically, principal component analysis (PCA) of full-spectra LIBS data was performed and then, based on the loading plots, the input variables of greater significance were selected in the order of higher weights for each constituent element. The results for the classification test with aluminum alloy, copper alloy, stainless steel and cast steel showed that the classification accuracy of the proposed method was nearly the same as that of full-spectra PCA, but the computation time was reduced by a factor of 20 or more. The results demonstrated that incorporating the information for constituent elements can significantly accelerate classification speed without loss of accuracy.

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Laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) is a useful technique for accurate sorting of metal scrap by chemical composition analysis. In this work, a method for intensity-ratiobased LIBS classification of stainless steel applicable to highly fluctuating LIBS signal conditions is proposed. The spectral line pairs for intensity ratio calculation are selected according to elemental concentration and upper levels of emission lines. It is demonstrated that the classification accuracy can be significantly improved from that of full-spectra principal component analysis or intensity-based analysis. The proposed method is considered to be suited to an industrial scrap sorting system that requires minimal maintenance and low system price.

Background and ObjectivesThe risk of contrast-induced nephropathy (CIN) is significantly influenced by baseline renal function and the amount of contrast media (CM). We evaluated the usefulness of the cystatin C (CyC) based estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFRCyC) in the prediction of CIN and to determine the safe CM dosage.Subjects and MethodsWe prospectively enrolled a total of 723 patients who received percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) and investigated the clinical factors associated with the development of CIN. Renal function was calculated as eGFRCyC and a modified diet in the renal disease (MDRD) equation, respectively. Systemic exposure of CM was calculated as CM volume to eGFR ratio. We conducted a regression analysis to evaluate the predictive role of CM volume to eGFRCyC for the risk of CIN.ResultsThe incidence of CIN was 4.0% (29/723). The patients with CIN had a lower hemoglobin level, decreased renal function, and a higher CyC value, and had greater CM exposure. Through multivariate regression analyses, hemoglobin {odds ratio (OR) 0.743, p=0.032}, CM volume/eGFRCyC (OR 1.697, p=0.006) and CM volume/MDRD (OR 2.275, p<0.001) were found to be independent predictors for CIN. In the receiver operating characteristic curve analysis, fair discrimination for CIN was found at a CM volume/eGFRCyC level of 4.493 (C-statics=0.814), and at this value, the sensitivity and specificity were 79.3% and 80.0%, respectively.ConclusionBoth the CM volume/MDRD and CM volume/eGFRCyC method would be simple, useful indicators for determining the safe CM-dose based on eGFR value before PCI. However, there was no significantly different predictive value between creatinine and CyC based GFR estimations.

For a knot K and its knot Floer complex CF K − (K), we introduce an algorithm to compute the bordered Floer bimodule of the complement of the knot and its meridian. The grading of the module computes spin c -summands of HF K(S 3 −n (K), µ K ), which can be also extended to arbitrary framing n.