El glistening de las lentes intraoculares: revisión de la literatura / Glistening on intraocular lenses: a review

El glistening en las lentes intraoculares (LIO) es un fenómeno en el que se forman diminutas microvacuolas llenas de agua dentro del material de la LIO, lo que hace que la luz se disperse y cree un efecto centelleante o reluciente. La presencia del glistening es frecuente en muchos tipos de materiales y modelos de LIO, y se ha estudiado ampliamente en los últimos años para conocer su incidencia, factores de riesgo, evolución y posible relevancia clínica. Clásicamente se ha estudiado in vitro en laboratorio o mediante fotografía obtenida con lámpara de hendidura. Sin embargo, son técnicas que requieren de un explorador experto, además de requerir mucho tiempo y un complejo procesado de las imágenes. En los últimos años, han surgido propuestas basadas en la cámara de Scheimpflug y en la tomografía de coherencia óptica como forma de simplificar el análisis del glistening en las LIO. Se ha descrito que tanto el proceso de fabricación, como el propio material acrílico hidrofóbico, y el tiempo desde la cirugía son factores de riesgo relacionados con la aparición de glistening. Además, aún se desconocen numerosas cuestiones relacionadas con este fenómeno, como la cantidad de puntos o el tamaño de los mismos necesarios para causar afectación de la función visual, ya que se han descrito diferentes fenómenos ópticos relacionados con el glistening de las LIO (AU)

The glistening in intraocular lenses (IOLs) is a phenomenon in which tiny water-filled microvacuoles form within the IOL material, causing light to scatter and create a sparkling or shimmering effect. The presence of glistening is common in many types of IOL materials and models and has been extensively studied in recent years to determine its incidence, risk factors, evolution, and possible clinical relevance. Classically, it has been studied in vitro in the laboratory or by means of photography obtained with a slit lamp, but these were techniques that required either specific technology or an expert explorer, complex image processing, and required a lot of time. In recent years, proposals based on the Scheimpflug camera and optical coherence tomography have emerged to try to simplify the analysis of glistening in IOLs. It has been described that the manufacturing process, the hydrophobic acrylic material, or the time since surgery are risk factors for the appearance of glistening. In addition, many issues related to this phenomenon are still unknown, such as not knowing from what number of points or their size they may have relevance to visual function since different optical phenomena related to glistening have been described on the IOLs (AU)

Robust femtosecond-written chirped and tilted fiber Bragg gratings for Raman filtering in multi-kW fiber lasers.

We present a robust chirped and tilted fiber Bragg grating (CTFBG) in a large-mode-area double-cladding fiber (LMA-DCF) written by a femtosecond (fs) laser. By implementing the fs-CTFBG into the output end of a high-power fiber laser for Raman filtering, a power handling capability of 4 kW is achieved with a Raman filtering ratio of ∼13 dB. To the best of our knowledge, this is the maximum handling power of a CTFBG for Raman filtering. The signal loss of the fs-CTFBG is 0.03 dB, which has little effect on the output laser beam quality. The air-cooled fs-CTFBG has a minimum temperature slope of 7.8°C/kW due to a self-annealing effect. This work proves the excellent performance of the fs-CTFBG, promoting the development of high-power CTFBGs.

Optical injection locking of a THz quantum-cascade VECSEL with an electronic source.

Optical injection locking of a metasurface quantum-cascade (QC) vertical-external-cavity surface-emitting laser (VECSEL) is demonstrated at 2.5 THz using a Schottky diode frequency multiplier chain as the injection source. The spectral properties of the source are transferred to the laser output with a locked linewidth of ∼1 Hz, as measured by a separate subharmonic diode mixer, and a locking bandwidth of ∼300 MHz is achieved. The large locking range is enabled by the microwatt power levels available from modern diode multipliers. The interplay between the injected signal and feedback from external reflections is studied and demonstrated to increase or decrease the locking bandwidth relative to the classic locking range depending on the phase of the feedback.

The implication of oversampling on the effectiveness of force signals in the fault detection of endodontic instruments during RCT.

