The control performance of the reluctance actuator maglev system is seriously affected by inherent nonlinearities (e.g. hysteresis, eddy current, flux leakage, etc.) and external disturbances. To this end, paper proposes an enhanced unknown dynamics estimator (USDE)-based sliding mode (USDE-SMC) method a novel predictive-adaptive switching (PAS) controller (USDE-SMC-PAS). First, USDE incorporat...

In the previous chapters we have described several novel phase transitions exhibited by compounds with molecules having longitudinal components of permanent electric dipole moments. As described in Chapter-1, in the smectic C (SmC) phase, the constituent molecules are tilted in the smectic layers. The SmC liquid crystal is made of compounds with molecules having lateral components of dipole mom...

The probability hypothesis density (PHD) filter suffers from lack of precise estimation of the expected number of targets. The Cardinalized PHD (CPHD) recursion, as a generalization of the PHD recursion, remedies this flaw and simultaneously propagates the intensity function and the posterior cardinality distribution. While there are a few new approaches to enhance the Sequential Monte Carlo (S...

In recent years Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) algorithms have been applied to capture the motion of humans. In this paper we apply a SMC algorithm to capture the motion of an articulated chain, e.g., a human arm, and show how the SMC algorithm can be improved in this context by applying auxiliary information. In parallel to a model-based approach we detect skin color blobs in the image as our au...

Organization and segregation of replicated chromosomes are essential processes during cell division in all organisms. Similar to eukaryotes, bacteria possess centromere-like DNA sequences (parS) that cluster at the origin of replication and the structural maintenance of chromosomes (SMC) complexes for faithful chromosome segregation. In Bacillus subtilis, parS sites are bound by the partitionin...

The structural maintenance of chromosomes (SMC) complexes are associated with transcriptional enhancers, promoters and insulators, where they contribute to the control of gene expression and genome structure. We review here recent insights into the interlinked roles of SMC complexes in gene expression and genome architecture. Among these, we note evidence that SMC complexes play important roles...

BACKGROUND Cardiac allograft vasculopathy (AV) is a pathological process of vascular remodeling leading to late graft loss following cardiac transplantation. While there is consensus that AV is alloimmune mediated, and evidence that the most important alloimmune target is medial smooth muscle cells (SMC), the role of the innate immune response in the initiation of this disease is still being el...

Quiescent smooth muscle cells (SMC) in normal artery express a pattern of actin isoforms with alpha-smooth muscle (alpha SM) predominance that switches to beta predominance when the cells are proliferating. We have examined the relationship between the change in actin isoforms and entry of SMC into the growth cycle in an in vivo model of SMC proliferation (balloon injured rat carotid artery). a...

We investigated whether the functional connections to the primary sensorimotor cortex (SMC) at rest are abnormal in 26 patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and whether such changes are related to the corticospinal tract (CST) damage, measured using diffusion tensor magnetic resonance imaging (DT MRI). ALS patients versus controls showed a significantly increased functional connecti...

Rabbit abdominal aortic smooth muscle cells (SMC) were stably transfected with the cDNA of porcine phospholipid hydroperoxide glutathione peroxidase (PHGPx) by means of a retroviral gene transfer technique, to create a model for studying cellular processes relevant to atherogenesis. The transfected cells (SMC/PHGPx) had approximately 4-fold higher PHGPx activity when cultured in the presence of...