Full Research Paper
Biomechanics of Bone / Bone Biomechanics
Masume Khaghani; Zahra Golniya; Ali Doostmohammadi
Volume 6, Issue 1 , June 2012, Pages 1-7
Abstract
The aim of this work was evaluating of zirconia nanoparticles’ effect on physical and mechanical properties of dental glass ionomer cements (GICs). Ceramic part of GIC was prepared using melting method and zirconia nanoparticles were added to GIC in 1, 3 and 5 weight percent. Characterization tests ...
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The aim of this work was evaluating of zirconia nanoparticles’ effect on physical and mechanical properties of dental glass ionomer cements (GICs). Ceramic part of GIC was prepared using melting method and zirconia nanoparticles were added to GIC in 1, 3 and 5 weight percent. Characterization tests and compressive strength evaluation of nanocomposite samples were carried out. The XRD results showed that the prepared ceramic part of GIC was completely amorphous and can be used as the matrix of composite. The result of XRF showed that the chemical composition of ceramic part of GIC was similar to expected composition. Also the results of mechanical properties determination analysis showed that the addition of zirconia nanoparticles to GIC could improve the compressive strength. The maximum of this strength obtained using 1% wt of GIC in zirconia composite. Increasing the nanoparticles content resulted in decrease of compressive strength but the strength of composite with any composition was more than the strength of control sample. According to the results of this study, the most proper composite was the one containing1%wt zirconia nanoparticles.
Full Research Paper
Vida Khalili; Jafar Khalil Allafi; Hosein Maleki Ghaleh
Volume 6, Issue 1 , June 2012, Pages 9-15
Abstract
NiTi shape memory alloy cannot provide all the clinical requirements of an implant due to the high nickel content and bio-inert surface. Thus, its surface is coated by bio-ceramics such as hydroxyapatite (HA) in different methods in order to improve biocompatibility and bioactivity. In the present ...
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NiTi shape memory alloy cannot provide all the clinical requirements of an implant due to the high nickel content and bio-inert surface. Thus, its surface is coated by bio-ceramics such as hydroxyapatite (HA) in different methods in order to improve biocompatibility and bioactivity. In the present study, a bio-active coating of HA using electrophoretic deposition technique was created on the surface of NiTi alloy to act as a barrier and prevent the diffusion of nickel ions in to the body fluid. A suspension was prepared by n-butanol as solvent and triethylenamine as dispersant. Coatings were deposited at different voltage of 40, 60 and 80 V for duration of 120s on the cathode. Then coated samples were sintered at 800 °C under argon atmosphere for 2 hrs. Evaluation of coatings was performed by X-ray diffraction techniques (XRD), scanning electron microscope (SEM) and energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDX). Bioactivity and corrosion behavior of HA coatings was studied within simulated body fluid (SBF) environment. The results showed, the sample coated at 60 V is dense, uniform, owing proper corrosion resistant, and also the ability for nucleation and growth of apatite layer in SBF.
Full Research Paper
Speech processing
Yaser Shekofteh; Farshad Almasganj
Volume 6, Issue 1 , June 2012, Pages 17-33
Abstract
Recent researches show that nonlinear and chaotic behavior of the speech signal can be studied in the reconstructed phase space (RPS). Delay embedding theorem is a useful tool to study embedded speech trajectories in the RPS. Characteristics of the speech trajectories have rarely used in the practical ...
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Recent researches show that nonlinear and chaotic behavior of the speech signal can be studied in the reconstructed phase space (RPS). Delay embedding theorem is a useful tool to study embedded speech trajectories in the RPS. Characteristics of the speech trajectories have rarely used in the practical speech recognition systems. Therefore, in this paper, a new feature extraction (FE) method is proposed based on parameters of vector AR (VAR) analysis over the speech trajectories. In this method, using filter and reflection matrices obtained from applying VAR analysis on static and dynamic information of the speech trajectory in the RPS, a high-dimensional feature vector can be achieved. Then, different transformation methods are utilized to attain final feature vectors with appropriate dimension. Results of discrete and continuous phoneme recognition over FARSDAT speech corpus show that the efficiency of the proposed FE method is better than other time-domain-based FE methods such as LPC and LPREF.
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Biomedical Signal Processing / Medical Signal Processing / Biosignal Processing
Mohammad Shahab Shahvazian; Vahid Abootalebi; Mohammad Taghi Sadeghi
Volume 6, Issue 1 , June 2012, Pages 35-47
Abstract
With the advent of biometric knowledge, conventional methods of authentication are being replaced with biometric based methods. Recently, the use of EEG signal in biometric systems attracted increasing research attention. Only a few works have been done in this emerging of EEG-based biometry mainly focusing ...