This work provides an innovative endodontic instrument fault detection methodology during root canal treatment (RCT). Sometimes, an endodontic instrument is prone to fracture from the tip, for causes uncertain the dentist's control. A comprehensive assessment and decision support system for an endodontist may avoid several breakages. This research proposes a machine learning and artificial intelligence-based approach that can help to diagnose instrument health. During the RCT, force signals are recorded using a dynamometer. From the acquired signals, statistical features are extracted. Because there are fewer instances of the minority class (i.e. faulty/moderate class), oversampling of datasets is required to avoid bias and overfitting. Therefore, the synthetic minority oversampling technique (SMOTE) is employed to increase the minority class. Further, evaluating the performance using the machine learning techniques, namely Gaussian Naïve Bayes (GNB), quadratic support vector machine (QSVM), fine k-nearest neighbor (FKNN), and ensemble bagged tree (EBT). The EBT model provides excellent performance relative to the GNB, QSVM, and FKNN. Machine learning (ML) algorithms can accurately detect endodontic instruments' faults by monitoring the force signals. The EBT and FKNN classifier is trained exceptionally well with an area under curve values of 1.0 and 0.99 and prediction accuracy of 98.95 and 97.56%, respectively. ML can potentially enhance clinical outcomes, boost learning, decrease process malfunctions, increase treatment efficacy, and enhance instrument performance, contributing to superior RCT processes. This work uses ML methodologies for fault detection of endodontic instruments, providing practitioners with an adequate decision support system.

Semiconductor Optical Amplifier (SOA)-Driven Reservoir Computing for Dense Wavelength-Division Multiplexing (DWDM) Signal Compensation.

Optical signal processing (OSP) technology is a crucial part of the optical switching node in the modern optical-fiber communication system, especially when advanced modulation formats, e.g., quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM), are applied. However, the conventional on-off keying (OOK) signal is still widely used in access or metro transmission systems, which leads to the compatibility requirement of OSP for incoherent and coherent signals. In this paper, we propose a reservoir computing (RC)-OSP scheme based on nonlinear mapping behavior through a semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) to deal with the non-return-to-zero (NRZ) signals and the differential quadrature phase-shift keying (DQPSK) signals in the nonlinear dense wavelength-division multiplexing (DWDM) channel. We optimized the key parameters of SOA-based RC to improve compensation performance. Based on the simulation investigation, we observed a significant improvement in signal quality over 10 dB compared to the distorted signals on each DWDM channel for both the NRZ and DQPSK transmission cases. The compatible OSP achieved by the proposed SOA-based RC could be a potential application of the optical switching node in the complex optical fiber communication system, where incoherent and coherent signals meet.

Simple polarization-insensitive coherent RoF link with increased capacity.

A simple polarization-insensitive coherent radio-over-fiber (RoF) link with increased spectrum efficiency and transmission capacity is proposed and demonstrated. Instead of using two polarization splitters (PBSs), two 90° hybrids, and four pairs of balanced photodetectors (PDs) in a conventional polarization-diversity coherent receiver (PDCR), a simplified PDCR with only one PBS, one optical coupler (OC), and two PDs is employed in the coherent RoF link. At the simplified receiver, a novel, to the best of our knowledge, digital signal processing (DSP) algorithm is proposed to achieve polarization-insensitive detection and demultiplexing of two spectrally overlapping microwave vector signals as well as the elimination of the joint phase noise originating from the transmitter and the local oscillator (LO) laser sources. An experiment is performed. The transmission and detection of two independent 16QAM microwave vector signals at identical microwave carrier frequencies of 3 GHz with a symbol rate of 0.5 GSym/s over a 25-km single-mode fiber (SMF) is demonstrated. Thanks to the spectrum superposition of the two microwave vector signals, the spectral efficiency as well as the data transmission capacity is increased.

Development and Validation of a Low-Cost Device for Real-Time Detection of Fatigue Damage of Structures Subjected to Vibrations.

