Salling Goldstein (arrowsilver5)

In this study, carbon nanotube (CNT) reinforced functionally graded bioactive glass scaffolds have been fabricated using additive manufacturing technique. Sol-gel method was used for the synthesis of the bioactive glass. For ink preparation, Pluronic F-127 was used as an ink carrier. The CNT-reinforced scaffolds were coated with the polymer polycaprolactone (PCL) using dip-coating method to improve their properties further by sealing the micro cracks. The CNT-reinforcement and polymer coating resulted in an improvement in the compressive strength of the additively manufactured scaffolds by 98% in comparison to pure bioactive glass scaffolds. Further, the morphological analysis revealed interconnected pores and their size appropriate for osteogenesis and angiogenesis. Evaluation of the in vitro bioactivity of the scaffolds after immersion in simulated body fluid (SBF) confirmed the formation of hydroxyapatite (HA). Further, the cellular studies showed good cell viability and initiation of osteogensis. These results demonstrate the potential of these scaffolds for bone tissue engineering applications.Recent studies have investigated bilateral gaits based on the causality analysis of kinetic (or kinematic) signals recorded using both feet. However, these approaches have not considered the influence of their simultaneous causation, which might lead to inaccurate causality inference. Furthermore, the causal interaction of these signals has not been investigated within their frequency domain. Therefore, in this study we attempted to employ a causal-decomposition approach to analyze bilateral gait. The vertical ground reaction force (VGRF) signals of Parkinson's disease (PD) patients and healthy control (HC) individuals were taken as an example to illustrate this method. To achieve this, we used ensemble empirical mode decomposition to decompose the left and right VGRF signals into intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) from the high to low frequency bands. The causal interaction strength (CIS) between each pair of IMFs was then assessed through the use of their instantaneous phase dependency. The results show that the CISes between pairwise IMFs decomposed in the high frequency band of VGRF signals can not only markedly distinguish PD patients from HC individuals, but also found a significant correlation with disease progression, while other pairwise IMFs were not able to produce this. In sum, we found for the first time that the frequency specific causality of bilateral gait may reflect the health status and disease progression of individuals. This finding may help to understand the underlying mechanisms of walking and walking-related diseases, and offer broad applications in the fields of medicine and engineering.To avoid severe limited-view artifacts in reconstructed CT images, current multi-row detector CT (MDCT) scanners with a single x-ray source-detector assembly need to limit table translation speeds such that the pitch p (viz., normalized table translation distance per gantry rotation) is lower than 1.5. When p > 1.5, it remains an open question whether one can reconstruct clinically useful helical CT images without severe artifacts. In this work, we show that a synergistic use of advanced techniques in conventional helical filtered backprojection, compressed sensing, and more recent deep learning methods can be properly integrated to enable accurate reconstruction up to p = 4 without significant artifacts for single source MDCT scans.This paper proposes a new method for joint design of radiofrequency (RF) and gradient waveforms in Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), and applies it to the design of 3D spatially tailored saturation and inversion pulses. The joint design of both waveforms is characterized by the ODE Bloch equations, to which there is no known direct solution. Existing approaches therefore typically rely on simplified problem formulations based on, e.g., the small-tip approximation or constraining the gradient wav