Sharif Digital Repository

In recent years, both tissue engineering and microfluidics have significantly contributed in engineering of in vitro skin substitutes to test the penetration of chemicals or to replace damaged skins. Organ-on-chip platforms have been recently inspired by the integration of microfluidics and biomaterials in order to develop physiologically relevant disease models. However, the application of organ-on-chip on the development of skin disease models is still limited and needs to be further developed. The impact of tissue engineering, biomaterials and microfluidic platforms on the development of skin grafts and biomimetic in vitro skin models is reviewed. The integration of tissue engineering and... 

The effect of condensate blockage on the pressure drop near the well bore has been studied. Two types of single well simulations have been conducted and pressure drop due to condensate blockage has been quantified based on variation of gas relative permeabilities in near well bore area. The relationship of condensate banking pressure drop, gas rate and reservoir quality has been presented. It is shown that for a poor reservoir quality, condensate blockage can increase the pressure drop up to 200% of the pressure drop in the tubing  

In this study, physically cross-linked hydrogels were developed by freezing-thawing method while different concentrations of honey were included into the hydrogels for accelerated wound healing. The hydrogel was composed of chitosan, polyvinyl alcohol (PVA), and gelatin with the ratio of 2:1:1 (v/v), respectively. Further, the effect of honey concentrations on antibacterial properties, and cell behavior was investigated. In vivo studies, including wound healing mechanism using rat model and histological analysis of section tissue samples were performed. The results illustrated that the incorporation of honey in hydrogels increased the ultimate strain of hydrogels approximately two times,... 

In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm that combines color and texture information of skin with cellular learning automata to segment skin-like regions in color images. First, the presence of skin colors in an image is detected, using a committee structure, to make decision from several explicit boundary skin models. Detected skin-color regions are then fed to a color texture extractor that extracts the texture features of skin regions via their color statistical properties and maps them to a skin probability map. Cellular learning automatons use this map to make decision on skin-like regions. The proposed algorithm has demonstrated true positive rate of about 83.4% and false positive... 

Skin detection is a difficult and primary task in many image processing applications. Because of the diversity of various image processing tasks, there exists no optimum method that can perform properly for all applications. In this paper, we have proposed a novel skin detection algorithm that combines color and texture information of skin with cellular learning automata to detect skin-like regions in color images. Skin color regions are first detected, by using a committee structure, from among several explicit boundary skin models. Detected skin-color regions are then fed to a texture analyzer which extracts texture features via their color statistical properties and maps them to a skin... 

Detection of skin pixels in arbitrary images is addressed in this paper. We have combined texture and color information to segment skin regions. First, a pixel-based boosted skin detection method is used to locate skin pixels. To further improve the detect performance, skin region texture features are employed using the nonsubsampled contourlet coefficients. For the candidate skin pixels, the set of 8×8 patches around that pixel in all subimages are selected and the feature vector of each patch is extracted. Multilayer perceptron is then utilized to learn features and classify any given input sample. The proposed algorithm has achieved true positive rate of about 82.8% and false positive... 

This paper presents a novel approach for detection and recognition of multi-view faces whose location is unknown and the illumination conditions are varying. The illumination is a big problem in the face detection and recognition aspects. Our proposed method doesn't use the skin color information for face detection. The detection of faces is accomplished after canceling the effect of the various illumination conditions. Two completely different methods are proposed for face detection in this paper. Because of the independency of the approaches to the face's skin color, the persons with every kind of skin colors are detected even in completely dark environments. Next, the detected faces are... 

Melanoma is the deadliest form of skin cancer if not treated early. The best way to cure melanoma is to treat it in its earliest stage of development. Since melanoma is similar to benign moles in its shape and appearance, it is often mistaken for moles and left untreated. Automatic melanoma detection is an essential way to increase the survival rate of patients by detecting melanoma in its early stages. In this paper, a new method for automatic diagnosis of melanoma using segmented dermatoscopic images is provided. Almost all related methods follow similar approaches but using different features. We have introduced several new features which could improve the accuracy of diagnosing melanoma.... 

In this paper, we have proposed a new face detection method which combines the AdaBoost algorithm with skin color information and support vector machine (SVM). First, a cascade classifier based on AdaBoost is used to detect faces in images. Due to noise and illumination changes some nonfaces might be detected too, therefore we have used a skin color model in the YCbCr color space to remove some of the detected nonfaces. Finally, we have utilized SVM to detect faces more accurately. Experimental results show that the performance of the proposed method is higher than the basic AdaBoost in the sense of detecting fewer nonfaces  

Abstract: In this study, an efficient, rapid and simple plant-mediated green sol–gel auto-combustion procedure was presented to synthesis magnesium–cobalt ferrite (MgCoFe2O4) nanocatalyst using an aqueous extract of apple skins as a chelating/combustion agent. The catalyst was assessed by multiple techniques, including FT-IR, XRD, FE-SEM, EDS, elemental mapping, TGA-DTA and VSM. Then, the catalytic potential of the as-prepared MgCoFe2O4 nanocatalyst was examined in the three-component condensation reaction of 1,3-dimethyl barbituric acid, aldehydes and malononitrile for the one-pot synthesis of pyrano[2,3-d]pyrimidinedione and their bis-derivatives. The obtained results indicated the... 

Abstract: In this study, an efficient, rapid and simple plant-mediated green sol–gel auto-combustion procedure was presented to synthesis magnesium–cobalt ferrite (MgCoFe2O4) nanocatalyst using an aqueous extract of apple skins as a chelating/combustion agent. The catalyst was assessed by multiple techniques, including FT-IR, XRD, FE-SEM, EDS, elemental mapping, TGA-DTA and VSM. Then, the catalytic potential of the as-prepared MgCoFe2O4 nanocatalyst was examined in the three-component condensation reaction of 1,3-dimethyl barbituric acid, aldehydes and malononitrile for the one-pot synthesis of pyrano[2,3-d]pyrimidinedione and their bis-derivatives. The obtained results indicated the... 

In this paper, it is shown that the main source of mechanical energy of cardiovascular (CV) system i.e., rhythmic heart contraction is transformed to the oscillations of the CV walls and blood flow, and finally CV acoustical waves. These waves propagate through both blood flow (hemodynamical pathways) and tissues (viscoelastical pathways) toward the skin. Nonetheless, the CV walls could be assumed as the source of acoustical waves, since they act as the interface between blood flows and other tissues including skin. After obtaining the approximate accelerations of CV walls from pressure-flow (PF) models, we also needed to model the viscoelastical pathways until the skin. Some improvements on... 

This paper presents a new method for eye detection in a sequence of video pictures. We first find the face region using the features of skin's color, then the location of eye is determined by applying three cues on the detected face region. The first cue is the eye intensity and color, because the intensity of each eye region is relatively low and its color differs from the color of surrounding skin. The second cue is based on the position and size of eyes. The third cue is based on the convolution of proposed-eye-variance-filter with the eye-window candidates. After finding the precise location of eye, it will be tracked in a finite search window. We have evaluated and tested the presented... 

Abstract: In recent years, temporary skin grafts (TSG) based on natural biopolymers modified with carbon nanostructures have received considerable attention for wound healing. Developments are required to improve physico-mechanical properties of these materials to match to natural skins. Additionally, in-deep pre-clinical examinations are necessary to ensure biological performance and toxicity effect in vivo. In the present work, we show superior acute-wound healing effect of graphene oxide nanosheets embedded in ultrafine biopolymer fibers (60 nm) on adult male rats. Nano-fibrous chitosan-based skin grafts crosslinked by Genepin with physico-mechanical properties close to natural skins were...