This paper presents the development and validation of a low-cost device for real-time detection of fatigue damage of structures subjected to vibrations. The device consists of an hardware and signal processing algorithm to detect and monitor variations in the structural response due to damage accumulation. The effectiveness of the device is demonstrated through experimental validation on a simple Y-shaped specimen subjected to fatigue loading. The results show that the device can accurately detect structural damage and provide real-time feedback on the health status of the structure. The low-cost and easy-to-implement nature of the device makes it promising for use in structural health monitoring applications in various industrial sectors.

Out-of-Band Fiber-Optic Time and Frequency Transfer Using Asymmetric and Symmetric Opto-Electronic Repeaters.

Signal repeaters for fiber-optic communication can be realized with back-to-back connected transceivers. This configuration can provide high gain ( ≈ 30 dB) at low cost, and the needed semiconductor lasers and modulators can be realized for practically any relevant wavelength. Unfortunately, for time and frequency (TF) transfer the uncorrelated wavelength drifts in the transceiver lasers can compromise transfer stability, and device replacement due to failure may result in large time offsets that have to be measured via global navigation satellite services (GNSS). This work demonstrates that good results can nevertheless be obtained with standard telecom dense wavelength-division multiplexing (DWDM) transceivers over long time periods (years). More importantly, a simple wavelength-symmetric repeater is proposed that can be used to cancel the detrimental effects of wavelength drifts and which lessens the need for link recalibrations after transceiver replacements. In a proof-of-concept test setup, timing drift due to wavelength drift of a repeater laser is reduced by approximately two orders of magnitude.

Fault Detection in Induction Motor Using Time Domain and Spectral Imaging-Based Transfer Learning Approach on Vibration Data.

The induction motor plays a vital role in industrial drive systems due to its robustness and easy maintenance but at the same time, it suffers electrical faults, mainly rotor faults such as broken rotor bars. Early shortcoming identification is needed to lessen support expenses and hinder high costs by using failure detection frameworks that give features extraction and pattern grouping of the issue to distinguish the failure in an induction motor using classification models. In this paper, the open-source dataset of the rotor with the broken bars in a three-phase induction motor available on the IEEE data port is used for fault classification. The study aims at fault identification under various loading conditions on the rotor of an induction motor by performing time, frequency, and time-frequency domain feature extraction. The extracted features are provided to the models to classify between the healthy and faulty rotors. The extracted features from the time and frequency domain give an accuracy of up to 87.52% and 88.58%, respectively, using the Random-Forest (RF) model. Whereas, in time-frequency, the Short Time Fourier Transform (STFT) based spectrograms provide reasonably high accuracy, around 97.67%, using a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based fine-tuned transfer learning framework for diagnosing induction motor rotor bar severity under various loading conditions.

Strain Analysis in Cementless Hip Femoral Prosthesis using the Finite Element Method - Influence of the Variability of the Angular Positioning of the Implant / Análise da deformação na prótese femoral não cimentada do quadril pelo método de elementos finitos - Influência da variabilidade do posicionamento angular do implante

Abstract Objective The present study aims to evaluate the influence of different positioning of the hip femoral prosthesis on the stress and strain over this implant. Methods A femoral prosthesis (Taper - Víncula, Rio Claro, SP, Brazil) was submitted to a stress and strain analysis using the finite element method (FEM) according to the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 7206-6 Implants for surgery - Partial and total hip joint prostheses - Part 6: Endurance properties testing and performance requirements of neck region of stemmed femoral components standard. The analysis proposed a branch of the physical test with a +/− 5° angle variation on the standard proposed for α and β variables. Results The isolated +/− 5° variation on the α angle, as well as the association of +/− 5° variation on the α and β angles, presented significant statistical differences compared with the control strain (p= 0.027 and 0.021, respectively). Variation on angle β alone did not result in a significant change in the strain of the prosthesis (p= 0.128). The stem positioning with greatest implant strain was α = 5° and β = 14° (p= 0.032). Conclusion A variation on the positioning of the prosthetic femoral stem by +/− 5° in the coronal plane and/or the association of a +/− 5° angle in coronal and sagittal planes significantly influenced implant strain.

