Needle-based interventions are pervasive in Minimally Invasive Surgery (MIS), and are often used in a number of diagnostic and therapeutic procedures, including biopsy and brachytherapy seed placement. Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) which can provide high quality, real time and high soft tissue contrast imaging, is an ideal guidance tool for image-guided therapy (IGT). Therefore, a MRI-guided needle-based surgical robot I would first like to express my sincerest gratitude to my advisor, Dr. Gregory Fischer, for all the support and guidance from the onset of my experience at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. He has fund of knowledge in medical robotics and gives me more instruction in electronic circuit design. His technical expertise and visionary leadership has significantly guided my research work and career development. I attribute the level of my master degree to his encouragement and effort and without him in this thesis, too, would not have been completed or written. Besides my advisor, I would like to thank the rest of my thesis committee: Prof. Glenn R. Gaudette and Prof. Stephen S. Nestinger, for their encouragement and insightful comments. Furthermore, I would also like to express my deepest gratitude to my fellow labmates in Automation and Interventional Medicine Lab. Wenjian Shang gave me more basic knowledge of circuit design and PCB design. Gang Li helped me a lot with the software and mechanical design. Alex Camilo gave me more help with motor driving system. In addition, I will also thank Hao Su, Yunzhao Ma, Hanling Hong and Guangda Lu for their numerous help both in academic and in life. Finally, I would like to thank my parents, Anzhong Ji and Yuhong Lu, for supporting me throughout all my studies at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. I would especially like to thank them for their encouragement and understanding when I am in troubles in both in master study and life. Their selfless love from another side of the world always keeps me moving forward. IV Dedication This thesis is dedicated to my parents Anzhong Ji and Yuhong Lu.
If paddy is not dried in time after harvesting, it very easily becomes moldy, which causes substantial losses. Inappropriate drying methods also affect the quality and safety of paddy when it enters the drying process. In order to select the optimal drying method, paddy with different moisture content was treated with sun drying, mechanical drying, and late harvesting, and the quality indexes of paddy were tested for safe moisture content. The effects of different drying methods on the quality of paddy were analyzed in terms of burst rate, taste value, appearance quality, and pasting characteristics. A paddy quality index system was constructed, and gray relational analysis (GRA) was used to evaluate comprehensively the paddy quality. The results showed that when the moisture content of paddy was 24.4%, the best quality of paddy was obtained after mechanical drying, when the gray relational degree was 0.996. Timely harvesting and mechanical drying can not only reduce the loss of paddy, but can also ensure the quality and safety of paddy.
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