Surgical instruments are often strongly contaminated with patients' blood and tissues, possibly containing pathogens. The reuse of contaminated instruments without adequate cleaning and sterilization can cause postoperative inflammation and the transmission of infectious diseases from one patient to another. Thus, based on the stringent sterility requirements, the development of highly efficien...

Campylobacter is responsible for human bacterial enteritis and poultry meat is recognised as a primary source of infection. In slaughterhouses, cleaning and disinfection procedures are performed daily, and it has been suggested that disinfectant molecules might select for antibiotic resistant strains if shared targets or combined resistance mechanisms were involved. The aim of the study was to ...

Two kinds of air duct cleaning methods, mechanical brushing with different brushes and compressed air cleaning, were compared in the laboratory and in newly built buildings. The ducts were contaminated either with test dust or with dust originated from a construction site. The amount of dust on the duct surface was measured with the vacuum test method and estimated visually before and after the...

Data cleaning is the process of detecting and repairing inaccurate or corrupt records in the data. Data cleaning is inherently human-driven and state of the art systems assume cleaning experts can access the data to tune the cleaning process. However, in sensitive datasets, like electronic medical records, privacy constraints disallow unfettered access to the data. To address this challenge, we...

Early pipeline milking systems were commonly flooded during cleaning. Flood cleaning is practical for systems with small diameter milklines, short pipelines and few milking units. Flood cleaning becomes impractical as milkline diameter and length and the number of milking units is increased. Excessive water volume is required and the flow velocities and corresponding mechanical cleaning action ...

The Lotus has been the symbol of purity for thousands of years; contaminations and pathogens are washed off the surfaces of Lotus and some other plants with rain or even dew. After the introduction of scanning electron microscopy, we were able to resolve the mechanism behind this phenomenon. It took some further decades before in-depth studies on self-cleaning with plants were conducted and the...

We present a domain independent platform for data cleaning developed as part of the Data Cleaning project at Microsoft Research. Our platform consists of a set of core primitives and design tools that allow a programmer to develop sophisticated data cleaning solutions with minimal programming effort. Our primitives are designed to allow rich domain and application specific customizations and ca...

Plasma cleaning of solid surfaces is one of the hot topics of the very fast developing field of plasma treatment of materials. Plasma cleaning has been implemented already in several industries such as semiconductor processing and microchip fabrication, metallurgy, the optical industry, dentistry, medical technologies, food packaging – to name just the most important areas. Understanding the ba...