Surface plasmon resonance (SPR) sensors are increasingly in demand due to their high sensitivity, better accuracy, and improved detection limit. Such performance parameters make these sensors suitable for biological and medical field’s applications. During the last decade, prism coupling-based SPR sensors had been a preferred choice among the designer and developers across the globe. This article summarizes a review of prism coupling-based SPR photonic sensors. Important performance characteristics of such sensors have also been studied with respect to their detection accuracy, sensitivity

A new approach to assess lean manufacturing based on system's variability is proposed. The assessment utilizes a new tool called variability source mapping (VSMII) which focuses on capturing and reducing variability across the production system. The new tool offers a new metric called variability index to measure the overall variability level of the system. Based on the mapping and the new metric, VSMII suggests a variability reduction plan guided by a recommendation list of both lean techniques as well as production control policies. An industrial application is used to demonstrate the new

This paper presents a case for adopting agent-based modeling (ABM) as a framework for representing the complex interactions that occur within the context of urban infrastructure management. A generic ABM is proposed with four key agents namely; assets, users, operators and politicians. For each agent a set of generic attributes, actions and behaviors are defined. A detailed behavioral model is adapted from the service quality domain to represent customer perceptions and actions related to infrastructure level of service. An illustrative example of 20 assets and 50 user agents is simulated to

It is feasible and safe to use unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) as the data collection platform of the Internet of things (IoT). In order to save the energy loss of the platform and make the UAV perform the collection work effectively, it is necessary to optimize the deployment of UAV. The objective problem is to minimize the sum of the lost energy of UAV and the loss of data transmission of Internet of things devices. The key to solving the problem is to calculate the location of the docking points and the number of docking points when the UAV is working to collect data. This paper proposes a

Fuzzy C-Means (FCM) clustering technique is among the most effective partitional clustering algorithms available in the literature. The Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP) is an important industrial logistics and managerial NP-hard problem. Cluster-First Route-Second Method (CFRS) is one of the efficient techniques used to solve CVRP. In CFRS technique, customers are first divided into clusters in the first phase, then each cluster is solved independently as a Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) in the second phase. This research is concerned with the clustering phase of CFRS, and TSP is

The return-risk trade-off of the 100 stocks contained in the Egyptian EGX100 index is examined. The Egyptian stock market has an average free float of only 45%. It is estimated that 50% of trading in the free float stocks is dominated by large investors, and local and international fund managers. The market suffers from low turnovers and more recently long periods of trade suspension after the political unrest of January 25th, 2011. The study finds that a serial correlated returns model is more suitable to estimate returns for low free float stocks in Egypt. However, it is unlikely that this

Background: Data have been accumulating in the past few years that identify vitiligo as a disorder with systemic implications. Results and methods: In this hospital-based, cross-sectional, case–control study, 50 patients with non-segmental vitiligo and 50 age- and sex-matched controls underwent analysis of serum lipid profile, oxidative stress biomarkers and carotid duplex. Hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) and malondialdehyde (MDA) were significantly higher in patients than controls (p-value <.001, <.001, respectively); on the other hand, total antioxidant capacity (TAC) was significantly lower in

An efficient fat suppression method is presented for MR tagging with complementary spatial modulation of magnetization (CSPAMM). In this method, the complementary modulation is applied to the water content of the tissues, while in-phase modulation is applied to the fat content. Therefore, during image reconstruction, the subtraction of the acquired images increases the tagging contrast of the water while cancels the tagging lines of the fat. Compared with the existing fat suppression techniques, the proposed method allows imaging with higher temporal resolution and shorter echo-time without

Wireless sensor networks open up a new realm of ubiquitous computing applications based on distributed large-scale data collection by embedded sensor nodes that are wirelessly connected and seamlessly integrated within the environment. 3D visualization of sensory data is a challenging issue, however, due to the large number of sensors used in typical deployments, continuous data streams, and constantly varying network topology. This paper describes a practical approach for interactive 3D visualization of wireless sensor network data. A regular 3D grid is reconstructed using scattered sensor

Despite the important role of object tracking using the Optical Flow (OF) in computer graphics applications, it has a limited role in segmenting speckle-free medical images such as magnetic resonance images of the heart. In this work, we propose a novel solution of the OF equation that allows incorporating additional constraints of the shape of the segmented object. We formulate a cost function that include the OF constraint in addition to myocardial contour properties such as smoothness and elasticity. The method is totally different from the common naïve combination of OF estimation within