A novel method for automatic ultra-precision alignment is presented.This method relies on the modified Moiré technique,and alignment marks are used in the form of gratings.The modified Moiré technique can ef...A novel method for automatic ultra-precision alignment is presented.This method relies on the modified Moiré technique,and alignment marks are used in the form of gratings.The modified Moiré technique can effectively improve detecting sensitivity of signals and simplify the control system by using only one pair of laser-Moiré sensors.We present the mathematical model and simulation results of diffracting two gratings.The effect of various parameters on Moiré signals is studied theoretically and experimentally,and the results are found to be consistent.A computer controlled alignment device using one pair of Moiré sensors is designed.The device can achieve a fully automatic precision alignment by the modified Moiré signal.The experimental result shows that the alignment device can obtain the resolution of 5 nm and the positioning accuracy of ±0 5 μm.展开更多
In this paper, a two-dimensional(2D) DOA estimation algorithm of coherent signals with a separated linear acoustic vector-sensor(AVS) array consisting of two sparse AVS arrays is proposed. Firstly,the partitioned spat...In this paper, a two-dimensional(2D) DOA estimation algorithm of coherent signals with a separated linear acoustic vector-sensor(AVS) array consisting of two sparse AVS arrays is proposed. Firstly,the partitioned spatial smoothing(PSS) technique is used to construct a block covariance matrix, so as to decorrelate the coherency of signals. Then a signal subspace can be obtained by singular value decomposition(SVD) of the covariance matrix. Using the signal subspace, two extended signal subspaces are constructed to compensate aperture loss caused by PSS.The elevation angles can be estimated by estimation of signal parameter via rotational invariance techniques(ESPRIT) algorithm. At last, the estimated elevation angles can be used to estimate automatically paired azimuth angles. Compared with some other ESPRIT algorithms, the proposed algorithm shows higher estimation accuracy, which can be proved through the simulation results.展开更多
From a medical perspective,the 12 leads of the heart in an electrocardiogram(ECG)signal have functional dependencies with each other.Therefore,all these leads report different aspects of an arrhythmia.Their difference...From a medical perspective,the 12 leads of the heart in an electrocardiogram(ECG)signal have functional dependencies with each other.Therefore,all these leads report different aspects of an arrhythmia.Their differences lie in the level of highlighting and displaying information about that arrhythmia.For example,although all leads show traces of atrial excitation,this function is more evident in lead II than in any other lead.In this article,a new model was proposed using ECG functional and structural dependencies between heart leads.In the prescreening stage,the ECG signals are segmented from the QRS point so that further analyzes can be performed on these segments in a more detailed manner.The mutual information indices were used to assess the relationship between leads.In order to calculate mutual information,the correlation between the 12 ECG leads has been calculated.The output of this step is a matrix containing all mutual information.Furthermore,to calculate the structural information of ECG signals,a capsule neural network was implemented to aid physicians in the automatic classification of cardiac arrhythmias.The architecture of this capsule neural network has been modified to perform the classification task.In the experimental results section,the proposed model was used to classify arrhythmias in ECG signals from the Chapman dataset.Numerical evaluations showed that this model has a precision of 97.02%,recall of 96.13%,F1-score of 96.57%and accuracy of 97.38%,indicating acceptable performance compared to other state-of-the-art methods.The proposed method shows an average accuracy of 2%superiority over similar works.展开更多
Stirred reactors are key equipment in production,and unpredictable failures will result in significant economic losses and safety issues.Therefore,it is necessary to monitor its health state.To achieve this goal,in th...Stirred reactors are key equipment in production,and unpredictable failures will result in significant economic losses and safety issues.Therefore,it is necessary to monitor its health state.To achieve this goal,in this study,five states of the stirred reactor were firstly preset:normal,shaft bending,blade eccentricity,bearing wear,and bolt looseness.Vibration signals along x,y and z axes were collected and analyzed in both the time domain and frequency domain.Secondly,93 statistical features were extracted and evaluated by ReliefF,Maximal Information Coefficient(MIC)and XGBoost.The above evaluation results were then fused by D-S evidence theory to extract the final 16 features that are most relevant to the state of the stirred reactor.Finally,the CatBoost algorithm was introduced to establish the stirred reactor health monitoring model.The validation results showed that the model achieves 100%accuracy in detecting the fault/normal state of the stirred reactor and 98%accuracy in diagnosing the type of fault.展开更多
Seismic imaging of complicated underground structures with severe surface undulation(i.e.,double complex areas)is challenging owing to the difficulty of collecting the very weak reflected signal.Enhancing the weak sig...Seismic imaging of complicated underground structures with severe surface undulation(i.e.,double complex areas)is challenging owing to the difficulty of collecting the very weak reflected signal.Enhancing the weak signal is difficult even with state-of-the-art multi-domain and multidimensional prestack denoising techniques.This paper presents a time–space dip analysis of offset vector tile(OVT)domain data based on theτ-p transform.The proposed N-th root slant stack method enhances the signal in a three-dimensionalτ-p domain by establishing a zero-offset time-dip seismic attribute trace and calculating the coherence values of a given data sub-volume(i.e.,inline,crossline,time),which are then used to recalculate the data.After sorting,the new data provide a solid foundation for obtaining the optimal N value of the N-th root slant stack,which is used to enhance a weak signal.The proposed method was applied to denoising low signal-to-noise ratio(SNR)data from Western China.The optimal N value was determined for improving the SNR in deep strata,and the weak seismic signal was enhanced.The results showed that the proposed method effectively suppressed noise in low-SNR data.展开更多
In this paper,we reconstruct strongly-decaying block sparse signals by the block generalized orthogonal matching pursuit(BgOMP)algorithm in the l2-bounded noise case.Under some restraints on the minimum magnitude of t...In this paper,we reconstruct strongly-decaying block sparse signals by the block generalized orthogonal matching pursuit(BgOMP)algorithm in the l2-bounded noise case.Under some restraints on the minimum magnitude of the nonzero elements of the strongly-decaying block sparse signal,if the sensing matrix satisfies the the block restricted isometry property(block-RIP),then arbitrary strongly-decaying block sparse signals can be accurately and steadily reconstructed by the BgOMP algorithm in iterations.Furthermore,we conjecture that this condition is sharp.展开更多
