Yifan Yin¹, Chunliu He¹, Biao Xu², Zhiyong Li^1,*

Molecular & Cellular Biomechanics, Vol.16, Suppl.1, pp. 57-57, 2019, DOI:10.32604/mcb.2019.05732

Abstract The tissue composition and morphological structure of atherosclerotic plaques determine its stability or vulnerability. Intravascular optical coherence tomography (IVOCT) has rapidly become the method of choice for assessing the pathology of the coronary arterial wall in vivo due to its superior resolution. However, in clinical practice, the analysis of plaque composition of OCT images mainly relies on the interpretation of images by well-trained experts, which is a time-consuming, labor-intensive procedure and it is also subjective. The purpose of this study is to use the Convolutional neural network (CNN) method to automatically extract the best feature information from the OCT images… More >

Haibo Jia^1,*, Bo Yu¹

Molecular & Cellular Biomechanics, Vol.16, Suppl.1, pp. 23-24, 2019, DOI:10.32604/mcb.2019.05708

Abstract Coronary angiography is the traditional standard imaging modality for visual evaluation of coronary anatomy and guidance of percutaneous coronary interventions (PCI). However, the 2-dimensional lumenogram cannot depict the arterial vessel per se and plaque characteristics, or directly assess the stenting result. Intracoronary imaging by means of intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) and optical coherence tomography (OCT) provides valuable incremental information that can be used clinically to optimize stent implantation and thereby minimize stent-related problems. Beyond guidance of stent selection and optimisation, imaging provides critical insights into the pathophysiology of acute coronary syndrome (ACS), greater clarity when confronted with angiographically ambiguous lesions and… More >

Regina Jeziorska*, Agnieszka Abramowicz, Agnieszka Szadkowska, Anna Pasnik and Ewa Spasowka

Journal of Renewable Materials, Vol.6, No.7, pp. 772-783, 2018, DOI:10.7569/JRM.2018.634114

Abstract Poly(phenylene oxide)/renewable polyamide 11 (PPO/PA11 20/80) blends toughened with glycidyl methacrylate grafted ethylene-n-octene copolymer (GEOC) were prepared in a co-rotating twin-screw extruder. The reaction between GEOC and PPO/PA11 blend was analyzed by gel content tests. The morphology of PPO/PA11/GEOC blends was observed by scanning electron microscope. The SEM results showed that PPO formed the continuous phase, though it is a minority component of blends. With increasing GEOC content from 5 to 15 wt% the morphology of the blends transformed from droplet-matrix to co-continuous structure, in which both PA11 and PPO phases are continuous. The blend with co-continuous morphology had better… More >

Qian Xiao¹, Xia Tang¹, Yuanxiu Chen¹, Han Bao¹, Lizhi Gao^1,2, Xiaobo Gong^3,*, Ping Zhang^1,4,*

Molecular & Cellular Biomechanics, Vol.16, No.3, pp. 199-210, 2019, DOI:10.32604/mcb.2019.07107

Abstract Adrenocorticotrophic hormone (ACTH), a 39-amino acid peptide hormone, has been reported in the appreciation of the proliferation of vascular smooth muscle cells (VSMCs), however, the mechanism in molecular scale supporting the appreciation remains to be elucidated. In this study, we observed that the protein expression levels of ACTH at 24 h after exposure to 15% cyclic stretch were significantly higher than that after 5% cyclic stretch. When VSMCs were treated with 1000 nM ACTH directly, Oct-1 and lamin B1 expression were both up-regulated associating with each other, and the presence of Oct-1 was found shuttling between the cytosol and nucleus.… More >

Caining Zhang¹, Huaguang Li², Xiaoya Guo³, David Molony⁴, Xiaopeng Guo², Habib Samady⁴, Don P. Giddens^4,5, Lambros Athanasiou⁶, Rencan Nie^2,*, Jinde Cao^3,*, Dalin Tang^1,*,7

Molecular & Cellular Biomechanics, Vol.16, No.2, pp. 153-161, 2019, DOI:10.32604/mcb.2019.06873

Abstract Cardiovascular diseases are closely associated with deteriorating atherosclerotic plaques. Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is a recently developed intravascular imaging technique with high resolution approximately 10 microns and could provide accurate quantification of coronary plaque morphology. However, tissue segmentation of OCT images in clinic is still mainly performed manually by physicians which is time consuming and subjective. To overcome these limitations, two automatic segmentation methods for intracoronary OCT image based on support vector machine (SVM) and convolutional neural network (CNN) were performed to identify the plaque region and characterize plaque components. In vivo IVUS and OCT coronary plaque data from 5… More >

