Development of a Method for Measuring the Ozone Concentration in the Atmosphere Using Passive Method
1. Introduction Passive method is widely used for measuring air pollutant for one day to several weeks. This method can be used easily and doesn’t need electricity, but expensive devices are needed for measuring substances, so this is not suitable for high school students for measuring or investigating. Then, we focused on the reaction, in which Indigo, the blue pigment, is discolored by ozone, and we built up a hypothesis, that indigo is suitable for measuring ozone concentration. 2. Experimental Section We soaked a 10 mm×20 mm filter paper in an indigo solution, including hosphoric acid. Then, they were dried in an automatic oven. 5.5 cm×10 cm PTFE sheet was fold in two and five sheets of indigo filters were fixed inside (passive sampler). The passive samplers were fixed on a stand and exposed to ozone in the atmosphere. After a few days, we collected the samplers and put each indigo filter and 4.0 mL of ion-exchange water into sample tubes. Then we shook this and extracted the color pigment. We had the average value of 600 nm from the five sheets as a measure value. 3. Results and Discussion The total amount of ozone for one to seven days measured in the experiment was directly proportional to the amount of ozone measured by Osaka Prefecture. We found that we can measure ozone in atmosphere using our method. Passive method has an advantage: it can be carried out easily. We employed this trait and measured ozone concentration at 23 points simultaneously in the north of Osaka for 48 hours. We made the map of ozone concentration by marking on a blank map. The map we made was just like the map published by Osaka Prefecture. We expect that this method will be useful in measuring ozone, where measuring devices are not available. 4. Conclusion We succeeded developing new method for measuring ozone in the atmosphere by passive method using indigo, the blue pigment.
IlluminaMed: Developing Novel Artificial Intelligence Techniques for the Use In a Biomedical Image Analysis Toolkit and Personalized Medicine Engine
Despite the multitude of biomedical scans conducted, there is still relatively low accuracy and standardization of diagnoses from these images. In both the fields of computer science and medicine there is very strong interest in developing personalized treatment policies for patients who have variable responses to treatments. The aim of my research was automatic segmentation of brain MRI scans to better analyze patients with tumors, multiple sclerosis, ALS, or Alzheimer’s. In particular, I aim to use this information, along with novel artificial intelligence algorithms, to find an optimal personalized treatment policy which is a non-deterministic function of the patient specific covariate data that maximizes the expected survival time or clinical outcome. The result of the research was IlluminaMed, a biomedical image analysis toolkit that relies on the development of new artificial neural networks and training algorithms and novel research in fuzzy logic. The networks can detect patterns more complex than humans can identify and create patterns over long periods of time. IlluminaMed was trained by a dataset of professionally and manually segmented MRI scans from several prestigious hospitals and universities. I then developed an algorithmic framework to solve multistage decision problem with a varying number of stages that are subject to censoring in which the “rewards” are expected survival times. In specific, I developed a novel Q-learning algorithm that dynamically adjusts for these parameters. Furthermore, I found finite upper bounds on the generalized error of the treatment paths constructed by this algorithm. I have also shown that when the optimal Q-function is an element of the approximation space, the anticipated survival times for the treatment regime constructed by the algorithm will converge to the optimal treatment path. I demonstrated the performance of the proposed algorithmic framework via simulation studies and through the analysis of chronic depression data and a hypothetical clinical trial. IlluminaMed can automatically segment the scans with 98% accuracy, find tumors with 96% accuracy and approximate their volume within a 2% margin of error. It can also find lesions in MS and ALS, distinguishing them from tumors with 94% accuracy. IlluminaMed can, in addition, determine the tendency of a patient to develop Alzheimer’s several months before patients develop symptoms correlating the brain structure and its fluctuations. Lastly, the censored Q-learning algorithm I developed is more effective than the state of the art clinical decision support systems and is able to operate in environments when many covariate parameters may be unobtainable or censored. IlluminaMed is the only fully automatic biomedical image analysis toolkit and personalized medicine engine. The personalized medicine engine runs at a level that is comparable to the best physicians. It is less computationally complex than similar software and is unique in the fact that it can find new patterns in the brain with possible future diagnoses. IlluminaMed’s implications are not only great in terms of the biomedical field, but also in the field of artificial intelligence with new findings in neural networks and the relationships of fuzzy extensional subsets.
New Screening Method for Early Pediatric Cancer Detection Through Automated Handwriting Analysis
Pediatric cancer has an incidence rate of more than 175,000 per year with a mortality rate of approximately 96,000 per year. One major cause of this problem is late diagnosis. A novel promising way of pediatric cancer screening is handwriting analysis. This method surpasses other methods by detecting pediatric cancer in a very early stage. However, studies are still limited to manual analysis which needs an expert and a long period of time. The aim of this project is to design a computer program to extract handwriting features and build a classification model to classify the user as patient or as control. Dataset was collected from schools and hospitals where all participants could read and write in English. After data cleansing, number of samples was 440 samples. MATLAB (Matrix Laboratory) program was used for extracting geometric features in handwriting. Program was validated using a subset of 50 samples of the dataset. WEKA Package was used to test and build the classifier. Experiments were done using classifiers: Logistic, Multilayer Perceptron, J48, LibSVM, AdaBoostM1 and Naïve Bayes. Best subset of attributes was evaluated and used for each classifier and all calculations were done as the average of cross validation operations of several folds assignments. Best performance was achieved by Logistic classifier with average accuracy of 80.15%, standard deviation of 0.43% and Matthews's correlation coefficient of 0.59. Finally, this project presents a new fast, free, ready, easy and psychologically comfortable method for pediatric cancer detection while keeping suitable accuracy for mass screening.
聚乳酸/天然纖維複合材料之研究-探討加入玉米葉纖維對機械性質之影響
本研究以玉米葉纖維做為聚乳酸纖維的補強材料,並以加入的玉米葉纖維長度為操縱變因,探討其對聚乳酸/玉米葉纖維複合材料機械性質的影響。實驗設計以純聚乳酸為對照組,以加入1mm, 2mm, 5mm, 13mm玉米葉纖維的聚乳酸複合材料為實驗組。本研究以拉伸強度和耐衝擊值來判斷機械性質的強度。 實驗數據顯示,實驗組的拉伸強度與對照組差距不大,但在耐衝擊值卻比對照組高出許多。除此之外,拉伸強度和耐衝擊值都顯示加入2mm玉米葉纖維在實驗組擁有最佳的數值。另外,加入越長的玉米葉纖維反而不會擁有較佳的機械性質。未來期待聚乳酸複合材料能夠應用在更廣的層面。