39876273
A Dependable Micro-Electronic Peptide Synthesizer Using Electrode Data
The research in the area of microelectronic fluidic devices for biomedical applications is rapidly growing. As faults in these devices can have serious personal implications, a system is presented which includes fault tolerance with respect to the synthesized biomaterials (peptides). It can employ presence and purity detection of peptide droplets via current (charge) tests of control electrodes or impedance (phase) measurements using direct sensing electrodes near the peptide collector area. The commercial multielectrode array performs better in pure and impure detection of peptides in impedance and phase. Our two-electrode X-MEF case shows slightly poorer results. In both cases the phase is the best choice for contents detection. If there are presence or purity problems, the location is marked, and repeated peptide synthesis at another collector site is initiated.
15017124
Fault modelling and co-simulation in flowFET-based biological array systems
The area of microelectronic fluidic arrays is rapidly developing into many different commercial products, one being biological arrays. As a consequence, efficient and reliable design and testing of these systems becomes of crucial importance. This paper shows some of the latest results obtained with regard to the flowFET fluidic transfer device, its fault-free and fault modelling, and the co-simulation of a microelectronic fluidic array for life sciences.
8916884
cisRED: a database system for genome-scale computational discovery of regulatory elements
We describe cisRED, a database for conserved regulatory elements that are identified and ranked by a genome-scale computational system (). The database and high-throughput predictive pipeline are designed to address diverse target genomes in the context of rapidly evolving data resources and tools. Motifs are predicted in promoter regions using multiple discovery methods applied to sequence sets that include corresponding sequence regions from vertebrates. We estimate motif significance by applying discovery and post-processing methods to randomized sequence sets that are adaptively derived from target sequence sets, retain motifs with p-values below a threshold and identify groups of similar motifs and co-occurring motif patterns. The database offers information on atomic motifs, motif groups and patterns. It is web-accessible, and can be queried directly, downloaded or installed locally.
16687476
PULMONARY CT IMAGE ANALYSIS AND COMPUTER AIDED DETECTION
This short article summarizes the use of current CT image data for a comprehensive assessment of pulmonary structure and function. It identifies the need for the development of highly automated methods and techniques allowing quantitative analysis of lungs, lung lobes, airway trees, and pulmonary parenchyma. Such analyses serve as the stepping stones for more sophisticated computer-aided detection approaches capable of parenchymal tissue characterization and identification of pulmonary nodules, some of which are discussed
96057611
Stress in thermally annealed parylene films
Stress is a problem for thin film Multichip Modules (MCM) fabrication and reliability. Stress can cause adhesion failure, wire cracking and fracture of the polymer. Parylene can be deposited in a low compressive stress state, and here we explore its temperature-stress behavior. The stress generated by thermal coefficient of expansion (TCE) mis-match between thick parylene-n (PA-n) films (4-7 μm)and Si substrates has been studied as a function temperature. Measurements of stress were made on as-deposited films; after thermal annealing and also in-situ. The as-deposited films are under compressive stress of 20 MPa. As the films are annealed, the stress decreases and then becomes tensile, peaking at about 53 MPa. It was observed that stress was reduced in PA-n films during the crystal phase transformations at around 200 and 270°C. The stress has been compared to reported data from other sources and found to agree. Stress in PA-c (chlorinated), and co-polymerized PA-n ande (ethyl) films, and a fluorinated parylene (PA-f) are also evaluated. The effective glass transition temperatures and the linear coefficient of expansion have also been estimated.
35595997
Parallel simulation of a multi-dimensional computational fluid dynamics problem
The simulation of computational fluid dynamics problems in two and more dimensions involves computations of multiple degrees of freedom, such as the components of velocity, which are an obvious source of parallelism. Further to our previous investigation in this area we report on our current experiences in extracting such parallelism on a distributed network platform. A finite element method for simulating incompressible viscous flows is parallelised using a domain decomposition approach. Various issues that arise in this implementation are discussed in the light of our experimental results.
1710827
A simulated annealing and hill-climbing algorithm for the traveling tournament problem
Abstract The Traveling Tournament Problem (TTP) [E. Easton, G. Nemhauser, M. Trick, The traveling tournament problem description and benchmarks, in: Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming, CP 2001, 2001, pp. 580–584; M. Trick, Challenge Traveling Tournament Problems, 2004] schedules a double round-robin tournament to minimize the total distance traveled by competing teams. It involves issues of feasibility and optimality and is a challenge to constraint and integer programming. In this work, we divide the search space and use simulated annealing (SA) to search a timetable space and hill-climbing to explore a team assignment space. The SA component mutates timetables using conditional local jumps to find timetables which lead to better schedules while hill-climbing is enhanced by pre-computation and dynamic cost updating to provide fast and efficient search. Computational experiments using this hybrid approach on benchmark sets give results comparable to or better than current best known solutions.