Resumo Objetivo Avaliar a influência da variação do posicionamento da prótese femoral do quadril na tensão e na deformação produzidas neste implante. Métodos Utilizou-se a análise de tensão e de deformação da prótese femoral (Taper, Víncula, Rio Claro, SP, Brasil) pelo método de elementos finitos (MEF) de acordo com a norma ISO 7206-6 Implants for surgery - Partial and total hip joint prostheses-Part 6: Endurance properties testing and performance requirements of neck region of stemmed femoral components. A análise propôs uma ramificação do ensaio físico, com variação da angulação de +/− 5° sobre a proposta normativa das variáveis α e β. Resultados Ao comparar com a deformação controle, houve significância estatística com a angulação isolada de +/− 5° do ângulo α, bem como com a associação de +/− 5° nas angulações α e β (p= 0,027 e 0,021, respectivamente). Já com a variação apenas do ângulo β, não houve variação significativa na deformação da prótese (p= 0,128). A posição da haste com maior deformação no implante foi com α = 5° e β = 14° (p= 0,032). Conclusão A variabilidade de posicionamento da haste femoral protética de +/− 5° no plano coronal e/ou a associação da angulação de +/− 5° nos planos coronal e sagital interferiu de forma significativa na deformação do implante.

Frequency down-conversion based on optical cascading process-New effective way for generation of far infrared or THz radiation.

Infrared and THz optics has many promising practical applications such as in spectroscopy, diagnostic, optical metrology, sensing, and many others. Due to limited number of IR radiation sources, the frequency down-conversion processes are widely used for obtaining infrared radiation. Among them, the most applicable method is a generation of wave with difference frequency under the three-waves interaction in a medium with quadratic nonlinear response. Below we propose a new effective tool for three times decreasing frequency of the incident pulse based on three-waves interaction in a medium with the quadratic susceptibility. At such interaction, a medium's response inherent cubic non-linearity appears due to so-called cascading SHG. The frequency down-conversion process possesses two stable modes. This is shown using multi-scale method. For each of the modes, the analytical solution is developed in the framework of the long pulse duration approximation without using the pump energy non-depletion approximation. The computer simulation results confirm those of analytical analysis. We show that the conversion efficiency of the incidentpump pulse energy achieves about 70%, if the low frequency wave incident intensity equals zero, or almost 100%, if the incident intensity of the low frequency wave is non-zero. The developed theoretical approach may be applied to other processes of the frequency down-conversion.

Optical Polarization Division Multiplexing Transmission System Based on Simplified Twin-SSB Modulation.

Optical twin-single sideband (Twin-SSB) modulation, due to the left sideband (LSB) and right sideband (RSB) signal carrying individual data, has become an attractive technique in fiber transmission because it satisfies the demand of the explosive increase in data traffic. This paper focuses on reducing the complexity of Twin-SSB system and further enhancing the spectral efficiency by proposing a polarization division multiplexing (PDM) Twin-SSB modulation scheme. LSB and RSB signals are extracted using de-mapping algorithm instead of optical bandpass filters (OBPFs) to reduce system complexity. To further improve spectral efficiency, PDM is employed to meet the polarization multiplexing transmission and achieve a higher transmission capacity. Based on the PDM Twin-SSB system, the LSB is 3-arr phase-shift-keying (3PSK) modulated, while RSB is quadrature phase-shift keying (QPSK) modulated. We simulated that the bit error ratio (BER) performance of LSB and RSB of X-polarization (X-Pol) and Y-polarization (Y-Pol) at 8-Gbaud, 10-Gbaud, 12-Gbaud, 14-Gbaud, and 16-Gbaud in the case of back-to-back (BTB) and 2 km standard single-mode fiber (SSMF) transmission. The simulation results verify the effectiveness and practical feasibility of the proposed PDM Twin-SSB scheme for future short-distance transmission owing to low cost, simplified structure, low algorithm complexity, and high data transmission capacity.

Narrow Linewidth Half-Open-Cavity Random Laser Assisted by a Three-Grating Ring Resonator for Strain Detection.

