No abstract

The luminescent properties of divalent europium ions can be exploited to produce storage phosphors for x-ray imaging applications. The relatively high cost and limited availability of divalent europium halides makes it desirable to synthesize them from the readily available trivalent salts. In this work, samples of pure EuCl3 and fluoride glass melts doped with EuCl3 were processed at 700-800 °C in an inert atmosphere furnace. The Eu oxidation state in the resulting materials was determined using fluorescence and Mössbauer spectroscopy. Heat treatment of pure EuCl3 for 10 minutes at 710 °C resulted in a material comprising approximately equal amounts of Eu2+ and Eu3+. Glasses made using mixtures of EuCl2 and EuCl3 in the starting material contained both oxidation states. This paper describes the sample preparation and analysis and discusses the results in the context of chemical equilibria in the melts.

Dental caries has been considered the heaviest worldwide oral health burden affecting a significant proportion of the population. To prevent dental caries, an appropriate and accurate early detection method is demanded. This proof-of-concept study aims to develop a two-stage computational system that can detect early occlusal caries from smartphone color images of unrestored extracted teeth according to modified International Caries Detection and Assessment System (ICDAS) criteria (3 classes: Code 0; Code 1-2; Code 3-6): in the first stage, carious lesion areas were identified and extracted from sound tooth regions. Then, five characteristic features of these areas were intendedly selected and calculated to be inputted into the classification stage, where five classifiers (Support Vector Machine, Random Forests, K-Nearest Neighbors, Gradient Boosted Tree, Logistic Regression) were evaluated to determine the best one among them. On a set of 587 smartphone images of extracted teeth, our system achieved accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity that were 87.39%, 89.88%, and 68.86% in the detection stage when compared to modified visual and image-based ICDAS criteria. For the classification stage, the Support Vector Machine model was recorded as the best model with accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity at 88.76%, 92.31%, and 85.21%. As the first step in developing the technology, our present findings confirm the feasibility of using smartphone color images to employ Artificial Intelligence algorithms in caries detection. To improve the performance of the proposed system, there is a need for further development in both in vitro and in vivo modeling. Besides that, an applicable system for accurately taking intra-oral images that can capture entire dental arches including the occlusal surfaces of premolars and molars also needs to be developed.

Cellular magnetic domain patterns in magnetic garnet films are an example of a spatially-extended metastable system whose evolution is limited by topological constraints. For sufficiently large applied magnetic fields, the entire pattern is under tension and can respond to local perturbations via large collective motions. In this regime disordered cellular patterns respond to small increases in applied field or to manual cell breakage via avalanches of sequential cell destruction which sweep through the pattern via the motion of cell walls. After one avalanche has stopped another can be started by a small increase in field or by another manual cell breakage; the system thus tends to self-organize into barely stable states. The measured distributions of avalanche size and duration are best fit by power laws. These features suggest that cellular avalanches may be an example of self-organized criticality.

Influence of Al-concentration on structure, magnetic properties and magnetocaloric effect of ( and 8) rapidly quenched ribbons was investigated. X-ray diffraction analysis shows that the ribbons exhibit single phase with a -cubic structure. Curie temperature, , of the alloy is slightly increased with increasing Al-concentration. Specially, the sample with has both the first- (FOPT) and second- (SOPT) order magnetic phase transitions. The reason for the FOPT in the alloy ribbons is due to existence of the structural transformation between martensitic and austenitic phases. The alloy owns both the positive and negative magnetocaloric effects with maximum magnetic entropy changes of and (in magnetic field change ), respectively. By using Arrott-Noakes and Kouvel-Fisher methods, the critical parameters of the alloy were determined to be close to those of the mean field theory of long-range ferromagnetic orders.