Sharif Digital Repository

A single-walled nanotube structure embedded in an elastic matrix is simulated by the nonlocal EulerBernoulli, Timoshenko, and higher order beams. The beams are assumed to be elastically supported and attached to continuous lateral and rotational springs to take into account the effects of the surrounding matrix. The discrete equations of motion associated with free transverse vibration of each model are established in the context of the nonlocal continuum mechanics of Eringen using Hamilton's principle and an efficient meshless method. The effects of slenderness ratio of the nanotube, small scale effect parameter, initial axial force and the stiffness of the surrounding matrix on the natural... 

The pharmaceutical industry is facing enormous challenges due to high drug attribution rates. For the past decades, novel methods have been developed for safety and efficacy testing, as well as for improving early development stages. In vitro screening methods for drug-receptor binding are considered to be good alternatives for decreasing costs in the identification of drug candidates. However, these methods require lengthy and troublesome labeling steps. Biosensors hold great promise due to the fact that label-free detection schemes can be designed in an easy and low-cost manner. In this paper, for the first time in the literature, we aimed to compare the potential of label-free optical and... 

In this paper multivariate response surface methodology (RSM) has been used for the optimization of hydrodistillation-headspace solvent microextraction (HD-HSME) of thymol and carvacrol in Thymus transcaspicus. Quantitative determination of compounds of interest was performed simultaneously using gas chromatography coupled with flame ionization detector (GC-FID). Parameters affecting the extraction efficiency were assessed and the optimized values were 5 min, 2 μL and 3 min for the extraction time, micro-drop volume and cooling time after extraction, respectively. The amounts of analyte extracted increased with plant weight. The calibration curves were linear in the ranges of 6.25-81.25 and... 

Cardiotocograph (CTG) is widely used in everyday clinical practice for fetal surveillance, where it is used to record fetal heart rate (FHR) and uterine activity (UA). These two biosignals can be used for antepartum and intrapartum fetal monitoring and are, in fact, nonlinear and non-stationary. CTG recordings are often corrupted by artifacts such as missing beats in FHR, high-frequency noise in FHR and UA signals. In this paper, an empirical mode decomposition (EMD) method is applied on CTG signals. A recursive algorithm is first utilized to eliminate missing beats. High-frequency noise is reduced using EMD followed by the partial reconstruction (PAR) method, where the noise order is... 

An electro-catalysis non-enzymatic electrode is proposed based on alloyed Pt/Ni nanowire arrays (NWAs) for the detection of glucose. The Pt/Ni NWAs were prepared by pulse electrodeposition of Pt and Ni within a nano-pore polycarbonate (PC) membrane followed by a chemical etching of the membrane. The electrode structure is characterized by scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and transmission electron microscopy (TEM). The resulting Pt/Ni NWAs electrode shows high electrocatalytic activities towards the oxidation of glucose in alkaline solution. Consequently, a sensitive amperometric detection of glucose is achieved under 0.45 V vs. SCE with a low detection limit of 1.5 μM within a wide linear... 

In this study a novel Pt/Ni nanostructure consisting of nano-bushes and nanocubes was fabricated onto TiO 2 nanotubes. The scanning electron microscopy images showed that a large amount of well-dispersed nano-architectures had uniformly covered all over the surface which made an electrode with high surface area. It was obviously seen that the nanocube structures mainly consists of Ni had been grown on top of each other while the Pt colonies represented bush-like structures. As a non-enzymatic glucose biosensor, the Pt/Ni TiO 2 nanotubes modified electrode exhibited an excellent performance. The proposed biosensor had two linear ranges for detection of glucose from 0 to 0.12 mM (correlation... 

Background: Accurate tracking of the heart surface motion is a major requirement for robot assisted beating heart surgery. Method: The feasibility of a stereo infrared tracking system for measuring the free beating heart motion was investigated by experiments on a heart motion simulator, as well as model surgery on a dog. Results: Simulator experiments revealed a high tracking accuracy (81 μm root mean square error) when the capturing times were synchronized and the tracker pointed at the target from a 100 cm distance. The animal experiment revealed the applicability of the infrared tracker with passive markers in practical heart surgery conditions. Conclusion: With the current technology,... 

A meshless method called reproducing kernel particle method (RKPM) is exploited to cope with elastic-plastic fracture mechanics (EPFM) problems. The idea of arithmetic progression is assumed to place particles within the refinement zone in the vicinity of the crack tip. A comparison between two conventional treatments, visibility and diffraction, to crack discontinuity is conducted. Also, a tracking to find the appropriate diffraction parameter is performed. To assess the suggestions made, two mode I numerical simulations, pure tension and pure bending tests, are executed. Results including J integral, crack mouth opening displacement (CMOD), and plastic zone size and shape are compared with... 

Polymeric microspheres which can load biomolecules, cells and active agents play an important role in tissue engineering and drug delivery systems. The conventional double emulsion method has been frequently used to fabricate polymeric microspheres. However, this method has two major shortcomings: the complicated fabrication process which makes it difficult to predict the characteristics of the final microspheres while the size distribution of the microspheres has a wide range. In this study, we eliminate the shortcomings of the conventional double emulsion method and increase its performance without decreasing its high production rate. This can make the proposed modified method a promising... 