The global incidence of infectious diseases has increased in recent years,posing a significant threat to human health.Hospitals typically serve as frontline institutions for detecting infectious diseases.However,accur...The global incidence of infectious diseases has increased in recent years,posing a significant threat to human health.Hospitals typically serve as frontline institutions for detecting infectious diseases.However,accurately identifying warning signals of infectious diseases in a timely manner,especially emerging infectious diseases,can be challenging.Consequently,there is a pressing need to integrate treatment and disease prevention data to conduct comprehensive analyses aimed at preventing and controlling infectious diseases within hospitals.This paper examines the role of medical data in the early identification of infectious diseases,explores early warning technologies for infectious disease recognition,and assesses monitoring and early warning mechanisms for infectious diseases.We propose that hospitals adopt novel multidimensional early warning technologies to mine and analyze medical data from various systems,in compliance with national strategies to integrate clinical treatment and disease prevention.Furthermore,hospitals should establish institution-specific,clinical-based early warning models for infectious diseases to actively monitor early signals and enhance preparedness for infectious disease prevention and control.展开更多
As modern communication technology advances apace,the digital communication signals identification plays an important role in cognitive radio networks,the communication monitoring and management systems.AI has become ...As modern communication technology advances apace,the digital communication signals identification plays an important role in cognitive radio networks,the communication monitoring and management systems.AI has become a promising solution to this problem due to its powerful modeling capability,which has become a consensus in academia and industry.However,because of the data-dependence and inexplicability of AI models and the openness of electromagnetic space,the physical layer digital communication signals identification model is threatened by adversarial attacks.Adversarial examples pose a common threat to AI models,where well-designed and slight perturbations added to input data can cause wrong results.Therefore,the security of AI models for the digital communication signals identification is the premise of its efficient and credible applications.In this paper,we first launch adversarial attacks on the end-to-end AI model for automatic modulation classifi-cation,and then we explain and present three defense mechanisms based on the adversarial principle.Next we present more detailed adversarial indicators to evaluate attack and defense behavior.Finally,a demonstration verification system is developed to show that the adversarial attack is a real threat to the digital communication signals identification model,which should be paid more attention in future research.展开更多
Reconstituting membrane proteins in liposomes and determining their structure is a common method for determining membrane protein structures using single-particle cryo-electron microscopy(cryo-EM).However,the strong s...Reconstituting membrane proteins in liposomes and determining their structure is a common method for determining membrane protein structures using single-particle cryo-electron microscopy(cryo-EM).However,the strong signal of liposomes under cryo-EM imaging conditions often interferes with the structural determination of the embedded membrane proteins.Here,we propose a liposome signal subtraction method based on single-particle two-dimensional(2D)classification average images,aimed at enhancing the reconstruction resolution of membrane proteins.We analyzed the signal distribution characteristics of liposomes and proteins within the 2D classification average images of protein–liposome complexes in the frequency domain.Based on this analysis,we designed a method to subtract the liposome signals from the original particle images.After the subtraction,the accuracy of single-particle three-dimensional(3D)alignment was improved,enhancing the resolution of the final 3D reconstruction.We demonstrated this method using a PIEZO1-proteoliposome dataset by improving the resolution of the PIEZO1 protein.展开更多
Automatic modulation recognition(AMR)of radiation source signals is a research focus in the field of cognitive radio.However,the AMR of radiation source signals at low SNRs still faces a great challenge.Therefore,the ...Automatic modulation recognition(AMR)of radiation source signals is a research focus in the field of cognitive radio.However,the AMR of radiation source signals at low SNRs still faces a great challenge.Therefore,the AMR method of radiation source signals based on two-dimensional data matrix and improved residual neural network is proposed in this paper.First,the time series of the radiation source signals are reconstructed into two-dimensional data matrix,which greatly simplifies the signal preprocessing process.Second,the depthwise convolution and large-size convolutional kernels based residual neural network(DLRNet)is proposed to improve the feature extraction capability of the AMR model.Finally,the model performs feature extraction and classification on the two-dimensional data matrix to obtain the recognition vector that represents the signal modulation type.Theoretical analysis and simulation results show that the AMR method based on two-dimensional data matrix and improved residual network can significantly improve the accuracy of the AMR method.The recognition accuracy of the proposed method maintains a high level greater than 90% even at -14 dB SNR.展开更多
A model of continuous-time insider trading in which a risk-neutral in-sider possesses two imperfect correlated signals of a risky asset is studied.By conditional expectation theory and filtering theory,we first establ...A model of continuous-time insider trading in which a risk-neutral in-sider possesses two imperfect correlated signals of a risky asset is studied.By conditional expectation theory and filtering theory,we first establish three lemmas:normal corre-lation,equivalent pricing and equivalent profit,which can guarantee to turn our model into a model with insider knowing full information.Then we investigate the impact of the two correlated signals on the market equilibrium consisting of optimal insider trading strategy and semi-strong pricing rule.It shows that in the equilibrium,(1)the market depth is constant over time;(2)if the two noisy signals are not linerly correlated,then all private information of the insider is incorporated into prices in the end while the whole information on the asset value can not incorporated into prices in the end;(3)if the two noisy signals are linear correlated such that the insider can infer the whole information of the asset value,then our model turns into a model with insider knowing full information;(4)if the two noisy signals are the same then the total ex ant profit of the insider is increasing with the noise decreasing,while down to O as the noise going up to infinity;(5)if the two noisy signals are not linear correlated then with one noisy signal fixed,the total ex ante profit of the insider is single-peaked with a unique minimum with respect to the other noisy signal value,and furthermore as the noisy value going to O it gets its maximum,the profit in the case that the real value is observed.展开更多