A stabilized narrow-linewidth random fiber laser for strain detection, based on a three-grating ring (TGR) resonator and half-open-cavity structure, is proposed and investigated experimentally. The half-open-cavity structure proved to provide double optical gain of erbium-doped fiber, which was beneficial to increase the photon lifetime as well as further narrow the linewidth. Meanwhile, the stability and frequency noise of narrow lasing output was improved by suppressing the competition-induced undesired residual random lasing modes with the TGR resonator. The TGR resonator is composed of a double-cavity fiber Bragg grating Fabry-Perot (FBG-FP) interferometer, a section of single-mode fiber, and a circulator. The specially designed double-cavity FBG-FP interferometer embedded in the TGR resonator acted as the strain-sensing element and improved the resolution of the dynamic strain. A stable ultra-narrow linewidth of about 205 Hz was obtained. The frequency noise was reduced to about 2 Hz/√Hz. A high dynamic strain measuring resolution of 35 femto-strain (fε)/√Hz was achieved.

Miniaturizing a Chip-Scale Spectrometer Using Local Strain Engineering and Total-Variation Regularized Reconstruction.

A wafer-thin chip-scale portable spectrometer suitable for wearable applications based on a reconstructive algorithm was demonstrated. A total of 16 spectral encoders that simultaneously functioned as photodetectors were monolithically integrated on a chip area of 0.16 mm2 by applying local strain engineering in compressively strained InGaN/GaN multiple quantum well heterostructures. The built-in GaN pn junction enabled a direct photocurrent measurement. A non-negative least-squares (NNLS) algorithm with total-variation regularization and a choice of a proper kernel function was shown to deliver a decent spectral reconstruction performance in the wavelength range of 400-645 nm. The accuracies of spectral peak positions and intensity ratios between peaks were found to be 0.97% and 10.4%, respectively. No external optics, such as collimation optics and apertures, were used, enabled by angle-insensitive light-harvesting structures, including an array of cone-shaped backreflectors fabricated on the underside of the sapphire substrate.

Low-voltage driving high-resistance liquid crystal micro-lens with electrically tunable depth of field for the light field imaging system.

Light field imaging (LFI) based on Liquid crystal microlens array (LC MLAs) are emerging as a significant area for 3D imaging technology in the field of upcoming Internet of things and artificial intelligence era. However, in scenes of LFI through conventional MLAs, such as biological imaging and medicine imaging, the quality of imaging reconstruction will be severely reduced due to the limited depth of field. Here, we are proposed a low-voltage driving LC MLAs with electrically tunable depth of field (DOF) for the LFI system. An aluminum-doped zinc oxide (AZO) film was deposited on the top of the hole-patterned driven-electrode arrays and used as a high resistance (Hi-R) layer, a uniform gradient electric field was obtained across the sandwiched LC cell. Experimental results confirm that the proposed LC MLAs possess high-quality interference rings and tunable focal length at a lower working voltage. In addition, the focal lengths are tunable from 3.93 to 2.62 mm and the DOF are adjustable from 15.60 to 1.23 mm. The experiments demonstrated that the LFI system based on the proposed structure can clearly capture 3D information of the insets with enlarged depths by changing the working voltage and driving frequency, which indicates that the tunable DOF LC MLAs have a potential application prospects for the biological and medical imaging.

Watt-level gigahertz femtosecond fiber laser system at 920 nm.

We demonstrate a watt-level femtosecond fiber laser system at 0.9 µm with a repetition rate of >1 GHz, which is the highest value reported so far for a fundamental mode-locked fiber laser. The fiber laser system is seeded by a fundamental mode-locked fiber laser constructed with a home-made highly Nd3+-doped fiber. After external amplification and pulse compression, an output power of 1.75 W and a pulse duration of 309 fs are obtained. This compact fiber laser system is expected to be a promising laser source for biological applications, particularly two-photon excitation microscopy.

Compact multicolor two-photon fluorescence microscopy enabled by tailorable continuum generation from self-phase modulation and dispersive wave generation.