Yuxiang Huang¹, Chuliu He¹, Jiaqiu Wang², Yuehong Miao¹, Tongjin Zhu¹, Ping Zhou¹, Zhiyong Li^1,2,*

Molecular & Cellular Biomechanics, Vol.15, No.2, pp. 117-125, 2018, DOI: 10.3970/mcb.2018.02478

Abstract Intravascular optical coherence tomography (IVOCT) is becoming more and more popular in clinical diagnosis of coronary atherosclerotic. However, reading IVOCT images is of large amount of work. This article describes a method based on image feature extraction and support vector machine (SVM) to achieve semi-automatic segmentation of IVOCT images. The image features utilized in this work including light attenuation coefficients and image textures based on gray level co-occurrence matrix. Different sets of hyper-parameters and image features were tested. This method achieved an accuracy of 83% on the test images. Single class accuracy of 89% for fibrous, 79.3% for calcification and… More >

J.L. Read¹, A. Bani Younes², J.L. Junkins³

CMES-Computer Modeling in Engineering & Sciences, Vol.111, No.1, pp. 65-81, 2016, DOI:10.3970/cmes.2016.111.065

Abstract This paper focuses on propagating perturbed two-body motion using orbital elements combined with a novel integration technique. While previous studies show that Modified Chebyshev Picard Iteration (MCPI) is a powerful tool used to propagate position and velocity, the present results show that using orbital elements to propagate the state vector reduces the number of MCPI iterations and nodes required, which is especially useful for reducing the computation time when including computationally-intensive calculations such as Spherical Harmonic gravity, and it also converges for > 5.5x as many revolutions using a single segment when compared with cartesian propagation. Results for the Classical… More >

K.W. Luczynski¹, A. Dejaco¹, O. Lahayne¹, J. Jaroszewicz², W.Swieszkowski², C. Hellmich¹

CMES-Computer Modeling in Engineering & Sciences, Vol.87, No.6, pp. 505-529, 2012, DOI:10.3970/cmes.2012.087.505

Abstract A 71 volume-% macroporous tissue engineering scaffold made of poly-l-lactide (PLLA) with 10 mass-% of pseudo-spherical tri-calcium phosphate (TCP) inclusions (exhibiting diameters in the range of several nanometers) was microCT-scanned. The corresponding stack of images was converted into regular Finite Element (FE) models consisting of around 100,000 to 1,000,000 finite elements. Therefore, the attenuation-related, voxel-specific grey values were converted into TCP-contents, and the latter, together with nanoindentation tests,entered a homogenization scheme of the Mori-Tanaka type, as to deliver voxel-specific (and hence, finite element-specific) elastic properties. These FE models were uniaxially loaded, giving access to the macroscopic Young's modulus of the… More >

J. Bielak¹, O. Ghattas², E.-J. Kim³

CMES-Computer Modeling in Engineering & Sciences, Vol.10, No.2, pp. 99-112, 2005, DOI:10.3970/cmes.2005.010.099

Abstract We present a parallel octree-based finite element method for large-scale earthquake ground motion simulation in realistic basins. The octree representation combines the low memory per node and good cache performance of finite difference methods with the spatial adaptivity to local seismic wavelengths characteristic of unstructured finite element methods. Several tests are provided to verify the numerical performance of the method against Green's function solutions for homogeneous and piecewise homogeneous media, both with and without anelastic attenuation. A comparison is also provided against a finite difference code and an unstructured tetrahedral finite element code for a simulation of the 1994 Northridge… More >

Ashwinth Janarthanan^1,*, Dhananjay Kumar¹

CMC-Computers, Materials & Continua, Vol.60, No.3, pp. 895-912, 2019, DOI:10.32604/cmc.2019.06805

Abstract Efficient aggregation in wireless sensor nodes helps reduce network traffic and reduce energy consumption. The objective of this work Localization Based Evolutionary Routing (LOBER) is to achieve global optimization for aggregation and WMSN lifetime. Improved localization is achieved by a novel Centroid Based Octant Localization (CBOL) technique considering an arbitrary hexagonal region. Geometric principles of hexagon are used to locate the unknown nodes in the centroid positions of partitioned regions. Flower pollination algorithm, a meta heuristic evolutionary algorithm that is extensively applied in solving real life, complex and nonlinear optimization problems in engineering and industry is modified as Enhanced Flower… More >