With the wide application of drone technology,there is an increasing demand for the detection of radar return signals from drones.Existing detection methods mainly rely on time-frequency domain feature extraction and ...With the wide application of drone technology,there is an increasing demand for the detection of radar return signals from drones.Existing detection methods mainly rely on time-frequency domain feature extraction and classical machine learning algorithms for image recognition.This method suffers from the problem of large dimensionality of image features,which leads to large input data size and noise affecting learning.Therefore,this paper proposes to extract signal time-domain statistical features for radar return signals from drones and reduce the feature dimension from 512×4 to 16 dimensions.However,the downscaled feature data makes the accuracy of traditional machine learning algorithms decrease,so we propose a new hybrid quantum neural network with signal feature overlay projection(HQNN-SFOP),which reduces the dimensionality of the signal by extracting the statistical features in the time domain of the signal,introduces the signal feature overlay projection to enhance the expression ability of quantum computation on the signal features,and introduces the quantum circuits to improve the neural network’s ability to obtain the inline relationship of features,thus improving the accuracy and migration generalization ability of drone detection.In order to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method,we experimented with the method using the MM model that combines the real parameters of five commercial drones and random drones parameters to generate data to simulate a realistic environment.The results show that the method based on statistical features in the time domain of the signal is able to extract features at smaller scales and obtain higher accuracy on a dataset with an SNR of 10 dB.On the time-domain feature data set,HQNNSFOP obtains the highest accuracy compared to other conventional methods.In addition,HQNN-SFOP has good migration generalization ability on five commercial drones and random drones data at different SNR conditions.Our method verifies the feasibility and effectiveness of signal detection methods based on quantum computation and experimentally demonstrates that the advantages of quantum computation for information processing are still valid in the field of signal processing,it provides a highly efficient method for the drone detection using radar return signals.展开更多
Temporal lobe epilepsy is a multifactorial neurological dysfunction syndrome that is refractory,resistant to antiepileptic drugs,and has a high recurrence rate.The pathogenesis of temporal lobe epilepsy is complex and...Temporal lobe epilepsy is a multifactorial neurological dysfunction syndrome that is refractory,resistant to antiepileptic drugs,and has a high recurrence rate.The pathogenesis of temporal lobe epilepsy is complex and is not fully understood.Intracellular calcium dynamics have been implicated in temporal lobe epilepsy.However,the effect of fluctuating calcium activity in CA1 pyramidal neurons on temporal lobe epilepsy is unknown,and no longitudinal studies have investigated calcium activity in pyramidal neurons in the hippocampal CA1 and primary motor cortex M1 of freely moving mice.In this study,we used a multichannel fiber photometry system to continuously record calcium signals in CA1 and M1 during the temporal lobe epilepsy process.We found that calcium signals varied according to the grade of temporal lobe epilepsy episodes.In particular,cortical spreading depression,which has recently been frequently used to represent the continuously and substantially increased calcium signals,was found to correspond to complex and severe behavioral characteristics of temporal lobe epilepsy ranging from gradeⅡto gradeⅤ.However,vigorous calcium oscillations and highly synchronized calcium signals in CA1 and M1 were strongly related to convulsive motor seizures.Chemogenetic inhibition of pyramidal neurons in CA1 significantly attenuated the amplitudes of the calcium signals corresponding to gradeⅠepisodes.In addition,the latency of cortical spreading depression was prolonged,and the above-mentioned abnormal calcium signals in CA1 and M1 were also significantly reduced.Intriguingly,it was possible to rescue the altered intracellular calcium dynamics.Via simultaneous analysis of calcium signals and epileptic behaviors,we found that the progression of temporal lobe epilepsy was alleviated when specific calcium signals were reduced,and that the end-point behaviors of temporal lobe epilepsy were improved.Our results indicate that the calcium dynamic between CA1 and M1 may reflect specific epileptic behaviors corresponding to different grades.Furthermore,the selective regulation of abnormal calcium signals in CA1 pyramidal neurons appears to effectively alleviate temporal lobe epilepsy,thereby providing a potential molecular mechanism for a new temporal lobe epilepsy diagnosis and treatment strategy.展开更多
This article presents an exhaustive comparative investigation into the accuracy of gender identification across diverse geographical regions,employing a deep learning classification algorithm for speech signal analysi...This article presents an exhaustive comparative investigation into the accuracy of gender identification across diverse geographical regions,employing a deep learning classification algorithm for speech signal analysis.In this study,speech samples are categorized for both training and testing purposes based on their geographical origin.Category 1 comprises speech samples from speakers outside of India,whereas Category 2 comprises live-recorded speech samples from Indian speakers.Testing speech samples are likewise classified into four distinct sets,taking into consideration both geographical origin and the language spoken by the speakers.Significantly,the results indicate a noticeable difference in gender identification accuracy among speakers from different geographical areas.Indian speakers,utilizing 52 Hindi and 26 English phonemes in their speech,demonstrate a notably higher gender identification accuracy of 85.75%compared to those speakers who predominantly use 26 English phonemes in their conversations when the system is trained using speech samples from Indian speakers.The gender identification accuracy of the proposed model reaches 83.20%when the system is trained using speech samples from speakers outside of India.In the analysis of speech signals,Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients(MFCCs)serve as relevant features for the speech data.The deep learning classification algorithm utilized in this research is based on a Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory(BiLSTM)architecture within a Recurrent Neural Network(RNN)model.展开更多