By precisely managing fiber-optic nonlinearity with anomalous dispersion, we have demonstrated the control of generating plural few-optical-cycle pulses based on a 24-MHz Chromium:forsterite laser, allowing multicolor two-photon tissue imaging by wavelength mixing. The formation of high-order soliton and its efficient coupling to dispersive wave generation leads to phase-matched spectral broadening, and we have obtained a broadband continuum ranging from 830 nm to 1200 nm, delivering 5-nJ pulses with a pulse width of 10.5 fs using a piece of large-mode-area fiber. We locate the spectral enhancement at around 920 nm for the two-photon excitation of green fluorophores, and we can easily compress the resulting pulse close to its limited duration without the need for active pulse shaping. To optimize the wavelength mixing for sum-frequency excitation, we have realized the management of the power ratio and group delay between the soliton and dispersive wave by varying the initial pulse energy without additional delay control. We have thus demonstrated simultaneous three-color two-photon tissue imaging with contrast management between different signals. Our source optimization leads to efficient two-photon excitation reaching a 500-µm imaging depth under a low 14-mW illumination power. We believe our source development leads to an efficient and compact approach for driving multicolor two-photon fluorescence microscopy and other ultrafast investigations, such as strong-field-driven applications.

Fatigue damage assessment of complex railway turnout crossings via Peridynamics-based digital twin.

Railway turnouts are essential in the train traffic route management for modern railways. Despite significant devotion to railway turnout research, one of their most common failures has not been thoroughly investigated, which is a fatigue over the turnout crossing nose. At the crossings, wheel-rail discontinuity imparts high-frequency high-magnitude forces, which are the source of fatigue failure over the crossing nose. In this study, a novel approach built on "Peridynamics" (PD) has been developed to obtain new insights into the fatigue cracks. A recent approach using "crack on mid-plane" has also been employed in this study to enhance the limited capability of Peridynamics. This paper is the world's first to investigate fatigue failures over a crossing nose from fracture mechanics perspective. This paper also introduces a novel adaptive time-mapping method as an alternative to earlier time-mapping methods for fatigue models proposed in the open literature. The new model has been verified against both Finite Element Method and experimental data. It reveals that our new approach can simulate fatigue damage, particularly in mode I crack propagation. The study has provided important insights on the fatigue crack development, which is not possible before by existing Peridynamics fatigue model. The new approach on the basis of "adaptive time-mapping" and "crack on mid-plane" is demonstrated to be effective and efficient in PD simulations.

Recent Progress in Long-Range Brillouin Optical Correlation Domain Analysis.

Distributed optical fiber sensing technology has been widely applied in the areas of infrastructure health monitoring, national defense security, etc. The long-range high-spatial-resolution Brillouin optical correlation domain analysis (BOCDA) has extensive development and application prospects. In this paper, long-range BOCDAs are introduced and summarized. Several creative methods underpinning measurement range enlargement, including the interval enhancement of the adjacent correlation peak (CP), improvements in the signal-to-noise ratio, and the concurrent interrogation of multiple CPs, are discussed and experimentally verified, respectively. The main drawbacks in the present BOCDA schemes and avenues for future research and development have also been prospected.

Extraction-Dominated Temperature Degradation of Population Inversion in Terahertz Quantum Cascade Lasers.

Degraded population inversion (PI) at elevated temperature, regarded as an important temperature degradation factor in terahertz quantum cascade lasers (THz QCL), has hindered the widespread use of these devices. Herein, the mechanism of the temperature degradation of PI is investigated microscopically. It is demonstrated that the limited extraction efficiency of the extraction system dominates the decrease of PI at elevated temperatures. To be specific, the increased temperature brings about intense thermally activated longitudinal optical phonon scattering, leading to large amounts of electrons scattering to lower level state. In this case, the resonant-phonon extraction system is incapable of depleting all the electrons from lower level states. So even though the resonant-tunneling injection seems efficient enough to compensate the electron runoff at the upper state, the electron density at lower level state increases and the overall PI turns out lower. In addition, it is found that strong electron-ionized donor separation at high temperature can induce level misalignment, which can stagger the optimal conditions of injection and extraction. Also, the extraction efficiency gets lower as the extraction system requires accurate coupling between several energy levels.