Fluticasone propionate (400 microg b.i.d.) administered using OptiNose's breath actuated bi-directional delivery device was an effective and well tolerated treatment for mild-to- moderate bilateral nasal polyposis.

White-light interferometry measuring an optically rough surface commonly does not resolve the lateral structure of the surface. This means that there are height differences within one resolution cell that exceed one-fourth of the wavelength of the light used. Thus the following questions arise: Which height is measured by white-light interferometry? How does the surface roughness affect the measurement uncertainty? The goal of the presented paper is to answer these questions by means of numerical simulations. Before the aforementioned questions can be answered, the distribution of the intensity of individual speckles, the influence of surface roughness, and the spectral width of the light source used are discussed.

White-light interferometry is a well-established method for measuring the height profiles of samples with rough as well as with smooth surfaces. Because white-light interferometry uses broadband light sources, the problem of dispersion arises. Because the optical paths in the two interferometer arms cannot be balanced for all wavelengths, the white-light correlogram is distorted, which interferes with its evaluation. We investigate the influence of setup parameters on the shape of the correlogram. Calculated values are compared with experimental results.

The acoustic emission method has been adopted for detection of damage mechanisms in carbon-fiber-reinforced polymer composite tubes during the three-point bending test. The damage evolution process of the individual samples has been monitored using the acoustic emission method, which is one of the non-destructive methods. The obtained data were then subjected to a two-step technique, which combines the unsupervised pattern recognition approach utilizing the short-time frequency spectra with the boundary curve enabling the already clustered data to be additionally filtered. The boundary curve identification has been carried out on the basis of preliminary tensile tests of the carbon fiber sheafs, where, by overlapping the force versus time dependency by the acoustic emission activity versus time dependency, it was possible to identify the boundary which will separate the signals originating from the fiber break from unwanted secondary sources. The application of the presented two-step method resulted in the identification of the failure mechanisms such as matrix cracking, fiber break, decohesion, and debonding. Besides the comparison of the results with already published research papers, the study presents the comprehensive parametric acoustic emission signal analysis of the individual clusters.