The reliability of the eddy current testing (ECT) in flaw detection is quantitatively evaluated by theprobability of detection (POD). Precise and efficient modeling of POD gives direction for the implement of ECTon si...The reliability of the eddy current testing (ECT) in flaw detection is quantitatively evaluated by theprobability of detection (POD). Precise and efficient modeling of POD gives direction for the implement of ECTon sites to avoid false or missing flaw detection. Traditional POD analysis focuses on single uncertain factor orsingle response signal with limited credibility in engineering. This paper considers multiple response signals andmultiple flaw parameters to perform POD. The flaw length, the flaw depth, the coil impedance, and the magneticflux density are comprehensively studied under various lift-off distances. A finite element model (FEM) of ECT isestablished and verified with experiments to obtain sufficient simulation data for discrete POD modeling. Thecontinuous POD function is then fitted based on the discrete values to show the superiority of integrating multiplefactors. A comparison with conventional POD analysis further demonstrates the higher reliability of ECT flawdetection considering multiple flaw parameters and multiple response signals, especially for small flaws.展开更多
Analyzing the strain signal of wind turbine blade is the key to studying the load of wind turbine blade,so as to ensure the safe and stable operation of wind turbine in natural environment.The strain signal of the win...Analyzing the strain signal of wind turbine blade is the key to studying the load of wind turbine blade,so as to ensure the safe and stable operation of wind turbine in natural environment.The strain signal of the wind turbine blade under continuous crosswind state has typical non-stationary and unsteady characteristics.The strain signal contains a lot of noise,which makes the analysis error.Therefore,it is very important to denoise and extract features of measured signals before signal analysis.In this paper,the joint algorithm of ensemble empirical mode decomposition(EEMD)and wavelet transform(WT)is used for the first time to achieve sufficient noise reduction and effectively extract the feature signals of non-stationary strain signals.The application process of EEMD-WT is optimized.This optimization can avoid the repeated selection of wavelet basis function and the number of decomposition layers due to different crosswind conditions.EEMD adaptively decomposes the strain signal into intrinsic mode functions,to judge the frequency of IMFs,remove the high-frequency noise components,retain the useful components.The useful components are denoised twice by the wavelet transform,the components and residual terms after the secondary denoising are reconstructed to obtain the characteristic signal.The EEMD-WT was applied to process the simulating signals andmeasured the strain signals.The results were compared with the results of the EEMD.The results showed that the EEMD-WTmethod has better noise reduction performance,and can effectively extract the characteristics of strain signals,which lays a solid foundation for accurate analysis of wind turbine blade strain signals under crosswind conditions.展开更多
Electroencephalogram(EEG) signals contain important information about the regulation of brain system. Thus, automatic detection of epilepsy by analyzing the characteristics obtained from EEG signals has important rese...Electroencephalogram(EEG) signals contain important information about the regulation of brain system. Thus, automatic detection of epilepsy by analyzing the characteristics obtained from EEG signals has important research implications in the field of clinical medicine. In this paper, the horizontal visibility graph(HVG) algorithm is used to map multifractal EEG signals into complex networks. Then, we study the structure of the networks and explore the nonlinear dynamics properties of the EEG signals inherited from these networks. In order to better describe complex brain behaviors, we use the angle between two connected nodes as the edge weight of the network and construct the weighted horizontal visibility graph(WHVG). In our studies, fractality and multifractality of WHVG are innovatively used to analyze the structure of related networks. However, these methods only analyze the reconstructed dynamical system in general characterizations,they are not sufficient to describe the complex behavior and cannot provide a comprehensive picture of the system. To this effect, we propose an improved multiscale multifractal analysis(MMA) for network, which extends the description of the network dynamics features by focusing on the relationship between the multifractality and the measured scale-free intervals.Furthermore, neural networks are applied to train the above-mentioned parameters for the classification and identification of three kinds of EEG signals, i.e., health, interictal phase, and ictal phase. By evaluating our experimental results, the classification accuracy is 99.0%, reflecting the effectiveness of the WHVG algorithm in extracting the potential dynamic characteristics of EEG signals.展开更多
To improve the recognition ability of communication jamming signals,Siamese Neural Network-based Open World Recognition(SNNOWR)is proposed.The algorithm can recognize known jamming classes,detect new(unknown)jamming c...To improve the recognition ability of communication jamming signals,Siamese Neural Network-based Open World Recognition(SNNOWR)is proposed.The algorithm can recognize known jamming classes,detect new(unknown)jamming classes,and unsupervised cluseter new classes.The network of SNN-OWR is trained supervised with paired input data consisting of two samples from a known dataset.On the one hand,the network is required to have the ability to distinguish whether two samples are from the same class.On the other hand,the latent distribution of known class is forced to approach their own unique Gaussian distribution,which is prepared for the subsequent open set testing.During the test,the unknown class detection process based on Gaussian probability density function threshold is designed,and an unsupervised clustering algorithm of the unknown jamming is realized by using the prior knowledge of known classes.The simulation results show that when the jamming-to-noise ratio is more than 0d B,the accuracy of SNN-OWR algorithm for known jamming classes recognition,unknown jamming detection and unsupervised clustering of unknown jamming is about 95%.This indicates that the SNN-OWR algorithm can make the effect of the recognition of unknown jamming be almost the same as that of known jamming.展开更多
This research aimed to explore the influence of Src homology-2 containing protein tyrosine phosphatase(SHP-2)on the functions of tyrosine kinase receptors with immunoglobulin and EGF homology domains 2(Tie2)-expressin...This research aimed to explore the influence of Src homology-2 containing protein tyrosine phosphatase(SHP-2)on the functions of tyrosine kinase receptors with immunoglobulin and EGF homology domains 2(Tie2)-expressing monocyte/macrophages(TEMs)and the influence of the angiopoietin(Ang)/Tie2-phosphatidylinositol-3-kinase(PI3K)/protein kinase B(Akt)/mammalian target of rapamycin(mTOR)(Ang/Tie2-PI3K/Akt/mTOR)signaling pathway on the tumor microvascular remodeling in an immunosuppressive microenvironment.In vivo,SHP-2-deficient mice were used to construct colorectal cancer(CRC)liver metastasis models.SHP-2-deficient mice had significantly more metastatic cancer and inhibited nodules on the liver surface than wild-type mice,and the high-level expression of p-Tie2 was found in the liver tissue of the macrophages’specific SHP-2-deficient mice(SHP-2MACKO)+planted tumor mice.Compared with the SHP-2 wild type mice(SHP-2WT)+planted tumor group,the SHP-2MAC-KO+planted tumor group experienced increased expression of p-Tie2,p-PI3K,p-Akt,p-mTOR,vascular endothelial growth factor(VEGF),cyclooxygenase-2(COX-2),matrix metalloproteinase 2(MMP2),and MMP9 in the liver tissue.TEMs selected by in vitro experiments were co-cultured with remodeling endothelial cells and tumor cells as carriers.It was found that when Angpt1/2 was used for stimulation,the SHP-2MAC-KO+Angpt1/2 group displayed evident increases in the expression of the Ang/Tie2-PI3K/Akt/mTOR pathway.The number of cells passing through the lower chamber and the basement membrane and the number of blood vessels formed by cells compared with the SHP-2WT+Angpt1/2 group,while these indexes were subjected to no changes under the simultaneous stimulation of Angpt1/2+Neamine.To sum up,the conditional knockout of SHP-2 can activate the Ang/Tie2-PI3K/Akt/mTOR pathway in TEMs,thereby strengthening tumor micro angiogenesis in the microenvironment and facilitating CRC liver metastasis.展开更多
