No abstract

We aimed to investigate the preventive effects of acupuncture for complications after radical hysterectomy. A single-center randomized controlled single-blinded trial was performed in a western-style hospital in China. One hundred and twenty patients after radical hysterectomy were randomly allocated to two groups and started acupuncture from sixth postoperative day for five consecutive days. Sanyinjiao (SP6), Shuidao (ST28), and Epangxian III (MS4) were selected with electrical stimulation and Zusanli (ST36) without electrical stimulation for thirty minutes in treatment group. Binao (LI14) was selected as sham acupuncture point without any stimulation in control group. The main outcome measures were bladder function and prevalence of postoperative complications. Compared with control group, treatment group reported significantly improved bladder function in terms of maximal cystometric capacity, first voiding desire, maximal flow rate, residual urine, and bladder compliance, and decreased bladder sensory loss, incontinence, and urinary retention on fifteenth and thirtieth postoperative days. Treatment group showed significant advantage in reduction of urinary tract infection on thirtieth postoperative day. But no significant difference between groups was observed for lymphocyst formation. By improving postoperative bladder function, early intervention of acupuncture may provide a valuable alternative method to prevent bladder dysfunctional disorders and urinary tract infection after radical hysterectomy.

The well-known Marangoni effect perfectly supports the dynamic mechanism of organic solvent-swollen gels on water. On this basis, we report a series of energy conversion processes of concentrated droplets of polyvinylidene fluoride/dimethyl formamide (PVDF/DMF) that can transfer chemical-free energy to kinetic energy to rapidly rotate itself on water. This droplet (22.2 mg) is capable to offer kinetic energy of 0.099 μJ to propel an artificial paper rocket of 31.8 mg to move over 560 cm on water at an initial velocity of 7.9 cm s. As the droplet increases to 35.0 mg, a paper goldfish of 10.6 mg can be driven to swim longer at a higher initial velocity of 20 cm s. The kinetic energy of the droplet can be further converted to electrical energy through an electromagnetic generator, in which as a 0.5 MΩ resistor is loaded, the peak output reaches 6.5 mV that corresponds to the power density of 0.293 μW kg. We believe that this report would open up a promising avenue to exploit energies for applications in miniature robotics.

No abstract

Overall position uncertainty for spinal radiosurgery patients has been evaluated. Rotational deviation and patient motion were the main factors contributed to position uncertainty for actual patient treatment.

No abstract

Computer vision as a fast, low-cost, noncontact, and online monitoring technology has been an important tool to inspect product quality, particularly on a large-scale assembly production line. However, the current industrial vision system is far from satisfactory in the intelligent perception of complex grain images, comprising a large number of local homogeneous fragmentations or patches without distinct foreground and background. We attempt to solve this problem based on the statistical modeling of spatial structures of grain images. We present a physical explanation in advance to indicate that the spatial structures of the complex grain images are subject to a representative Weibull distribution according to the theory of sequential fragmentation, which is well known in the continued comminution of ore grinding. To delineate the spatial structure of the grain image, we present a method of multiscale and omnidirectional Gaussian derivative filtering. Then, a product quality classifier based on sparse multikernel–least squares support vector machine is proposed to solve the low-confidence classification problem of imbalanced data distribution. The proposed method is applied on the assembly line of a food-processing enterprise to classify (or identify) automatically the production quality of rice. The experiments on the real application case, compared with the commonly used methods, illustrate the validity of our method.

A stochastic micromechanical framework for predicting the concrete probabilistic behavior is proposed considering the interfacial transition zone effects in this paper. The volume fraction of the interfacial transition zone is analytically calculated based on the aggregate grading. Multilevel homogenization schemes based on the direct interaction micromechanical solutions are presented to predict the concrete effective properties considering the aggregate and interfacial transition zone effects. By modeling the volume fractions and properties of the constituents as stochastic, we extend the deterministic framework to stochastic to incorporate the inherent randomness of effective properties among different concrete specimens. With the moments of the effective properties, the probability density function is approximated using the exponential polynomial for concrete material. Numerical examples including limited experimental validations, comparisons with existing micromechanical models, commonly used probability density functions, and the direct Monte Carlo simulations indicate that the proposed models provide an accurate and computationally efficient framework in characterizing the material’s effective properties. Finally, the effects of the randomness of interfacial transition zone and aggregate on the materials’ macroscopic probabilistic behaviors are investigated based on our proposed stochastic micromechanical framework.