Sharif Digital Repository

This paper presents an innovative formulation of the RKPM (reproducing kernel particle method) pioneered by Liu. A major weakness of the conventional RKPM is in dealing with the derivative boundary conditions. The EFGM (element free Galerkin method) pioneered by Belytschko shares the same difficulty. The proposed RKPM referred to as GRKPM (gradient RKPM), incorporates the first gradients of the function in the reproducing equation. Therefore in three-dimensional space GRKPM consists of four independent types of shape functions. It is due to this feature that the corrected collocation method can be readily generalized and combined with GRKPM to enforce the EBCs (essential boundary... 

In this paper, a novel method as a combination of the expectation–maximization (EM) algorithm and Variogram is proposed to decompose the longitudinal measurement errors in the absence of replications and the presence of multiple instrumental measurement errors. In the proposed method, multiple measurements are considered where the units are observed by several distinct instruments (gauges). The approach decouples the observed variance of the measurement model into the process and measurement system variances. In addition, it decomposes the variance of multiple instruments into the process and instrument variances. In the end, the proposed model is validated and tested based on simulated... 

ECG denoising has always been an important issue in medical engineering. The purposes of denoising are reducing noise level and improving signal to noise ratio (SNR) without distorting the signal. This paper proposes a method for removing white Gaussian noise from ECG signals. The concepts of singularity and local maxima of the wavelet transform modulus were used for analyzing singularity and reconstructing the ECG signal. Adaptive thresholding was used to remove white Gaussian noise modulus maximum of wavelet transform and then reconstruct the signal  

Games and their use in rehabilitation have formed a new and rapidly growing area of research. A critical hardware component of rehabilitation programs is the input device that measures the patients' movements. After Microsoft released Kinect, extensive research has been initiated on its applications as an input device for rehabilitation. However, since most of the works in this area rely on a qualitative determination of the joints' movements rather than an accurate quantitative one, detailed analysis of patients' movements is hindered. The aim of this article is to determine the accuracy of the Kinect's joint tracking. To fulfill this task, a model of upper body was fabricated. The... 

Abdominal recordings of fetal ECG (fECG) have lower signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) as compared with invasive procedures. In this paper we have combined two previously proposed methods, one for extracting fECG, called piCA and the other, a transformation based on Hilbert transform to enhance the R-peaks. The combination of these methods seems to work well in situations of noisy data and fetal repositioning. Also a comparison is done by using ICA in order to extract the fetal signals. Performance of both methods is studied separately. Results show that applying the transformation on the components extracted with the use of piCA (after maternal ECG cancellation), had a very good performance. Also,... 

Neural activity is very important source for data mining and can be used as a control signal for brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). Particularly, Magnetic signals of neurons are enriched with information about the movement of different part of the body such as wrist movement. In this paper, we use MEG (Magneto encephalography) signals of two subjects recorded during wrist movement task in four directions. Data were prepared for BCI competition 2008 for multiclass classification. Our approach for this classification problem consists of PCA as a noise reduction method, ULDA for feature reduction and various linear classifiers such as Bayesian, KNN and SVM. Final results (58%-62% for subject 1... 

Electromyogram signal (EMG) is an electrical manifestation of contractions of muscles. Surface EMG (sEMG) signal collected form surface of the skin has been used in diverse applications. One of its usages is exploiting it in a pattern recognition system which evaluates and synthesizes hand prosthesis movements. The ability of current prosthesis has been limited in simple opening and closing that decreases the efficacy of these devices in contrary to natural hand. In order to extend the ability and accuracy of prosthesis arm movements and performance, a novel approach for sEMG pattern recognizing system is proposed. In order to have a relevant comparison, present and recent research for... 

A major disadvantage of conventional meshless methods as compared to finite element method (FEM) is their weak performance in dealing with constraints. To overcome this difficulty, the penalty and Lagrange multiplier methods have been proposed in the literature. In the penalty method, constraints cannot be enforced exactly. On the other hand, the method of Lagrange multiplier leads to an ill-conditioned matrix which is not positive definite. The aim of this paper is to boost the effectiveness of the conventional reproducing kernel particle method (RKPM) in handling those types of constraints which specify the field variable and its gradient(s) conveniently. Insertion of the gradient term(s),... 

Purpose: A new Monte Carlo (MC) source model (SM) has been developed for azimuthally symmetric photon beams. Methods: The MC simulation tallied phase space file (PSF) is divided into two categories depending on the relationship of the particle track line to the beam central axis: multiple point source (MPS) and spatial mesh based surface source (SMBSS). To validate this SM, MCNPX2.6 was used to generate two PSFs for a 6MV photon beam from a Varian 2100C/D linear accelerator. Results: PDDs and profiles were calculated using the SM and original PSF for different field sizes from 5×5 to 40×40cm2. Agreement was within 2% of the maximum dose at 100cm SSD and 2.5% of the maximum dose at 200cm SSD... 

In recent years, analyzing genome-wide expression profiles to find genetic markers has received much attention as a challenging field of research aiming at unveiling biological mechanisms behind complex disorders. The identification of reliable and reproducible markers has lately been achieved by integrating genome-scale functional relationships and transcriptome datasets, and a number of algorithms have been developed to support this strategy. In this paper, we present a promising and easily applicable tool to accomplish this goal, namely CytoGTA, which is a Cytoscape plug-in that relies on an optimistic game theoretic approach (GTA) for identifying subnetwork markers. Given transcriptomic... 

In this study, we have experimentally investigated the electrical properties of graphene and its derivatives (Exfoliated graphene, CVD synthesized graphene, graphene oxide and hydrogenated graphene oxide) under uniaxial strain. We have used gauge factor as a common representation of the sensitivity of the strain sensors and found that the hydrogenated graphene oxide shows significantly higher responsivity comparing to other samples under study. Reproducibility, reliability and lack of hysteresis in the responses of the graphene based samples make them a good candidate to be used in the strain sensors. © 2018  

Electrocardiogram (ECG) and magnetocardiogram (MCG) signals are among the most considerable sources of noise for other biomedical signals. In some recent works, a Bayesian filtering framework has been proposed for denoising the ECG signals. In this paper, it is shown that this framework may be effectively used for removing cardiac contaminants such as the ECG, MCG and ballistocardiographic artifacts from different biomedical recordings such as the electroencephalogram, electromyogram and also for canceling maternal cardiac signals from fetal ECG/MCG. The proposed method is evaluated on simulated and real signals. © 2008 Institute of Physics and Engineering in Medicine  

In this paper, an application of the reproducing kernel particle method (RKPM) is presented in plasticity behavior of pressure-sensitive material. The RKPM technique is implemented in large deformation analysis of powder compaction process. The RKPM shape function and its derivatives are constructed by imposing the consistency conditions. The essential boundary conditions are enforced by the use of the penalty approach. The support of the RKPM shape function covers the same set of particles during powder compaction, hence no instability is encountered in the large deformation computation. A double-surface plasticity model is developed in numerical simulation of pressure-sensitive material....