Although the application of nonlinear tools including recurrence quantification analysis (RQA) has increasingly grown in the recent years especially in balance-disordered populations, there have been few studies which determine their measurement properties. Therefore, a methodological study was performed to estimate the intersession and intrasession reliability of some dynamic features provided by RQA for nonlinear analysis of center of pressure (COP) signals recorded during quiet standing in a sample of patients with musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs) including low back pain (LBP), anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injury and functional ankle instability (FAI). The subjects completed postural... 

Objective: To translate the Foot and Ankle Ability Measure (FAAM) into Persian and to evaluate the psychometric properties of the Persian version of FAAM. Methods: 93 patients with a range of foot and ankle disorders, completed the Persian version of the FAAM and Short-Form 36 Health Survey (SF-36) in the test session. With an interval of 2-6 days, 60 patients filled out the FAAM in the retest session. The FAAM is composed of two subscales including activities of daily living (ADL) and SPORTS. Internal consistency was assessed using Cronbach's alpha, test-retest reliability using intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) and standard error of measurement (s.e.m.), item internal consistency... 

A carbon paste electrode (CPE) chemically modified with TiO2 nanoparticles and quinizarine (QZ) was used as a selective electrochemical sensor for the simultaneous determination of minor amounts of d-penicillamine (D-PA) and tryptophan (Trp). This modified electrode showed very efficient electrocatalytic activity for anodic oxidation of both d-PA and Trp. Substantial decreases of anodic overpotentials for both compounds made this analysis possible. Results of square wave voltammetry (SWV) using this modified electrode showed two well-resolved anodic waves for the oxidation of d-PA and Trp, which makes the simultaneous determination of both compounds possible. The peak potential for the... 

Artifact removal is an essential part in electroencephalogram (EEG) recording and the raw EEG signals require preprocessing before feature extraction. In this work, we implemented three filtering methods and demonstrated their effects on the performance of different classifiers. Bandpass digital filtering, median filtering and facet method are three preprocessing approaches investigated in this paper. We used data set lib from the BCI competition 2003 for training and testing phase. Our accuracy varied between 80% and 96%. In our work, we demonstrated that the problems of choosing the classifier and preprocessing methods are not independent of each other. Two of our approaches could achieve... 

In this paper, the performance of five classifiers in P300 speller paradigm are compared. Theses classifiers are Linear Support Vector Machine (LSVM), Gaussian Support Vector Machine (RSVM), Neural Network (NN), Fisher Linear Discriminant (FLD), and Kernel Fisher Discriminant (KFD). In classification of P300 waves, there has been a trend to use SVM classifiers. Although they have shown a good performance, in this paper, it is shown that the FLD classifiers outperform the SVM classifiers. FLD classifier uses only ten channels of the recorded electroencephalogram (EEG) signals. This makes them a very good candidate for real-time applications. In addition, FLD approach does not need any... 

Introduction - Recently, there have been growing attention on the modification and optimisation of new extraction and quantification methods, caused by the lack of environmentally friendly methodologies for the extraction of phytochemicals from complex matrices. In the case of pharmaceutical compounds, not only the extraction procedure but also the analysis method should be efficient, precise, fast and easy.Objectives - The essential pharmaceutical characteristics and trace concentration of withanolides led us to modify and optimise the previously reported extraction and quantification procedure for withaferin A (WA) as a candidate for withanolides.Matrial and methods - The WA from the... 

This paper reports a simple, low-cost, and effective electrochemical technique for sensing and reducing CrVI based on a Au-Pd bimetallic nanoparticle (BNP)-decorated indium tin oxide (ITO) conducting glass electrode. It was observed that the Au-Pd BNP-decorated ITO electrode could significantly boost the electrochemical reduction of CrVI when compared with either Au nanoparticle- or Pd nanoparticle-decorated ITO electrodes. These BNP-decorated electrodes exhibited a wide linear concentration range of 0.001-100 μM, a very low detection limit (signal-to-noise ratio = 3) of 0.3 nM, and a high sensitivity of 1.701 μA μM-1. From electrochemical impedance spectroscopy, it was revealed that this... 

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... 

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... 

Gradient reproducing kernel particle method (GRKPM) is a meshless technique which incorporates the first gradients of the function into the reproducing equation of RKPM. Therefore, in two-dimensional space GRKPM introduces three types of shape functions rather than one. The robustness of GRKPM's shape functions is established by reconstruction of a third-order polynomial. To enforce the essential boundary conditions (EBCs), GRKPM's shape functions are modified by transformation technique. By utilizing the modified shape functions, the weak form of the nonlinear evolutionary Buckley-Leverett (BL) equation is discretized in space, rendering a system of nonlinear ordinary differential equations... 

Objectives: Detecting caries lesions is challenging for dentists, and deep learning models may help practitioners to increase accuracy and reliability. We aimed to systematically review deep learning studies on caries detection. Data: We selected diagnostic accuracy studies that used deep learning models on dental imagery (including radiographs, photographs, optical coherence tomography images, near-infrared light transillumination images). The latest version of the quality assessment tool for diagnostic accuracy studies (QUADAS-2) tool was used for risk of bias assessment. Meta-analysis was not performed due to heterogeneity in the studies methods and their performance measurements....