Near infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) analysis technology, combined with chemometrics, can be effectively used in quick and nondestructive analysis of quality and category. In this paper, an effective drug identification method by using deep belief network (DBN) with dropout mecha-nism (dropout-DBN) to model NIRS is introduced, in which dropout is employed to overcome the overfitting problem coming from the small sample. This paper tests proposed method under datasets of different sizes with the example of near infrared diffuse reflectance spectroscopy of erythromycin ethylsuccinate drugs and other drugs, aluminum and nonaluminum packaged. Meanwhile, it gives experiments to compare the proposed method's performance with back propagation (BP) neural network, support vector machines (SVMs) and sparse denoising auto-encoder (SDAE). The results show that for both binary classification and multi-classification, dropout mechanism can improve the classification accuracy, and dropout-DBN can achieve best classification accuracy in almost all cases. SDAE is similar to dropout-DBN in the aspects of classification accuracy and algorithm stability, which are higher than that of BP neural network and SVM methods. In terms of training time, dropout-DBN model is superior to SDAE model, but inferior to BP neural network and SVM methods. Therefore, dropout-DBN can be used as a modeling tool with effective binary and multi-class classification performance on a spectrum sample set of small size.

Fourier ptychographic microscopy (FPM) is a newly developed imaging technique which stands out by virtue of its high-resolution and wide FOV. It improves a microscope's imaging perfor-mance beyond the diffraction limit of the employed optical components by illuminating the sample with oblique waves of different incident angles, similar to the concept of synthetic aperture. We propose to use an objective lens with high-NA to generate oblique illuminating waves in FPM. We demonstrate utilizing an objective lens with higher NA to illuminate the sample leads to better resolution by simulations, in which a resolution of 0.28 m is achieved by using a high-NA illuminating objective lens (NA=1.49) and a low-NA collecting objective lens (NA=0.2) in coherent imaging (λ=488 nm). We then deeply study FPM's exact relevance of convergence speed to spatial spectrum overlap in frequency domain. The simulation results show that an overlap of about 60% is the optimal choice to acquire a high-quality recovery (520*520 pixels) with about 2 min's computing time. In addition, we testify the robustness of the algorithm of FPM to additive noises and its suitability for phase objects, which further proves FPM's potential application in biomedical imaging.

Hypoxia is a disorder in which the tissues are not oxygenated adequately. The lack of oxygen may cause irreversible damage to the major organs such as the brain, heart and lungs. In severe cases, coma, seizures, and death may happen. In addition to the routine medication, acupuncture treatment has been applied as a complementary treatment to counter hypoxia. In this paper, the optical fiber acupuncture needle was fabricated using the optical fiber imbedding into the metal capillary tube with needle tip, therefore made it easy to insert into the body for the laser treatment. The laser optical fiber needle treatment to the ST36 acupoint conducted with the laser irradiation intra body. The normobaric hypoxia tolerance test results in mice show that the optical fiber needle treatment to the ST36 acupoint with laser acupuncture appears to improve the tolerance to hypoxia. The mice treated with laser acupuncture expressed high level of IL-1 in serum. Our results suggest that laser optical fiber needle acupuncture may serve as a potential treatment for hypoxia.

Surface functionalization of sensor chip for probe immobilization is crucial for the biosensing applications of surface plasmon resonance (SPR) sensors. In this paper, we report a method circulating the dopamine aqueous solution to coat polydopamine film on sensing surface for surface functionalization of SPR chip. The polydopamine film with available thickness can be easily prepared by controlling the circulation time and the biorecognition elements can be immobilized on the polydopamine film for specific molecular interaction analysis. These opera-tions are all performed under flow condition in the fluidic system, and have the advantages of easy implementation, less time consuming, and low cost, because the reagents and devices used in the operations are routinely applied in most laboratories. In this study, the specific absorption between the protein A probe immobilized on the sensing surface and human immunoglobulin G in the buffer is monitored based on this surface functionalization strategy to demonstrated its feasibility for SPR biosensing applications.

Previous results show that the floating reference theory (FRT) is an effective tool to reduce the influence of interference factors on noninvasive blood glucose sensing by near-infrared spectros-copy (NIRS). It is the key to measure the floating reference point (FRP) precisely for the application of FRT. Monte Carlo (MC) simulation has been introduced to quantitatively in-vestigate the effects of positioning errors and light source drifts on measuring FRP. In this article, thinning and calculating method (TCM) is proposed to quantify the positioning error. Mean-while, the normalization process (NP) is developed to significantly reduce the error induced by light source drift. The results according to TCM show that 7 m deviations in positioning can generate about 10.63% relative error in FRP. It is more noticeable that 1% fluctuation in light source intensity may lead to 12.21% relative errors. Gratifyingly, the proposed NP model can effectively reduce the error caused by light source drift. Therefore, the measurement system for FRPs must meet that the positioning error is less than 7 m, and the light source drift is kept within 1%. Furthermore, an improvement for measurement system is proposed in order to take advantage of the NP model.

