Background: Though prediction of protein secondary structures has been an active research issue in bioinformatics for quite a few years and many approaches have been proposed, a new challenge emerges as the sizes of contemporary protein structure databases continue to grow rapidly. The new challenge concerns how we can effectively exploit all the information implicitly deposited in the protein structure databases and deliver ever-improving prediction accuracy as the databases expand rapidly.

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In this study, we develop a method to analyze traveling waves generated by two bending modes of a two-dimensional piezoelectric actuator. This actuator has a composite structure constructed by a stainless-steel plate and piezoelectric PZT sheets. A developed analytical model analyzed the characteristics and efficiency of the traveling waves generated by the superposition of different bending modes. Using the multi-integer frequency, two-mode (MIF-TM) driving method, a steady traveling wave can be generated using two driving frequencies with an integer multiple relationships and near two bending modes. The optimization of the driving parameters is conducted by developing a cost function using the Hilbert transform, in which the driving voltages and the phase difference between the two driving frequencies are used. Finally, this analysis method is verified by using the finite element method.

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This article takes account of the radiation feature of rivers in high-resolution airborne Xband synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images and proposes a novel automatic approach to detect highway bridges by combining statistical and topology features. The proposed method consists of two steps. In the river-extraction stage, the classification techniques are applied to water extraction according to the statistical and gray-leveled features. In the bridge-extraction stage, bridges are then detected in this binary image by using a topology-based approach. Experiments, undertaken on high-resolution X-band SAR images, confirm that the proposed method can be implemented with high-precision highway-bridge extraction, feature analysis, and bridge recognition.