ABSTRACT
. Over the past ten years, diabetes has rapidly become more prevalent in all age demographics and especially in children. Improved dietary assessment techniques are necessary for epidemiological studies that investigate the relationship between diet and disease. Current nutritional research is hindered by the low accuracy of traditional dietary intake estimation methods used for portion size assessment. This paper presents the development and validation of a novel instrumentation system for measuring accurate dietary intake for diabetic patients. This instrument uses a mobile Structured Light System (SLS), which measures the food volume and portion size of a patient's diet in daily living conditions. The SLS allows for the accurate determination of the volume and portion size of a scanned food item. Once the volume of a food item is calculated, the nutritional content of the item can be estimated using existing nutritional databases. The system design includes a volume estimation algorithm and a hardware add-on that consists of a laser module and a diffraction lens. The experimental results demonstrate an improvement of around 40% in the accuracy of the volume or portion size measurement when compared to manual calculation. The limitations and shortcomings of the system are discussed in this manuscript.
ABSTRACT
The ongoing discoveries of RNA modalities (for example, non-coding, micro and enhancer) have resulted in an increased desire for detecting, sequencing and identifying RNA segments for applications in food safety, water and environmental protection, plant and animal pathology, clinical diagnosis and research, and bio-security. Here, we demonstrate that single-molecule conductance techniques can be used to extract biologically relevant information from short RNA oligonucleotides, that these measurements are sensitive to attomolar target concentrations, that they are capable of being multiplexed, and that they can detect targets of interest in the presence of other, possibly interfering, RNA sequences. We also demonstrate that the charge transport properties of RNA:DNA hybrids are sensitive to single-nucleotide polymorphisms, thus enabling differentiation between specific serotypes of Escherichia coli. Using a combination of spectroscopic and computational approaches, we determine that the conductance sensitivity primarily arises from the effects that the mutations have on the conformational structure of the molecules, rather than from the direct chemical substitutions. We believe that this approach can be further developed to make an electrically based sensor for diagnostic purposes.