Sharif Digital Repository

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... 

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... 

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... 

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... 

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... 

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,... 

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... 

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... 

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... 

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... 

Investigation of response of reinforced concrete (RC) structures due to axisymmetric macrocell corrosion of rebars is of concern after propagation of microcracks within the concrete medium. The geometry, boundary and interfaces conditions of the present problem are identical to those stated in part I. As seen in the companion paper, the exact solution to the boundary value problem corresponding to the uncracked steel-rust-concrete composite was possible. After appearance of the microcracks the concrete behavior becomes nonlinear anisotropic with post-cracking softening, and the associated problem is analytically intractable. Therefore, it is proposed to employ a novel meshless method, namely... 

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... 

As benign tumors, warts are made through the mediation of Human Papillomavirus (HPV) and may grow on all parts of body, especially hands and feet. There are several treatment methods for this illness. However, none of them can heal all patients. Consequently, physicians are looking for more effective and customized treatments for each patient. They are endeavoring to discover which treatments have better impacts on a particular patient. The aim of this study is to identify the appropriate treatment for two common types of warts (plantar and common) and to predict the responses of two of the best methods (immunotherapy and cryotherapy) to the treatment. As an original work, the study was... 

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.... 

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... 

In recent years, electromyogram signal (EMG) feature selection, based on wavelet transform, has received considerable attention. This study introduces a new multiwavelet function for surface EMG (sEMG) signal intended for tasks that involve hand movement recognition. To create the new wavelet function, several types of well known mother wavelet were exploited and through their integration the proposed mother wavelet was generated. The proposed wavelet function closely reproduced the characteristics of the EMG signal, while increasing the recognition accuracy of hand movements. We used eight unique classes of hand motions and considered the ability of various mother wavelets and the proposed... 

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,...