Determination of 44 major components and chemical profiling of saccharide in Chinese medicinal formula Lanqin Oral Liquid.

INTRODUCTION: Lanqin Oral Liquid (LQL) is a traditional Chinese medicine preparation (TCMP) containing five herbal medicines and has been commonly used for the treatment of pharyngitis and hand-foot-and-mouth disease in clinic. The material basis of LQL has been reported in our previous study, but the contents of the major components and the features of saccharide in LQL are still unclear. OBJECTIVES: This study aimed to establish accurate and rapid methods for the quantification of the major components and profiling of saccharide in LQL. The quantitative results combined with similarity evaluation were applied to improve the quality control of LQL. METHODOLOGY: An ultra-high performance liquid chromatography coupled with triple-quadrupole tandem mass spectrometry (UPLC-QQQ-MS) method was utilised to determine 44 major components. Cosine similarity was used to evaluate the similarities among 20 batches of LQL based on the quantitative results of 44 major components. The physicochemical properties, structure, composition, and contents of saccharide in LQL were detected by a combination of chemical and instrumental analysis. RESULTS: A total of 44 compounds, including flavonoids, iridoid glycosides, alkaloids, and nucleosides, were accurately determined. The 20 batches of LQL were remarkably similar (> 0.95). In addition, d-glucose, galactose, d-glucuronic acid, arabinose, and d-mannose were detected in saccharide of LQL. The contents of saccharide in LQL were 13.52-21.09 mg/ml. CONCLUSIONS: The established methods can be applied for the comprehensive quality control of LQL, including characterisation of saccharide and quantification of representative components. Our study will provide a robust chemical foundation for disclosing the quality markers of its therapeutic effect.

Design of optimal groundwater remediation systems under flexible environmental-standard constraints.

In developing optimal groundwater remediation strategies, limited effort has been exerted to solve the uncertainty in environmental quality standards. When such uncertainty is not considered, either over optimistic or over pessimistic optimization strategies may be developed, probably leading to the formulation of rigid remediation strategies. This study advances a mathematical programming modeling approach for optimizing groundwater remediation design. This approach not only prevents the formulation of over optimistic and over pessimistic optimization strategies but also provides a satisfaction level that indicates the degree to which the environmental quality standard is satisfied. Therefore the approach may be expected to be significantly more acknowledged by the decision maker than those who do not consider standard uncertainty. The proposed approach is applied to a petroleum-contaminated site in western Canada. Results from the case study show that (1) the peak benzene concentrations can always satisfy the environmental standard under the optimal strategy, (2) the pumping rates of all wells decrease under a relaxed standard or long-term remediation approach, (3) the pumping rates are less affected by environmental quality constraints under short-term remediation, and (4) increased flexible environmental standards have a reduced effect on the optimal remediation strategy.

An integrated simulation, inference, and optimization method for identifying groundwater remediation strategies at petroleum-contaminated aquifers in western Canada.

This study advances an integrated simulation, inference, and optimization method (ISIOM) for optimizing groundwater remediation systems. SIOM has the advantages of (i) automotive screening of potential explanatory variables (e.g., the pumping rates at various remediation wells), (ii) providing a flexible manner for investigating the linear, interactive, and quadratic effects of operating conditions on the benzene levels, and (iii) mitigating the computational efforts in optimization processes. The method is applied to a petroleum-contaminated site in western Canada for identifying the optimal remediation strategies under a given set of remediation durations and environmental standard levels. To examine the effect of pumping duration on contaminants removing efficiency, 4 duration options are considered including 5, 10, 15, and 20 years, respectively. The results indicate that the pumping duration would have effect on the optimized scheme. It is suggested that the 10-year duration would be more desirable than the 15-year one. The simulation results demonstrate that the peak benzene concentrations would be reduced to satisfy the environmental standard when the optimal remediation strategy is carried out.

[Development of RF ablation therapeutic instrument based on improved PID algorithm].

The development of a RF ablation therapeutic instrument based on improved PID algorithm is introduced here. It is based on the theory of radio frequency local destruction. By adopting the improved PID temperature control algorithm, the problem of the temperature control precision reduction due to tumor tissue characteristic changing by heating has been solved, thus ensuring homogeneous and smooth radio frequency heating to tumor foci. Experiments demonstrate that the new algorithm has strong adaptability and anti-disturbance capability, the equipment works stably and reliably, and can control therapeutic temperature precisely (+/- 2 degrees C), which indicates a good clinical application value.