This paper presents a recognition system for the automatic quality control in industrial applications. The purpose of the system is to collect the product information (e.g. Expiry-date, production identification) and verify these information for quality control. The main difficulties of the system are to make an effcient preprocessing for the acquired low resolution image and to create a simple and fast recognition method to get the product information. In this paper, we propose an effcient recognition method based on the endpoint features and structure characteristics of the numerals. The experimental results show that the proposed method is effcient, robust and reliable for recognizing machine printed numerals. The system is currently successfully working with a real application with required specifications.

Objective To accurately extract pulmonary vessels on medical images. Methods An efficient vessel segmentation framework is presented, which includes a smoothing method and a extraction algorithm. The smoothing method is based on an improved coherence diffusion approach that integrates the second-order directional differential information. It can analyze weak edges such as narrow peak or ridge-like structures. Meanwhile, an improved extraction algorithm is proposed. It is based on a fast marching algorithm where a sorted sequence array and multi-initialization technique are applied. Results The improved coherence diffusion approach can precisely preserve important oriented patterns and remove noises on the images. Experimental results on several images show that the proposed method can effectively find the location of pulmonary vessels. Conclusion The segmentation method is accurate and fast that can be a useful tool for medical imaging applications.

Objective To study the effect of low frequency on drug release from improved PLGA microcapsules, and investigate the possibility of utilizing PLGA microcapsules as the carrier of ultrasound targeted drug delivery system to deliver drug into brain. Methods Doxorubicin loaded poly (D,L lactic-co-glycolic acid) (PLGA) microcapsules were prepared via double emulsion solvent evaporate method and coated with either chitosan or gelatin. In vitro drug release profile and the drug release rate under the exposure of low frequency pulsed ultrasound (25 kHz) and continuous wave ultrasound (35.1 kHz) were assayed. Results The coating with chitosan or gelatin can depress the burst of drug release. The drug release rate from uncoated and chitosan-coated microcapsules did not changed with the exposure of ultrasound, and the rate of gelatin-coated microcapsules did increased. The effect of pulsed ultrasound was stronger than that of continuous ultrasound. Conclusion The drug release from gelatin-coated PLGA microcapsules can be controlled and triggered by 25 kHz pulsed ultrasound, which may be a potent carrier of targeting drugs into brain.

The concentration of glucose in the blood may soon be measured noninvasively by near infrared multi-wavelength sensor array without the painful puncture for obtaining a drop of blood. For overcoming the limitation of low measuring accurate degree and unstable working state, according to the Lambert-Beer Law, the authors analyzed the feature of blood adsorption spectroscopy and designed an infrared multi-wavelength blood glucose measuring sensor array to surmount the difficulties in noninvasive blood glucose measurement. The key technique, most suitable for detecting site and the influencing factors from human body were discussed, and the Mixture of Expert(ME) algorithm was adopted in building calibration model with multiple parameters of human body. It can overcome the existing problems and get more exact blood glucose information from the weak changes in spectral signals. Also presented and addressed in this paper are the detailed implementing steps of ME and the system, as well as the problems need to be solved.
Algorithms ; Blood Glucose ; analysis ; Equipment Design ; Humans ; Spectroscopy, Fourier Transform Infrared ; instrumentation ; methods