Search results for "structures"
showing 10 items of 4815 documents
Thermally Induced Structural Modification of Silica Nanoparticles Investigated by Raman and Infrared Absorption Spectroscopies
2010
We report an experimental investigation by Raman and infrared (IR) absorption spectroscopies on the structural modifications induced by isochronal thermal treatments on amorphous SiO2 nanoparticles (fumed silica). In particular, three different commercial types of this material, characterized by particle mean diameters of 7, 14, and 40 nm, were subjected to thermal treatments from 100 up to 1000 °C. We found that some properties of fumed silica, such as the SiOSi mean bond angle, ring size distribution, and surface adsorbed water content, are drastically different from those of common bulk silica materials and intimately related to the particles' dimension. The SiOSi mean bond angle, probed…
Nickel-Indium Sulphide Core-Shell Nonostructures Obtained by Spray-ILGAR Deposition
2013
Ni nanowires (NWs) of different lengths were fabricated by pulsed potentiostatic deposition within pores of polycarbonate membranes. After template dissolution, substrates underwent sequential Spray-ILGAR® depositions of thin indium sulphide films. The effect of deposition temperature was also investigated. For low number of deposition cycles, results showed complete and uniform covering of metal over the entire length of NWs, with formation of Ni - In2S3 core-shell structures. However, with increasing number of deposition cycles films became uneven and crusty, especially at higher temperatures, owing to the simultaneous formation of nickel sulfide. This drawback was almost eliminated doubl…
“In situ” corneal and contact lens thickness changes with high resolution OCT
2012
Purpose: To show the utility of high resolution spectral domain optical coherence tomography (HR SOCT) for the in situ evaluation of epithelial, stromal and contact lens (CL) thickness changes under closed-eye conditions without lens removal. Settings: Clinical and Experimental Optometry Research Lab, University of Minho, Portugal. Methods: Eight young healthy patients wore a thick soft CL during 90 minutes under closed-eye conditions and measures of epithelial and stromal corneal thickness were obtained at regular intervals using a HR SOCT (Copernicus HR, Optopol Tech. SA, Poland). Results: Minimal changes in epithelial thickness were detected with a transient statistically significant inc…
Early and late clinical landmarks of corneal dystrophies
2020
Abstract Corneal dystrophies (CDs) represent a heterogenous group of genetic diseases (Lisch and Weiss, 2019). The International Committee of Classification of Corneal Dystrophies (IC3D) distinguishes between 22 distinct forms of corneal dystrophy (CD) which are predominantly autosomal dominant, although autosomal recessive and X-chromosomal dominant and recessive patterns do exist. A detailed corneal examination of as many affected family members as possible can show the phenotypic differences of the various generations. There are few publications which describe the different CDs with regard to the early and late phenotypes. According to early and late phenotype, three types of CD are gene…
Granulometric analysis of corneal endothelium specular images by using a germ–grain model
2007
Specular microscopy is widely used to study the human corneal endothelium status in vivo. In this paper, the corneal endothelium is represented as a binary image composed of the cell inscribed circles. The granulometric distribution function of the complement of this image is used as a functional descriptor, which provides information about the shape, size and spatial arrangement of cells. Experimental evaluation using bootstrap techniques shows its ability to discriminate between controls and pathological cases. It represents a reliable and graphical alternative to the classical indices (cell density, hexagonality and coefficient of variation of cell areas), which behave poorly when detect…
Corneal Oxygen Supply Conditions
1976
Pronounced cornea hypoxia induces swelling and a loss of transparency. Hypoxia of longer duration causes necrosis, particularly of the corneal endothelium. These findings were observed after ligation of the cilial arteries and the arteria carotis interna, after reduction of oxygen tension on the anterior corneal surface as well as after prolonged wearing of ill-fitted contact lenses (11, 15, 18, 22, 23). Because the normal function of the corneal endothelium plays a central role in maintaining transparency, an insufficient endothelial oxygen supply can directly influence vision (3, 17).
A granulometric analysis of specular microscopy images of human corneal endothelia
2005
The inner layer of the human cornea, called the corneal endothelium, plays an important role in the maintenance of corneal transparency. Specular microscopy is the most widely used technique to study the corneal endothelium in vivo. Improvements in technology have allowed us to obtain good quality specular images, but the detection and quantification of small size-shape cell changes is not obvious, specially when the physician wants to evaluate endothelial cell changes after some surgical procedures. This paper proposes a methodology to analyze specular microscopy images. Every corneal endothelium is described by means of different cumulative distribution functions or some moments (mean, st…
Measuring the Spatial Homogeneity in Corneal Endotheliums by Means of a Randomization Test
1999
Quantification of regularity of cell sizes and the spatial arrangement of cells in corneal endotheliums becomes of a great importance associated to stress situations such as cataract surgery, corneal transplantation or implantation of intra-ocular lenses. A new index of regularity of the spatial distribution of cell sizes in corneal endotheliums is proposed. The corneal endothelium is described by means of a spatial marked point pattern (the cell centroids marked with the cell areas). The hypothesis of no dependency between mark and locations is tested by a Monte Carlo test. The new index is the p-value of the test validating the hypothesis. Pairs of endotheliums from different eyes of the …
Classifying human endothelial cells based on individual granulometric size distributions
2002
Abstract This paper presents an application to a medical problem of methods of shape analysis based on mathematical morphology. The medical problem consists on the detection of abnormalities in the corneal endothelium, a tissue composed by quasi-planar cells of ideally regular hexagonal shape. Images of this tissue are taken by a specular microscope and used to evaluate the corneal endothelium status. Up to now, cell density, hexagonality and an analysis of cell areas are the usual descriptors of a corneal endothelium. These parameters are not sensitive enough to detect subtle lesions. What this paper proposes is an analysis based on granulometries, which are size-shape descriptors widely u…
Set Descriptors for Visual Evaluation of Human Corneal Endothelia
2001
Images of corneal endothelium obtained from specular microscopy are of great importance in the evaluation of the corneal endothelium status. Several commercial tools provide some numerical descriptors to characterize these images in terms of cell density, hexagonality, and some descriptive statistics of the cell areas. However, it is a too simple analysis that only detects severe abnormal endothelia with many irregular and large cells. Detection of subtle abnormalities needs a more refined analysis. This paper proposes a shape-size descriptor based on some modified versions of the geometric covariogram. This descriptor is presented as a valid alternative to the classical analysis that provi…