As high-dynamics and weak-signal are of two primary concerns of navigation using Global Navigation Satellite System(GNSS)signals,an acquisition algorithm based on threetime fractional Fourier transform(FRFT)is present...As high-dynamics and weak-signal are of two primary concerns of navigation using Global Navigation Satellite System(GNSS)signals,an acquisition algorithm based on threetime fractional Fourier transform(FRFT)is presented to simplify the calculation effectively.Firstly,the correlation results similar to linear frequency modulated(LFM)signals are derived on the basis of the high dynamic GNSS signal model.Then,the principle of obtaining the optimum rotation angle is analyzed,which is measured by FRFT projection lengths with two selected rotation angles.Finally,Doppler shift,Doppler rate,and code phase are accurately estimated in a real-time and low signal to noise ratio(SNR)wireless communication system.The theoretical analysis and simulation results show that the fast FRFT algorithm can accurately estimate the high dynamic parameters by converting the traditional two-dimensional search process to only three times FRFT.While the acquisition performance is basically the same,the computational complexity and running time are greatly reduced,which is more conductive to practical application.展开更多
文摘A novel method for automatic ultra-precision alignment is presented.This method relies on the modified Moiré technique,and alignment marks are used in the form of gratings.The modified Moiré technique can effectively improve detecting sensitivity of signals and simplify the control system by using only one pair of laser-Moiré sensors.We present the mathematical model and simulation results of diffracting two gratings.The effect of various parameters on Moiré signals is studied theoretically and experimentally,and the results are found to be consistent.A computer controlled alignment device using one pair of Moiré sensors is designed.The device can achieve a fully automatic precision alignment by the modified Moiré signal.The experimental result shows that the alignment device can obtain the resolution of 5 nm and the positioning accuracy of ±0 5 μm.
基金supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (62261047,62066040)the Foundation of Top-notch Talents by Education Department of Guizhou Province of China (KY[2018]075)+3 种基金the Science and Technology Foundation of Guizhou Province of China (ZK[2022]557,[2020]1Y004)the Science and Technology Research Program of the Chongqing Municipal Education Commission (KJQN202200637)PhD Research Start-up Foundation of Tongren University (trxyDH1710)Tongren Science and Technology Planning Project ((2018)22)。
文摘In this paper, a two-dimensional(2D) DOA estimation algorithm of coherent signals with a separated linear acoustic vector-sensor(AVS) array consisting of two sparse AVS arrays is proposed. Firstly,the partitioned spatial smoothing(PSS) technique is used to construct a block covariance matrix, so as to decorrelate the coherency of signals. Then a signal subspace can be obtained by singular value decomposition(SVD) of the covariance matrix. Using the signal subspace, two extended signal subspaces are constructed to compensate aperture loss caused by PSS.The elevation angles can be estimated by estimation of signal parameter via rotational invariance techniques(ESPRIT) algorithm. At last, the estimated elevation angles can be used to estimate automatically paired azimuth angles. Compared with some other ESPRIT algorithms, the proposed algorithm shows higher estimation accuracy, which can be proved through the simulation results.
文摘From a medical perspective,the 12 leads of the heart in an electrocardiogram(ECG)signal have functional dependencies with each other.Therefore,all these leads report different aspects of an arrhythmia.Their differences lie in the level of highlighting and displaying information about that arrhythmia.For example,although all leads show traces of atrial excitation,this function is more evident in lead II than in any other lead.In this article,a new model was proposed using ECG functional and structural dependencies between heart leads.In the prescreening stage,the ECG signals are segmented from the QRS point so that further analyzes can be performed on these segments in a more detailed manner.The mutual information indices were used to assess the relationship between leads.In order to calculate mutual information,the correlation between the 12 ECG leads has been calculated.The output of this step is a matrix containing all mutual information.Furthermore,to calculate the structural information of ECG signals,a capsule neural network was implemented to aid physicians in the automatic classification of cardiac arrhythmias.The architecture of this capsule neural network has been modified to perform the classification task.In the experimental results section,the proposed model was used to classify arrhythmias in ECG signals from the Chapman dataset.Numerical evaluations showed that this model has a precision of 97.02%,recall of 96.13%,F1-score of 96.57%and accuracy of 97.38%,indicating acceptable performance compared to other state-of-the-art methods.The proposed method shows an average accuracy of 2%superiority over similar works.
基金supported by the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation(Grant Number 2023M742598).
文摘Stirred reactors are key equipment in production,and unpredictable failures will result in significant economic losses and safety issues.Therefore,it is necessary to monitor its health state.To achieve this goal,in this study,five states of the stirred reactor were firstly preset:normal,shaft bending,blade eccentricity,bearing wear,and bolt looseness.Vibration signals along x,y and z axes were collected and analyzed in both the time domain and frequency domain.Secondly,93 statistical features were extracted and evaluated by ReliefF,Maximal Information Coefficient(MIC)and XGBoost.The above evaluation results were then fused by D-S evidence theory to extract the final 16 features that are most relevant to the state of the stirred reactor.Finally,the CatBoost algorithm was introduced to establish the stirred reactor health monitoring model.The validation results showed that the model achieves 100%accuracy in detecting the fault/normal state of the stirred reactor and 98%accuracy in diagnosing the type of fault.
