The availability of cheap electricity is one of the biggest factors for improving quality of life. The push for large-scale renewable sources of energy has met problems with regards to energy storage and availability. The proposed coal, wind, and nuclear hybrid energy system would combine a renewable energy source, wind, with the traditional and stable energy sources coal and nuclear to create an integrated, resilient, and sustainable system. A next generation small modular nuclear reactor is considered together with a pressurized circulating fluidized bed coal combustion system which also utilizes biomass as a feedstock. This system employs a coelectrolysis unit for utilization of carbon dioxide as a feedstock for the production of synthetic gas and subsequently fuels and chemicals. A techno-economic analysis of the proposed system was performed along with a thermodynamic analysis of overall efficiency and sustainability.

Background. In dermoscopic images, multiple shades of pink have been described in melanoma without specifying location of these areas within the lesion. Objective. The purpose of this study was to determine the statistics for the presence of centrally and peripherally located pink melanoma and benign melanocytic lesions. Methods. Three observers, untrained in dermoscopy, each retrospectively analyzed 1290 dermoscopic images (296 melanomas (170 in situ and 126 invasive), 994 benign melanocytic nevi) and assessed the presence of any shade of pink in the center and periphery of the lesion. Results. Pink was located in the peripheral region in 14.5% of melanomas and 6.3% of benign melanocytic lesions, yielding an odds ratio of 2.51 (95% CI: 1.7–3.8, P < 0.0001). Central pink was located in 12.8% of melanomas and 21.8% of benign lesions, yielding an odds ratio of 0.462 (95% CI: 0.67, P = 0.204). Pink in melanoma in situ tended to be present throughout the lesion (68% of pink lesions). Pink in invasive melanoma was present in 17% of cases, often presenting as a pink rim. Conclusions. The presence of pink in the periphery or rim of a dermoscopic melanocytic lesion image provides an indication of malignancy. We offer the “pink rim sign” as a clue to the dermoscopic diagnosis of invasive melanoma.

Detection of melanoma remains an empirical clinical science. New tools for automatic discrimination of melanoma from benign lesions in digitized dermoscopy images may allow an improvement in early detection of melanoma. This research implements a fast version of the median split algorithm in an open source format and applied to four-color splitting of the lesion area to capture the architectural disorder apparent in melanoma colors. Our version of the median split algorithm splits colors along the color axis with maximum Range. For a set of 888 dermoscopy images, the best model for discrimination produces an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.821. Logistic regression analysis of 242 parameter variables obtained from 888 images shows that the most important features in the final model, measured by Wald Chi-square significance, are the lengths of two peripheral inter-color boundaries and one measure of boundary overlay by different colors. The median split algorithm is fast, requiring less than one second per image and only a four-color splitting, but it captures sufficient critical information regarding color disorder, with peripheral inter-color boundaries showing the highest significance for melanoma discrimination.