With the growing popularity of the functional food market, bioactive ingredients from natural sources are discovered one after another for their ability to promote better health and prevent chronic diseases. Emulsion, widely occurring in many food systems, has become a popular vehicle to facilitate the incorporation of bioactive components into the food system. Depending on the designated functionality, an emulsion can be developed with various physical and chemical properties. To ensure the successful development of a high-quality emulsion-based system to serve their purpose in food, knowledge of the analytical methods that could efficiently evaluate their quality parameters is important for investigators who work in this field. In this work, important emulsion properties are overviewed, and techniques that are commonly used to assess them are provided. Discussions and recommendations are also included to make suggestions on advantages and disadvantages when selecting suitable techniques and methods to characterize these quality parameters of emulsion systems.

We discuss a bent-ray ultrasound tomography algorithm with total-variation (TV) regularization.We have applied this algorithm to 61 in vivo breast datasets collected with our in-house clinical prototype for imaging sound-speed distributions in the breast. Our analysis showed that TV regularization could preserve sharper lesion edges than the classic Tikhonov regularization.Furthermore, the image quality of our TV bent-ray sound-speed tomograms was superior to that of the straight-ray counterparts for all types of breasts within BI-RADS density categories 1-4.For all four breast types from fatty to dense, the improvements for average sharpness (in the unit of (m· s) -1) of lesion edges in our TV bent-ray tomograms are between 2.1 to 3.4 fold compared to the straight ray tomograms. Reconstructed sound-speed tomograms illustrated that our algorithm could successfully image fatty and glandular tissues within the breast. We calculated the mean sound-speed values for fatty tissue and breast parenchyma as 1422 ± 9 ml s (mean± SD) and1487 ± 21 ml s, respectively. Based on 32 lesions in a cohort of 61 patients, we also found that the mean sound-speed for malignant breast lesions (1548±17 mls) was higher, on average, than that of benign ones (1513±27 mls) (one-sided p

: The combination of tendon gliding exercises with conventional treatments may be more effective than that of nerve gliding exercises with conventional treatments.