文摘Seismic imaging of complicated underground structures with severe surface undulation(i.e.,double complex areas)is challenging owing to the difficulty of collecting the very weak reflected signal.Enhancing the weak signal is difficult even with state-of-the-art multi-domain and multidimensional prestack denoising techniques.This paper presents a time–space dip analysis of offset vector tile(OVT)domain data based on theτ-p transform.The proposed N-th root slant stack method enhances the signal in a three-dimensionalτ-p domain by establishing a zero-offset time-dip seismic attribute trace and calculating the coherence values of a given data sub-volume(i.e.,inline,crossline,time),which are then used to recalculate the data.After sorting,the new data provide a solid foundation for obtaining the optimal N value of the N-th root slant stack,which is used to enhance a weak signal.The proposed method was applied to denoising low signal-to-noise ratio(SNR)data from Western China.The optimal N value was determined for improving the SNR in deep strata,and the weak seismic signal was enhanced.The results showed that the proposed method effectively suppressed noise in low-SNR data.
基金supported by Natural Science Foundation of China(62071262)the K.C.Wong Magna Fund at Ningbo University.
文摘In this paper,we reconstruct strongly-decaying block sparse signals by the block generalized orthogonal matching pursuit(BgOMP)algorithm in the l2-bounded noise case.Under some restraints on the minimum magnitude of the nonzero elements of the strongly-decaying block sparse signal,if the sensing matrix satisfies the the block restricted isometry property(block-RIP),then arbitrary strongly-decaying block sparse signals can be accurately and steadily reconstructed by the BgOMP algorithm in iterations.Furthermore,we conjecture that this condition is sharp.
文摘The global incidence of infectious diseases has increased in recent years,posing a significant threat to human health.Hospitals typically serve as frontline institutions for detecting infectious diseases.However,accurately identifying warning signals of infectious diseases in a timely manner,especially emerging infectious diseases,can be challenging.Consequently,there is a pressing need to integrate treatment and disease prevention data to conduct comprehensive analyses aimed at preventing and controlling infectious diseases within hospitals.This paper examines the role of medical data in the early identification of infectious diseases,explores early warning technologies for infectious disease recognition,and assesses monitoring and early warning mechanisms for infectious diseases.We propose that hospitals adopt novel multidimensional early warning technologies to mine and analyze medical data from various systems,in compliance with national strategies to integrate clinical treatment and disease prevention.Furthermore,hospitals should establish institution-specific,clinical-based early warning models for infectious diseases to actively monitor early signals and enhance preparedness for infectious disease prevention and control.
基金supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China(61771154)the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities(3072022CF0601)supported by Key Laboratory of Advanced Marine Communication and Information Technology,Ministry of Industry and Information Technology,Harbin Engineering University,Harbin,China.
文摘As modern communication technology advances apace,the digital communication signals identification plays an important role in cognitive radio networks,the communication monitoring and management systems.AI has become a promising solution to this problem due to its powerful modeling capability,which has become a consensus in academia and industry.However,because of the data-dependence and inexplicability of AI models and the openness of electromagnetic space,the physical layer digital communication signals identification model is threatened by adversarial attacks.Adversarial examples pose a common threat to AI models,where well-designed and slight perturbations added to input data can cause wrong results.Therefore,the security of AI models for the digital communication signals identification is the premise of its efficient and credible applications.In this paper,we first launch adversarial attacks on the end-to-end AI model for automatic modulation classifi-cation,and then we explain and present three defense mechanisms based on the adversarial principle.Next we present more detailed adversarial indicators to evaluate attack and defense behavior.Finally,a demonstration verification system is developed to show that the adversarial attack is a real threat to the digital communication signals identification model,which should be paid more attention in future research.
基金Project supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos.32241023 and 92254306)the Fund from the Tsinghua–Peking Joint Center for Life SciencesBeijing Frontier Research Center for Biological Structure。
文摘Reconstituting membrane proteins in liposomes and determining their structure is a common method for determining membrane protein structures using single-particle cryo-electron microscopy(cryo-EM).However,the strong signal of liposomes under cryo-EM imaging conditions often interferes with the structural determination of the embedded membrane proteins.Here,we propose a liposome signal subtraction method based on single-particle two-dimensional(2D)classification average images,aimed at enhancing the reconstruction resolution of membrane proteins.We analyzed the signal distribution characteristics of liposomes and proteins within the 2D classification average images of protein–liposome complexes in the frequency domain.Based on this analysis,we designed a method to subtract the liposome signals from the original particle images.After the subtraction,the accuracy of single-particle three-dimensional(3D)alignment was improved,enhancing the resolution of the final 3D reconstruction.We demonstrated this method using a PIEZO1-proteoliposome dataset by improving the resolution of the PIEZO1 protein.
基金National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No.61973037China Postdoctoral Science Foundation under Grant No.2022M720419。
文摘Automatic modulation recognition(AMR)of radiation source signals is a research focus in the field of cognitive radio.However,the AMR of radiation source signals at low SNRs still faces a great challenge.Therefore,the AMR method of radiation source signals based on two-dimensional data matrix and improved residual neural network is proposed in this paper.First,the time series of the radiation source signals are reconstructed into two-dimensional data matrix,which greatly simplifies the signal preprocessing process.Second,the depthwise convolution and large-size convolutional kernels based residual neural network(DLRNet)is proposed to improve the feature extraction capability of the AMR model.Finally,the model performs feature extraction and classification on the two-dimensional data matrix to obtain the recognition vector that represents the signal modulation type.Theoretical analysis and simulation results show that the AMR method based on two-dimensional data matrix and improved residual network can significantly improve the accuracy of the AMR method.The recognition accuracy of the proposed method maintains a high level greater than 90% even at -14 dB SNR.
文摘A model of continuous-time insider trading in which a risk-neutral in-sider possesses two imperfect correlated signals of a risky asset is studied.By conditional expectation theory and filtering theory,we first establish three lemmas:normal corre-lation,equivalent pricing and equivalent profit,which can guarantee to turn our model into a model with insider knowing full information.Then we investigate the impact of the two correlated signals on the market equilibrium consisting of optimal insider trading strategy and semi-strong pricing rule.It shows that in the equilibrium,(1)the market depth is constant over time;(2)if the two noisy signals are not linerly correlated,then all private information of the insider is incorporated into prices in the end while the whole information on the asset value can not incorporated into prices in the end;(3)if the two noisy signals are linear correlated such that the insider can infer the whole information of the asset value,then our model turns into a model with insider knowing full information;(4)if the two noisy signals are the same then the total ex ant profit of the insider is increasing with the noise decreasing,while down to O as the noise going up to infinity;(5)if the two noisy signals are not linear correlated then with one noisy signal fixed,the total ex ante profit of the insider is single-peaked with a unique minimum with respect to the other noisy signal value,and furthermore as the noisy value going to O it gets its maximum,the profit in the case that the real value is observed.
