Occupational exposures to glucocorticoids are still a neglected issue in some work environments, including pharmaceutical plants. We developed an analytical method to quantify simultaneously 21 glucocorticoids using UPLC coupled with mass spectrometry to provide a basis to carry out environmental monitoring. Samples were taken from air, hand-washing tests, pad-tests and wipe-tests. This paper r...

During an investigation conducted December 17-20, 2001, we collected environmental samples from a U.S. postal facility in Washington, D.C., known to be extensively contaminated with Bacillus anthracis spores. Because methods for collecting and analyzing B. anthracis spores have not yet been validated, our objective was to compare the relative effectiveness of sampling methods used for collectin...

Sample collection for Ion Mobility Spectrometry (IMS) analysis is typically completed by swiping a collection wipe over a suspect surface to collect trace residues. The work presented here addresses the need for a method to measure the collection efficiency performance of surface wipe materials as a function of the number of times a wipe is used to interrogate a surface. The primary purpose of ...

background and aim. the aim of the present study was to evaluate the frequency, extension and severity of the gingival recession in a greek adult population sample. materials and methods. the study was performed on 800 patients, 336 males and 446 females between 18-77 years old, which sought dental treatment in a private dental practice. all measurements of recession depth and width were done w...

The objective of the study was to evaluate the detection efficiency of micro-vacuum surface sampling and surface wet wipe sampling in homes that had been identified with vermiculite attic insulation and/or other asbestos containing materials. Surface samples were collected pre and post weatherization activities and analyzed by transmission electron microscopy. Baseline sampling revealed that we...

The detection of transitions between shots in video programs is an important rst step in analyzing video content. The wipe is a frequently used transitional form between shots. Wipe detection is more involved than the detection of abrupt and other gradual transitions because a wipe may take various patterns and because of the diiculty in discriminating a wipe from object and camera motion. In t...

This paper presents a novel algorithm for wipe scene change detection in video sequences. In the proposed scheme, each image in the sequence is mapped to a reduced image. Then we use statistical features and structural properties of the images to identify wipe transition region. Finally, Hough transform is used to analyse the wiping pattern and the direction of wiping. Results show that the alg...

We show that the F-test can be both liberal and conservative in the context of a particular type of nonspherical behaviour induced by spatial autocorrelation, and that the conservative variant is more likely to occur for extreme values of the spatial autocorrelation parameter. In particular, it will wipe out the progressive one as the sample size increases.