The proposed system is highly accurate and reliable for measuring the severity of skin pore enlargement. It can be suitably used for objective assessment of the pore tightening treatments.
Abstract. From a subject group of pes cavus, the purpose of this study was to evaluate the biomechanical characteristics of lower limbs, based on plantar foot pressure and electromyography (EMG) activities, by the effects on two kind of custommade insoles. Ten individuals among thirty females with a clinical diagnosis of idiopathic pes cavus (mean age (SD): 22.3 (0.08) years) were selected for the study. The plantar foot pressure data and EMG activities of four lower limb muscles were collected, when subjects walked on a treadmill, under three different experimental conditions. The plantar foot pressure data was analyzed, after the bilateral foot was divided into three areas of masks and into four sections of stance phase, to compare plantar foot pressure. The EMG activities were analyzed for integrated EMG (IEMG) value. The results show that plantar foot pressure concentrated in particular parts is decreased by custom-made insoles. In the case of EMG, all the muscle activities decreased significantly. The custom-made insoles dispersed pressure concentrated by the higher medial longitudinal arch and improved the efficient use of muscles. In particular, the extension structure in the forefoot of custom-made insoles was more efficient for pes cavus. Therefore, it could help patients to walk, by offering support to prevent the disease of pes cavus deformity, and to relieve the burden and fatigue in the lower limbs on gait.
In recent years, metallic nanowires have been attracting significant attention as next-generation flexible transparent conductive films. The performance of films depends on the network structure created by nanowires. Gaining an understanding of their structure, such as connectivity, coverage, and alignment of nanowires, requires the knowledge of individual nanowires inside the microscopic images taken from the film. Although nanowires are flexible up to a certain extent, they are usually depicted as rigid rods in many analysis and computational studies. Herein, we propose a simple and straightforward algorithm based on the filtering in the frequency domain for detecting the rod-shape objects inside binary images. The proposed algorithm uses a specially designed filter in the frequency domain to detect image segments, namely, the connected components aligned in a certain direction. Those components are post-processed to be combined under a given merging rule in a single rod object. In this study, the microscopic properties of the rod networks relevant to the analysis of nanowire networks were measured for investigating the opto-electric performance of transparent conductive films and their alignment distribution, length distribution, and area fraction. To verify and find the optimum parameters for the proposed algorithm, numerical experiments were performed on synthetic images with predefined properties. By selecting proper parameters, the algorithm was used to investigate silver nanowire transparent conductive films fabricated by the dip coating method.
Image analysis is an important tool for characterizing nano/micro network structures. To understand the connection, organization and proper alignment of network structures, the knowledge of the segments that represent the materials inside the image is very necessary. Image segmentation is generally carried out using statistical methods. In this study, we developed a simple and reliable masking method that improves the performance of the indicator kriging method by using entropy. This method selectively chooses important pixels in an image (optical or electron microscopy image) depending on the degree of information required to assist the thresholding step. Reasonable threshold values can be obtained by selectively choosing important pixels in a complex network image composed of extremely large numbers of thin and narrow objects. Thus, the overall image segmentation can be improved as the number of disconnected objects in the network is minimized. Moreover, we also proposed a new method for analyzing high-pixel resolution images on a large scale and optimized the time-consuming steps such as covariance estimation of low-pixel resolution image, which is rescaled by performing the affine transformation on high-pixel resolution images. Herein, image segmentation is executed in the original high-pixel resolution image. This entropy-based masking method of low-pixel resolution significantly decreases the analysis time without sacrificing accuracy.
The correlations between CIELAB values and multiple characteristics of skin were more significant when green LED was applied than when white light was applied. In addition, coherent relationships between the grade of dryness and skin conductance values showed that visual assessment could be appropriate for the study as with objective measurement.
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