Uveitis is a severe inflammatory disease that can cause visual impairment. Recently, activated γδ T cells were proved to play a central role in the development of experimental autoimmune uveitis (EAU). However, the mechanism underlying γδ T-cell activation in EAU is incompletely known. In this study, we determined the percentage changes in and the phenotypes of γδ T cells and dendritic cells (DCs) obtained from the spleens of immunized C57BL/6 (B6) mice, an animal model of EAU. We found that the number of γδ T cells and DCs obviously increased during the inflammation phase of EAU (days 16–20 of our experiment), and that during this time, γδ T cells expressed high levels of CD69 and the integrin lymphocyte function–associated antigen-1 (LFA-1) and secreted high levels of interleukin (IL)-17A. Moreover, DCs obtained during this phase expressed high levels of CD80, CD83, CD86, and intracellular cell adhesion molecule-1 (ICAM-1). Furthermore, we studied the interaction between DCs and T cells by using flow cytometry and confocal microscopy in order to determine whether DCs affected γδ T-cell activation in vitro. Co-cultures of the two types of cells showed that DCs induced high levels of CD69, LFA-1, and IL-17A in γδ T cells. Imaging studies revealed contact between the DCs and γδ T cells. This interaction was mediated by the accumulation of ICAM-1 and LFA-1 at the interface of DCs-γδ T cells. Thus, the activation of γδ T cells in EAU was promoted by DCs interacting with γδ T cells.

The binding interaction between tetra-(p-sulfoazophenyl-4-aminosulfonyl)-substituted aluminum (III) phthalocyanine (AlPc), and two-serum albumins (bovine serum albumin (BSA) and human serum albumin (HSA)) has been investigated. AlPc could quench the intrinsic fluorescence of BSA and HSA through a static quenching process. The primary and secondary binding sites of AlPc on BSA were domain I and III of BSA. The primary binding site of AlPc on HSA was domain I, and the secondary binding sites of AlPc on HSA were found at domains I and II. Our results suggest that AlPc readily interact with BSA and HSA implying that the amphiphilic substituents AlPc may contribute to their transportation in the blood.

Molecular diagnostics is one of the most important tools currently in use for clinical pathogen detection due to its high sensitivity, specificity, and low consume of sample and reagent is keyword to low cost molecular diagnostics. In this paper, a sensitive DNA isothermal amplifi-cation method for fast clinical infectious diseases diagnostics at aM concentrations of DNA was developed using a polycarbonate (PC) microfluidic chip. A portable confocal optical fluo-rescence detector was specifically developed for the microfluidic chip that was capable of highly sensitive real-time detection of amplified products for sequence-specific molecular identification near the optical diffraction limit with low background. The molecular diagnostics of Listeria monocytogenes with nucleic acid extracted from stool samples was performed at a minimum DNA template concentration of 3.65 aM, and a detection limit of less than five copies of genomic DNA. Contrast to the general polymerase chain reaction (PCR) at eppendorf (EP) tube, the detection time in our developed method was reduced from 1.5 h to 45 min for multi-target parallel detection, the consume of sample and reagent was dropped from 25 L to 1.45 L. This novel microfluidic chip system and method can be used to develop a micro total analysis system as a clinically relevant pathogen molecular diagnostics method via the amplification of targets, with potential applications in biotechnology, medicine, and clinical molecular diagnostics.

This study develops a novel cervical precancerous detection system by using texture analysis of field emission scanning electron microscopy (FE-SEM) images. The processing scheme adopted in the proposed system focused on two steps. The first step was to enhance cervical cell FE-SEM images in order to show the precancerous characterization indicator. A problem arises from the question of how to extract features which characterize cervical precancerous cells. For the first step, a preprocessing technique called intensity transformation and morphological operation (ITMO) algorithm used to enhance the quality of images was proposed. The algo-rithm consisted of contrast stretching and morphological opening operations. The second step was to characterize the cervical cells to three classes, namely normal, low grade intra-epithelial squamous lesion (LSIL), and high grade intra-epithelial squamous lesion (HSIL). To differen-tiate between normal and precancerous cells of the cervical cell FE-SEM images, human papillomavirus (HPV) contained in the surface of cells were used as indicators. In this paper, we investigated the use of texture as a tool in determining precancerous cell images based on the observation that cell images have a distinct visual texture. Gray level co-occurrences matrix (GLCM) technique was used to extract the texture features. To confirm the system's perfor-mance, the system was tested using 150 cervical cell FE-SEM images. The results showed that the accuracy, sensitivity and specificity of the proposed system are 95.7%, 95.7% and 95.8%, respectively.