基金supported by Major Science and Technology Projects in Henan Province,China,Grant No.221100210600.
文摘With the wide application of drone technology,there is an increasing demand for the detection of radar return signals from drones.Existing detection methods mainly rely on time-frequency domain feature extraction and classical machine learning algorithms for image recognition.This method suffers from the problem of large dimensionality of image features,which leads to large input data size and noise affecting learning.Therefore,this paper proposes to extract signal time-domain statistical features for radar return signals from drones and reduce the feature dimension from 512×4 to 16 dimensions.However,the downscaled feature data makes the accuracy of traditional machine learning algorithms decrease,so we propose a new hybrid quantum neural network with signal feature overlay projection(HQNN-SFOP),which reduces the dimensionality of the signal by extracting the statistical features in the time domain of the signal,introduces the signal feature overlay projection to enhance the expression ability of quantum computation on the signal features,and introduces the quantum circuits to improve the neural network’s ability to obtain the inline relationship of features,thus improving the accuracy and migration generalization ability of drone detection.In order to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method,we experimented with the method using the MM model that combines the real parameters of five commercial drones and random drones parameters to generate data to simulate a realistic environment.The results show that the method based on statistical features in the time domain of the signal is able to extract features at smaller scales and obtain higher accuracy on a dataset with an SNR of 10 dB.On the time-domain feature data set,HQNNSFOP obtains the highest accuracy compared to other conventional methods.In addition,HQNN-SFOP has good migration generalization ability on five commercial drones and random drones data at different SNR conditions.Our method verifies the feasibility and effectiveness of signal detection methods based on quantum computation and experimentally demonstrates that the advantages of quantum computation for information processing are still valid in the field of signal processing,it provides a highly efficient method for the drone detection using radar return signals.
基金supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China,Nos.62027812(to HS),81771470(to HS),and 82101608(to YL)Tianjin Postgraduate Research and Innovation Project,No.2020YJSS122(to XD)。
文摘Temporal lobe epilepsy is a multifactorial neurological dysfunction syndrome that is refractory,resistant to antiepileptic drugs,and has a high recurrence rate.The pathogenesis of temporal lobe epilepsy is complex and is not fully understood.Intracellular calcium dynamics have been implicated in temporal lobe epilepsy.However,the effect of fluctuating calcium activity in CA1 pyramidal neurons on temporal lobe epilepsy is unknown,and no longitudinal studies have investigated calcium activity in pyramidal neurons in the hippocampal CA1 and primary motor cortex M1 of freely moving mice.In this study,we used a multichannel fiber photometry system to continuously record calcium signals in CA1 and M1 during the temporal lobe epilepsy process.We found that calcium signals varied according to the grade of temporal lobe epilepsy episodes.In particular,cortical spreading depression,which has recently been frequently used to represent the continuously and substantially increased calcium signals,was found to correspond to complex and severe behavioral characteristics of temporal lobe epilepsy ranging from gradeⅡto gradeⅤ.However,vigorous calcium oscillations and highly synchronized calcium signals in CA1 and M1 were strongly related to convulsive motor seizures.Chemogenetic inhibition of pyramidal neurons in CA1 significantly attenuated the amplitudes of the calcium signals corresponding to gradeⅠepisodes.In addition,the latency of cortical spreading depression was prolonged,and the above-mentioned abnormal calcium signals in CA1 and M1 were also significantly reduced.Intriguingly,it was possible to rescue the altered intracellular calcium dynamics.Via simultaneous analysis of calcium signals and epileptic behaviors,we found that the progression of temporal lobe epilepsy was alleviated when specific calcium signals were reduced,and that the end-point behaviors of temporal lobe epilepsy were improved.Our results indicate that the calcium dynamic between CA1 and M1 may reflect specific epileptic behaviors corresponding to different grades.Furthermore,the selective regulation of abnormal calcium signals in CA1 pyramidal neurons appears to effectively alleviate temporal lobe epilepsy,thereby providing a potential molecular mechanism for a new temporal lobe epilepsy diagnosis and treatment strategy.
文摘This article presents an exhaustive comparative investigation into the accuracy of gender identification across diverse geographical regions,employing a deep learning classification algorithm for speech signal analysis.In this study,speech samples are categorized for both training and testing purposes based on their geographical origin.Category 1 comprises speech samples from speakers outside of India,whereas Category 2 comprises live-recorded speech samples from Indian speakers.Testing speech samples are likewise classified into four distinct sets,taking into consideration both geographical origin and the language spoken by the speakers.Significantly,the results indicate a noticeable difference in gender identification accuracy among speakers from different geographical areas.Indian speakers,utilizing 52 Hindi and 26 English phonemes in their speech,demonstrate a notably higher gender identification accuracy of 85.75%compared to those speakers who predominantly use 26 English phonemes in their conversations when the system is trained using speech samples from Indian speakers.The gender identification accuracy of the proposed model reaches 83.20%when the system is trained using speech samples from speakers outside of India.In the analysis of speech signals,Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients(MFCCs)serve as relevant features for the speech data.The deep learning classification algorithm utilized in this research is based on a Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory(BiLSTM)architecture within a Recurrent Neural Network(RNN)model.
基金supported by the Key Research and Development Project of Zhejiang Province(Grant No.2023C01248,2023C01069)and the National Natural Science Foundation of China(Grant No.52375135,52305137).
文摘The reliability of the eddy current testing (ECT) in flaw detection is quantitatively evaluated by theprobability of detection (POD). Precise and efficient modeling of POD gives direction for the implement of ECTon sites to avoid false or missing flaw detection. Traditional POD analysis focuses on single uncertain factor orsingle response signal with limited credibility in engineering. This paper considers multiple response signals andmultiple flaw parameters to perform POD. The flaw length, the flaw depth, the coil impedance, and the magneticflux density are comprehensively studied under various lift-off distances. A finite element model (FEM) of ECT isestablished and verified with experiments to obtain sufficient simulation data for discrete POD modeling. Thecontinuous POD function is then fitted based on the discrete values to show the superiority of integrating multiplefactors. A comparison with conventional POD analysis further demonstrates the higher reliability of ECT flawdetection considering multiple flaw parameters and multiple response signals, especially for small flaws.
