No abstract

Liposomes are one of the most attractive particles in different industries, especially pharmaceutical applications. The main reasons for such a desire for liposomes are non-toxicity, small size, the ability to encapsulate and carry biological components, and finally biocompatibility and biodegradability. The present study aims to simulate the active electrohydrodynamic-based micromixer for the high-throughput formation of nanoscale liposomes. The micromixer consists of two inlets for DI water and one inlet for ethanol with lipid particles. Two configurations of asymmetric electrodes namely longitudinal and the array of electrodes were introduced and examined. Electrodes were placed at the bottom of the mixer and a DC electrical field was applied to them. Generated chaotic advection inside the microchannel by the electrical field and consequently increasing surface-to-volume ratio is the main reason for the increase in the formation of liposomes. These configurations of electrodes cause liposome formation occurs at very low voltages which is the most advantage of the proposed micromixer. The Taguchi method as a statistical method of design of experiment (DOE) was utilized to reduce the number of required simulations. The simulations showed that case 6 had the best mixing index of 58.6% among the studied models. Also, according to the DOE results, the best possible design was found and simulated and a mixing index of 74.3% which has a 5.3% error in comparison to the predicted results.

Wireless capsule endoscopy (WCE) is a new noninvasive instrument which allows direct observation of the gastrointestinal tract to diagnose its relative diseases. Because of the large number of images obtained from the capsule endoscopy per patient, doctors need too much time to investigate all of them. So, it would be worthwhile to design a system for detecting diseases automatically. In this paper, a new method is presented for automatic detection of tumors in the WCE images. This method will utilize the advantages of the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) and singular value decomposition (SVD) algorithms to extract features from different color channels of the WCE images. Therefore, the extracted features are invariant to rotation and can describe multiresolution characteristics of the WCE images. In order to classify the WCE images, the support vector machine (SVM) method is applied to a data set which includes 400 normal and 400 tumor WCE images. The experimental results show proper performance of the proposed algorithm for detection and isolation of the tumor images which, in the best way, shows 94%, 93%, and 93.5% of sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy in the RGB color space, respectively.

In robotics research, catching a projectile object with a robotic system is one of the challenging problems. The outcome of these researches can be used in a wide range of applications such as video surveillance systems, analysis of sports videos, monitoring programs for human activities, and human-machine interactions. In this paper, we propose a new vision-based algorithm to estimate the trajectory of a projectile, which estimates the time and the position of the projectile's collision with the robot's working space in real-time. We use sub-pixel calculations and present an improved algorithm for estimating the center of the ball. We evaluate the performance of different trajectory estimation algorithms and also provide a real-time hardware implementation of our method on a designed robot. Moreover, the combination of single-camera and gyroscope information is studied in this paper. The results show that the proposed algorithm is capable of correctly estimating the ball's trajectory and has a very good performance against the noise.

Camera full pose estimation using only a monocular camera model is an important topic in the field of visual servoing. In this paper a simple adaptive method for updating the weights of particle filter is proposed. Using this method, the efficiency of particle filter in estimating the full pose of camera is improved. Results of the proposed method are compared with those of generic particle filter (PF) and EKF under the same condition through an intensive computer simulation.