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With the advent of biometric knowledge, conventional methods of authentication are being replaced with biometric based methods. Recently, the use of EEG signal in biometric systems attracted increasing research attention. Only a few works have been done in this emerging of EEG-based biometry mainly focusing on person identification not on person authentication. This paper examines the effectiveness of the EEG as a biometric for person authentication. In this study, the EEG signal from fifteen volunteer recorded during imagination of opening and closing fist was used. A set of AR coefficients, power of spectral bands, Energy Spectral Density, Energy Entropy and Sample Entropy were used as extracted features. The authentication system is fused at the sensor module and features to support a system which can meet more challenging and varying requirements. The utility of the sequential search methods is also experimentally studied. In the extensive experimentation on the Shalk and his colleague’s database, we demonstrate that with combination of features when using single channel EEG, the performance of system is improved in two ways of single block and multi block methods compared to other. Result of this study shows a clear vision of commercial and practical use of the brain's electrical signals in the authentication systems of future.
Full Research Paper
Biomechanics of Bone / Bone Biomechanics
Sara Sadat Farshidfar; Mohammad Reza Mallakzadeh; Hamid Reza Yazdi
Volume 6, Issue 1 , June 2012, Pages 49-55
Abstract
The aim of this study was to compare the contact area and pressure within medial and lateral compartments of tibiofemoral joint during internal and external rotational deformities of tibia bone. Methods: five lower extremities of fresh frozen human cadavers were tested by using a mechanical system was ...
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The aim of this study was to compare the contact area and pressure within medial and lateral compartments of tibiofemoral joint during internal and external rotational deformities of tibia bone. Methods: five lower extremities of fresh frozen human cadavers were tested by using a mechanical system was designed for the first time in IRAN to simulate the static position loading of standing on two legs in full extension knee under 400N loading along the longitudinal axis of each foot. The contact area and pressure were measured by FUJIfilm Prescale films under axial loading in neutral rotation and serial mal-rotations of tibia from 40 degrees external to 40 degrees internal mal-rotations in 10 degrees increments by tibial osteotomy. Results: contact area and lateral compartment contact pressure was not significantly affected by mal-rotations. Medial compartment contact pressure increased with external and decreased with internal mal-rotations. Changing the medial compartment contact pressure of tibiofemoral joint in various rotational alignments of tibia can be very effective in rapid growth of knee osteoarthritis symptoms specially in people with unilateral medial knee osteoarthritis.
Full Research Paper
Biomedical Signal Processing / Medical Signal Processing / Biosignal Processing
Ali Khadem; Gholam Ali Hossein-Zadeh
Volume 6, Issue 1 , June 2012, Pages 57-69
Abstract
Exploring the causal (delayed) brain relations is an important topic in the Neuroscience. The traditional estimators of brain causal (delayed) relations are mainly model-based and put restrictive assumptions on the brain dynamics. In the recent years, some nonparametric measures have been introduced ...
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Exploring the causal (delayed) brain relations is an important topic in the Neuroscience. The traditional estimators of brain causal (delayed) relations are mainly model-based and put restrictive assumptions on the brain dynamics. In the recent years, some nonparametric measures have been introduced to solve this problem. Among them, the most important one is Transfer Entropy (TE) which is based on the information theory and Conditional Mutual Information concept. However, in the presence of significant instantaneous relations that are observed extensively in the brain functional datasets, TE may estimate the causal (delayed) relations inaccurately. In this paper, two information theoretic based measures called Instantaneous Interaction (II) and Modified Transfer entropy (MTE) are introduced to estimate the instantaneous and causal (delayed) brain relations, respectively. MTE is used instead of TE whenever II is significant. These measures are evaluated on 3 simulated models and eyes-closed resting state EEG data. The simulation results show high ability of II to estimate the linear and nonlinear instantaneous relations. Also, based on the simulation results MTE outperforms TE to estimate causal (delayed) relations in presence of significant instantaneous relations (significant II). For the real EEG data, II detects a significant instantaneous relation between Posterior and Frontal EEG channels. Also MTE detects the information flow from Posterior EEG channels to Frontal ones more significantly than TE does. So in presence of significant instantaneous relations in the real EEG data, MTE outperforms TE.
Full Research Paper
Fluid-Structure Interaction in Biological Media / FSI
Saeed Nahidi; Alireza Hossein-Nezhad; Nasser Fatouraee; Zahra Heidari
Volume 6, Issue 1 , June 2012, Pages 71-79
Abstract
Hemodynamic parameters are always affected by stenosis severity of arterial and these parameters in their turn have influence on the development of atherosclerosis. In this paper, By considering three different stenosis severity, the effects of wall porosity assumption on the hemodynamic parameters of ...
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Hemodynamic parameters are always affected by stenosis severity of arterial and these parameters in their turn have influence on the development of atherosclerosis. In this paper, By considering three different stenosis severity, the effects of wall porosity assumption on the hemodynamic parameters of a stenosed artery with a two-layer flexible wall (intima-media, adventitia), in which inner layer (intima-media) assumed porous, is numerically investigated, using Porous Fluid Structure Interaction (PFSI) model. Blood is assumed as an incompressible non-Newtonian fluid with pulsatile flow condition. In this investigation, the results show that the permeability assumption has much influenced on the hemodynamic characteristics so that the comparison of the results using PFSI with those of a non-porous model show 6% decrease in shear stress, 30% increase in displacement and more than 72% increase in effective stress in the porous layer.
