Objectives: Recently, there have been important advances in the clinical application of targeted hybrid near-infrared (NIR) fluorescent-radioactive tracers. ICG-99mTc-nanocolloid, for example, is already being used by some centres for sentinel lymph node biopsy in head and neck cancer. The radioactive component allows imaging at depths which would not be possible with NIR alone and, once exposed, the NIR fluorescence reporter can be imaged at very high resolution. Gamma detection is currently carried out with a separate hand-held gamma camera or with a non-imaging probe. Visualisation of NIR fluorescence during surgery requires a dedicated NIR camera, several of which are available commercially. We describe a novel hand-held hybrid NIR-gamma small field of view camera, capable of displaying co-aligned images from both modalities, which can be fused into one image or viewed separately. This study is a preliminary investigation of the performance of the fluorescence component of this camera, including phantom studies and first images from a preclinical pilot study. Methods: The hybrid camera consists of a 1500 µm thick thallium doped caesium iodide columnar (CsI:Tl) scintillator coupled to an electron multiplying charged coupled device (EMCCD). A 1.0mm diameter tungsten pinhole collimator gives a 40mm x 40mm nominal field of view for an 8mm x 8mm CCD detection area. A fluorescence camera was aligned to provide the same field of view as the gamma camera with an LED ring as the excitation source. The performance of the fluorescence imaging was quantified in this study for the fluorophores ICG and IRDye800CW (CW800) using a range of bespoke phantom experiments. In vivo images were also obtained from a preclinical study of a targeted hybrid tracer (cRGD-CW800-TCO + TCO-DOTA-111In) in mice with HT29 colorectal cancer xenografts. RESULTS AND CONCLUSION: The portable hybrid camera prototype has been shown to successfully image dual NIR-gamma tracers using both in vitro and in vivo experimental models. With further development, this camera could be used intraoperatively, offering the benefits of gamma imaging at depth in tissues and high resolution surface NIR fluorescence imaging in a single imaging system.
Nanomaterials have an excellent potential for improving the rheological and tribological properties of lubricating oil. In this study, oleic acid was used to surface-modify nanoparticles to enhance the dispersion and stability of Nanofluid. The surface modification was conducted for inorganic nanoparticles (NPs) TiO₂ and CuO with oleic acid (OA) surfactant, where oleic acid could render the surface of TiO2-CuO hydrophobic. Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), and Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) were used to characterize the surface modification of NPs. The main objective of this study was to investigate the influence of adding modified TiO₂-CuO NPs with weight ratio 1:1 on thermal-physical propertie
... Show MoreIn this paper, two new simple, fast and efficient block matching algorithms are introduced, both methods begins blocks matching process from the image center block and moves across the blocks toward image boundaries. With each block, its motion vector is initialized using linear prediction that depending on the motion vectors of its neighbor blocks that are already scanned and their motion vectors are assessed. Also, a hybrid mechanism is introduced, it depends on mixing the proposed two predictive mechanisms with Exhaustive Search (ES) mechanism in order to gain matching accuracy near or similar to ES but with Search Time ST less than 80% of the ES. Also, it offers more control capability to reduce the search errors. The experimental tests
... Show MoreIn modern era, which requires the use of networks in the transmission of data across distances, the transport or storage of such data is required to be safe. The protection methods are developed to ensure data security. New schemes are proposed that merge crypto graphical principles with other systems to enhance information security. Chaos maps are one of interesting systems which are merged with cryptography for better encryption performance. Biometrics is considered an effective element in many access security systems. In this paper, two systems which are fingerprint biometrics and chaos logistic map are combined in the encryption of a text message to produce strong cipher that can withstand many types of attacks. The histogram analysis o
... Show MoreImage quality plays a vital role in improving and assessing image compression performance. Image compression represents big image data to a new image with a smaller size suitable for storage and transmission. This paper aims to evaluate the implementation of the hybrid techniques-based tensor product mixed transform. Compression and quality metrics such as compression-ratio (CR), rate-distortion (RD), peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), and Structural Content (SC) are utilized for evaluating the hybrid techniques. Then, a comparison between techniques is achieved according to these metrics to estimate the best technique. The main contribution is to improve the hybrid techniques. The proposed hybrid techniques are consisting of discrete wavel
... Show MoreCloud computing provides huge amount of area for storage of the data, but with an increase of number of users and size of their data, cloud storage environment faces earnest problem such as saving storage space, managing this large data, security and privacy of data. To save space in cloud storage one of the important methods is data deduplication, it is one of the compression technique that allows only one copy of the data to be saved and eliminate the extra copies. To offer security and privacy of the sensitive data while supporting the deduplication, In this work attacks that exploit the hybrid cloud deduplication have been identified, allowing an attacker to gain access to the files of other users based on very small hash signatures of
... Show MoreIn the present work a comparative study for thermal and electrical performance of different hybrid photovoltaic/thermal collectors designs for Iraq climate conditions have been carried out. Four different types of air based hybrid PV/T collectors have been manufactured and tested. Three collectors consist of four main parts namely, channel duct, glass cover, axial fan to circulate air and two PV panels in parallel connection. The measured parameters are, the temperature of the upper and the lower surfaces of the PV panels, air temperature along the collector, air flow rate, pressure drop, power produced by solar cell, and climate conditions such as wind speed, solar radiation and ambient temperature. The thermal and hydraulic performances o
... Show MoreThe spectral response of the Si solar cell does not coincidence with the sun irradiance spectrum, so the efficiency of the Si solar cell is not high. To improve the Si solar cell one try to make use of most region of the sun spectrum by using dyes which absorb un useful wavelengths and radiate at useful region of spectrum (by stock shift). Fluorescence's dye is used as luminescent concentrator to increase the efficiency of the solar cell. The results show that the performance efficiency and out power for crystalline silicon solar cells are improved.
Due to the high mobility and dynamic topology of the FANET network, maintaining communication links between UAVs is a challenging task. The topology of these networks is more dynamic than traditional mobile networks, which raises challenges for the routing protocol. The existing routing protocols for these networks partly fail to detect network topology changes. Few methods have recently been proposed to overcome this problem due to the rapid changes of network topology. We try to solve this problem by designing a new dynamic routing method for a group of UAVs using Hybrid SDN technology (SDN and a distributed routing protocol) with a highly dynamic topology. Comparison of the proposed method performance and two other algorithms is simula
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