Transport Properties in Multicomponent Systems Containing Cyclodextrins and Nickel Ions.

In this work, we propose a comprehensive experimental study of the diffusion of nickel ions in combination with different cyclodextrins as carrier molecules for enhanced solubility and facilitated transport. For this, ternary mutual diffusion coefficients measured by Taylor dispersion method are reported for aqueous solutions containing nickel salts and different cyclodextrins (that is, α-CD, ß-CD, and γ-CD) at 298.15 K. A combination of Taylor dispersion and other methods, such as UV-vis spectroscopy, will be used to obtain complementary information on these systems. The determination of the physicochemical properties of these salts with CDs in aqueous solution provides information that allows us to understand solute-solvent interactions, and gives a significant contribution to understanding the mechanisms underlying diffusional transport in aqueous solutions, and, consequently, to mitigating the potential toxicity associated with these metal ions. For example, using mutual diffusion data, it is possible to estimate the number of moles of each ion transported per mole of the cyclodextrin driven by its own concentration gradient.

A method for segmentation of dental implants and crestal bone.

PURPOSE: Medical imaging and in particular digital radiographic images offer a great deal of information to dentists in the clinical diagnosis and treatment processes on a daily basis. This paper presents a new method aimed to produce an accurate segmentation of dental implants and the crestal bone line in radiographic images. With this, it is possible computing several measures to biomechanical and clinical evaluation of dental implants positioning and evolution. METHODS: The proposed segmentation method includes two major steps: (1) the preprocessing that combine denoising filters, morphological operations and histogram threshold techniques and (2) the final segmentation involving made-to-measure adjusted and trained active shape models for detecting the precise location of the intended structures. RESULTS: Resulting measurements were compared to manual measurements made by experts on representative radiographs from patients. The calculated intraclass correlation coefficient was 0.75 and showed good reliability of the method, and the Bland-Altman analysis showed 95% of the values within the limits of agreement. The mean of the differences between the manual and method-driven measurements was 0.049 mm ([Formula: see text]) 95% CI, inferior to the established limit (0.15mm). CONCLUSIONS: It was demonstrated that the method achieved a precise segmentation of the intended structures. The validation process on standardized periapical radiographs showed good agreement between the manual measurements and the ones produced by the new method. Future work will be focused on making the method more robust to densitometry changes and to validate the method on non-standardized radiographs.