Sharif Digital Repository

Denoising is an important preprocessing stage in some ElectroEncephaloGraphy (EEG) applications. For this purpose, Blind Source Separation (BSS) methods, such as Independent Component Analysis (ICA) and Decorrelated and Colored Component Analysis (DCCA), are commonly used. Although ICA and DCCA-based methods are powerful tools to extract sources of interest, the procedure of eliminating the effect of sources of non-interest is usually manual. It should be noted that some methods for automatic selection of artifact sources after BSS methods exist, although they imply a training supervised step. On the other hand, in cases where there are some a prioriinformation about the subspace of... 

We explore the interplay between tunneling process and chiral interactions in the discrimination of chiral states for an ensemble of molecules in a biological environment. Each molecule is described by an asymmetric double-well potential and the environment is modeled as a bath of harmonic oscillators. We carefully analyze different time-scales appearing in the resulting master equation at both weak- and strong-coupling limits. The corresponding results are accompanied by a set of coupled differential equations characterizing optical activity of the molecules. We show that, at the weak-coupling limit, chiral interactions prohibit the coherent racemization induced by decoherence effects and... 

Background: Celiac disease (CD) is a disorder associated with body reaction to gluten. After the gluten intake, an immune reaction against the protein occurs and damages villi of small intestine in celiac patients gradually. Objectives: The OSC, a filtering method for minimization of inter- and intra-spectrom-eter variations that influence on data acquisition, was applied to biofluid NMR data of CD patients. Patients and Methods: In this study, metabolites of total 56 serum samples from 12 CD patients, 15 CD patients taking gluten-free diet (GFD), and 29 healthy cases were analyzed using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and associated theoretical analysis. Employ-ing ProMetab (version... 

The viscoelasticity effects on the reaction-diffusion rates in a Y-shaped microreactor are studied utilizing the PTT rheological model. The flow is assumed to be fully developed and considered to be created under a combined action of electroosmotic and pressure forces. In general, finite-volume-based numerical simulations are conducted to handle the problem; however, analytical solutions based on the depthwise averaging approach are also obtained for the case for which there is no reaction between the inlet components. The analytical solutions are found to predict accurate results when the width to height ratio is at least 10 and acceptable results for lower aspect ratios. An investigation... 

In this paper, an efficient approach for ultrasonic object segmentation with special application for left ventricle segmentation in echocardiography images is proposed. At first, an efficient hybrid trend for ultrasonic image edge detection is suggested. Then, a modified level set approach is introduced based on the extracted edges and the computed probabilistic map as the stopping criteria for the contour evolution. Both synthetic and clinical images are utilized as validation measures with respect to the prior techniques which indicate outperform results quantitatively and qualitatively. Left ventricle segmentation using proposed method illustrates expert-approved performance, providing a... 

In this study, using fluid-structure interaction (FSI), 3-dimensional blood flow in an aneurysm in the circle of Willis-which is located in the middle cerebral artery (MCA)-has been simulated. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the effect of a partly blocked vessel on an aneurysm. To achieve this purpose, two cases have been investigated using the FSI method: in the first case, an ideal geometry of aneurysm in the MCA has been simulated; in the second case, modeling is performed for an ideal geometry of the aneurysm in the MCA with a partly blocked vessel. All boundary conditions, properties and modeling methods were considered the same for both cases. The only difference between the... 

A molecular structural mechanics method has been implemented to investigate the vibrational behavior of single-layered graphene sheets. By adopting this approach, mode shapes and natural frequencies are obtained. Vibrational analysis is performed with different chirality and boundary conditions. Numerical results from the atomistic modeling are employed to develop predictive equations via a statistical nonlinear regression model. With the proposed equations, fundamental frequencies of single-layered graphene sheets with considered boundary conditions can be predicted within 3% difference with respect to the atomistic simulation. © IOP Publishing Ltd  

The turbulent heat transfer in gas-solid flows through an inclined pipe under various inclination angles is studied with constant wall heat flux. The hydrodynamic k- τ and kθ- τθ thermal two phase model is used in a lagrangian/Eulerian four way approach. The numerical results agreed reasonably with available experimental data in vertical and horizontal pipe flows. The effects of inclination angles on the flow patterns are reported. The pressure drop and Nusselt number are enhanced significantly as the inclination increases up to a certain angle. The mass loading ratio has influence on the optimal inclination angle. With increasing loading ratio, the optimal inclination angle of maximum... 

Laccase production by indigenous fungus, Phanerochaete chrysosporium, requires solving optimal problems to determine the maximum production of the enzyme within a definite time period and conditions specified in the solid-state fermentation process. For this purpose, parallel to response surface methodology, an analytical approach has been proposed based on the advanced concepts of Poisson geometry and Lie groups, which lead to a system of the Hamiltonian equations. Despite the dating of the Hamiltonian approach to solving biological problems, the novelty of this paper is based on the expression of a Hamiltonian system in notions of Poisson geometry, Lie algebras and symmetry groups and... 

Intracellular production of recombinant proteins in prokaryotes necessitates subsequent disruption of cells for protein recovery. Since the cell disruption and subsequent purification steps largely contribute to the total production cost, scalable tools for protein release into the extracellular space is of utmost importance. Although there are several ways for enhancing protein release, changing culture conditions is rather a simple and scalable approach compared to, for example, molecular cell design. This contribution aimed at quantitatively studying process technological means to boost protein release of a periplasmatic recombinant protein (alkaline phosphatase) from E. coli.... 

We propose a new image recovery method to improve the resolution in microwave imaging applications. Scattered field data obtained from a simplified breast model with closely located targets is used to formulate an electromagnetic inverse scattering problem, which is then solved using the Distorted Born Iterative Method (DBIM). At each iteration of the DBIM method, an underdetermined set of linear equations is solved using our proposed sparse recovery algorithm, IMATCS. Our results demonstrate the ability of the proposed method to recover small targets in cases where traditional DBIM approaches fail. Furthermore, in order to regularize the sparse recovery algorithm, we propose a novel... 

Techniques available in graph theory can be applied to signals recorded from human brain. In network analysis of EEG signals, the individual nodes are EEG sensor locations and the edges correspond to functional relations between them that are extracted from EEG time series. In this paper, we study EEG-based directed functional networks in Alzheimer's disease (AD). To this end, directed connectivity matrices of 25 AD patients and 26 healthy subjects are processed and a number of meaningful graph theory metrics are studied. Our data show that functional networks of AD brains have significantly reduced global connectivity in alpha and beta bands (P < 0.05). The AD brains have significantly... 

The performance of cellular solids in biomedical applications relies strongly on a detailed understanding of the effects of pore topology on mechanical properties. This study aims at characterizing the failure mechanism of scaffolds based on nodal connectivity (number of struts that meet in joints) and geometry of the pores. Plastic models of scaffolds having the same relative density but different cubic and trigonal unit cells were designed and then fabricated via three dimensional (3-D) printing. Unit cells were repeated in different arrangements in 3-D space. An in-situ imaging technique was utilized to study the progressive deformation of the scaffold models. Different nodal... 

Image based registration of rigid objects has been frequently addressed in the literature to obtain an object's motion parameters. In this paper, a new approach of joint segmentation-rigid registration, within the variational framework of the phase field approximation of the Mumford-Shah's functional, is proposed. The defined functional consists of two Mumford-Shah equations, extracting the discontinuity set of the reference and target images due to a rigid spatial transformation. Multiscale minimization of the proposed functional after finite element discretization provided a sub-pixel, robust algorithm for edge extraction as well as edge based rigid registration. The implementation...