Insect infestation in rice stock is a significant issue in rice exporting business, resulting in the loss of product quality, nutrient as well as the economic losses. However, detecting the insect contamination with the traditional sorting techniques were destructive, inaccurate, time consuming and unable to detect the internal insect infestation. This study used near infrared (NIR) spectroscopy for obtaining the absorbent spectra from the insect contamination in two kinds of rice samples, Milled Hommali rice (MHR) and Brown Hommali rice (BHR). The mathematical methods of partial least squares (PLSs) regression and singular value de-composition (SVD) were employed to construct the predicting model. The statistical analysis results, R2 , RMSEP, RPD and bias, concluded that the predictive models from PLS for MHR and BHR were 0.95 and 0.90, 0.014 and 0.019, 4.79 and 3.11, as well as 0.007 and 0.008, respectively; while the statistical analysis results from SVD for MHR and BHR were 0.97 and 0.96, 0.012 and 0.013, 5.71 and 5.39, as well as 0.003 and 0.002, respectively. It showed that SVD technique performed better than PLS technique which shows that using the advantage of SVD technique required less amounts of wave numbers for predicting and was possible to construct the low cost handheld equipment for detecting the insects in rice samples.

Optical microscopy of biological tissues at the 1700 nm window has enabled deeper penetration, due to the combined advantage of relatively small water absorption and tissue scattering at this wavelength. Compared with excitation at other wavelengths, such as the commonly used 800 nm window for two-photon microscopy, water absorption at the 1700 nm window is more than one order of magnitude higher. As a result, more temperature rise can be expected and can be potentially detrimental to biological tissues. Here, we present theoretical estimation of temper-ature rise at the focus of objective lens at the 1700 nm window, purely due to water absorption. Our calculated result shows that under realistic experimental conditions, temperature rise due to water absorption is still below 1 K and may not cause tissue damage during imaging.

Previous studies have shown cost effectiveness and quality-of-life benefit of pneumatic compression therapy (PCT) for lymphedema (LE). Insurers, such as the Centers for Medicare/Medicaid (CMS), however, desire visual proof that PCT moves lymph. Near-infrared fluorescence lymphatic imaging (NIRFLI) was used to visualize lymphatic anatomy and function in four subjects with primary and cancer treatment-related LE of the lower extremities before, during, and after PCT. Optically transparent and windowed PCT garments allowed visualization of lymph movement during single, 1h PCT treatment sessions. Visualization revealed significant extravascular and lymphatic vascular movement of intradermally injected dye in all subjects. In one subject with sufficient patent lymphatic vessels to allow quantification of lymph pumping velocities and frequencies, these values were significantly increased during and after PCT as compared to pre-treatment values. Lymphatic contractile activity in patent lymphatic vessels occurred in concert with the sequential cycling of PCT. Direct visualization revealed increased lymphatic function, during and after PCT therapy, in all LE-affected extremities. Further studies are warranted to assess the effects of PCT pressure and sequences on lymph uptake and movement.

Noninvasive techniques, surface electromyography (sEMG) in particular, are being increasingly employed for assessing muscle activity. In these studies, local oxygen consumption and muscle metabolism are of great interest. Measurements can be performed noninvasively using optics-based methods such as near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS). By combining energy consumption data provided by NIRS with muscle level activation data from sEMG, we may gain an insight into the metabolic and functional characteristics of muscle tissue. However, muscle motion may induce artifacts into EMG and NIRS. Thus, the inclusion of simultaneous motion measurements using accelerometers (ACMs) enhances possibilities to perceive the effects of motion on NIRS and EMG signals. This paper reviews the current state of noninvasive EMG and NIRS-based methods used to study muscle function. In addition, we built a combined sEMG/NIRS/ACM sensor to perform simultaneous measurements for static and dynamic exercises of a biceps brachii muscle. Further, we discuss the effect of muscle motion in response of NIRS and EMG when measured noninvasively. Based on our preliminary studies, both NIRS and EMG supply speciˉc information on muscle activation, but their signal responses also showed similarities with acceleration signals which, in this case, were supposed to be solely sensitive to motions.