基金supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China(No.51766014)the Natural Science Foundation of Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region(Nos.2019MS05024,2020MS05005)Basic Scientific Research Funds of Colleges and Universities directly under the Autonomous Region(JY20220247).
文摘Analyzing the strain signal of wind turbine blade is the key to studying the load of wind turbine blade,so as to ensure the safe and stable operation of wind turbine in natural environment.The strain signal of the wind turbine blade under continuous crosswind state has typical non-stationary and unsteady characteristics.The strain signal contains a lot of noise,which makes the analysis error.Therefore,it is very important to denoise and extract features of measured signals before signal analysis.In this paper,the joint algorithm of ensemble empirical mode decomposition(EEMD)and wavelet transform(WT)is used for the first time to achieve sufficient noise reduction and effectively extract the feature signals of non-stationary strain signals.The application process of EEMD-WT is optimized.This optimization can avoid the repeated selection of wavelet basis function and the number of decomposition layers due to different crosswind conditions.EEMD adaptively decomposes the strain signal into intrinsic mode functions,to judge the frequency of IMFs,remove the high-frequency noise components,retain the useful components.The useful components are denoised twice by the wavelet transform,the components and residual terms after the secondary denoising are reconstructed to obtain the characteristic signal.The EEMD-WT was applied to process the simulating signals andmeasured the strain signals.The results were compared with the results of the EEMD.The results showed that the EEMD-WTmethod has better noise reduction performance,and can effectively extract the characteristics of strain signals,which lays a solid foundation for accurate analysis of wind turbine blade strain signals under crosswind conditions.
基金Project supported by the Xuzhou Key Research and Development Program (Social Development) (Grant No. KC21304)the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 61876186)。
文摘Electroencephalogram(EEG) signals contain important information about the regulation of brain system. Thus, automatic detection of epilepsy by analyzing the characteristics obtained from EEG signals has important research implications in the field of clinical medicine. In this paper, the horizontal visibility graph(HVG) algorithm is used to map multifractal EEG signals into complex networks. Then, we study the structure of the networks and explore the nonlinear dynamics properties of the EEG signals inherited from these networks. In order to better describe complex brain behaviors, we use the angle between two connected nodes as the edge weight of the network and construct the weighted horizontal visibility graph(WHVG). In our studies, fractality and multifractality of WHVG are innovatively used to analyze the structure of related networks. However, these methods only analyze the reconstructed dynamical system in general characterizations,they are not sufficient to describe the complex behavior and cannot provide a comprehensive picture of the system. To this effect, we propose an improved multiscale multifractal analysis(MMA) for network, which extends the description of the network dynamics features by focusing on the relationship between the multifractality and the measured scale-free intervals.Furthermore, neural networks are applied to train the above-mentioned parameters for the classification and identification of three kinds of EEG signals, i.e., health, interictal phase, and ictal phase. By evaluating our experimental results, the classification accuracy is 99.0%, reflecting the effectiveness of the WHVG algorithm in extracting the potential dynamic characteristics of EEG signals.
基金supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China(U19B2016)Zhejiang Provincial Key Lab of Data Storage and Transmission Technology,Hangzhou Dianzi University。
文摘To improve the recognition ability of communication jamming signals,Siamese Neural Network-based Open World Recognition(SNNOWR)is proposed.The algorithm can recognize known jamming classes,detect new(unknown)jamming classes,and unsupervised cluseter new classes.The network of SNN-OWR is trained supervised with paired input data consisting of two samples from a known dataset.On the one hand,the network is required to have the ability to distinguish whether two samples are from the same class.On the other hand,the latent distribution of known class is forced to approach their own unique Gaussian distribution,which is prepared for the subsequent open set testing.During the test,the unknown class detection process based on Gaussian probability density function threshold is designed,and an unsupervised clustering algorithm of the unknown jamming is realized by using the prior knowledge of known classes.The simulation results show that when the jamming-to-noise ratio is more than 0d B,the accuracy of SNN-OWR algorithm for known jamming classes recognition,unknown jamming detection and unsupervised clustering of unknown jamming is about 95%.This indicates that the SNN-OWR algorithm can make the effect of the recognition of unknown jamming be almost the same as that of known jamming.
基金Natural Science Foundation Project of Hebei Province(H2022405033).
文摘This research aimed to explore the influence of Src homology-2 containing protein tyrosine phosphatase(SHP-2)on the functions of tyrosine kinase receptors with immunoglobulin and EGF homology domains 2(Tie2)-expressing monocyte/macrophages(TEMs)and the influence of the angiopoietin(Ang)/Tie2-phosphatidylinositol-3-kinase(PI3K)/protein kinase B(Akt)/mammalian target of rapamycin(mTOR)(Ang/Tie2-PI3K/Akt/mTOR)signaling pathway on the tumor microvascular remodeling in an immunosuppressive microenvironment.In vivo,SHP-2-deficient mice were used to construct colorectal cancer(CRC)liver metastasis models.SHP-2-deficient mice had significantly more metastatic cancer and inhibited nodules on the liver surface than wild-type mice,and the high-level expression of p-Tie2 was found in the liver tissue of the macrophages’specific SHP-2-deficient mice(SHP-2MACKO)+planted tumor mice.Compared with the SHP-2 wild type mice(SHP-2WT)+planted tumor group,the SHP-2MAC-KO+planted tumor group experienced increased expression of p-Tie2,p-PI3K,p-Akt,p-mTOR,vascular endothelial growth factor(VEGF),cyclooxygenase-2(COX-2),matrix metalloproteinase 2(MMP2),and MMP9 in the liver tissue.TEMs selected by in vitro experiments were co-cultured with remodeling endothelial cells and tumor cells as carriers.It was found that when Angpt1/2 was used for stimulation,the SHP-2MAC-KO+Angpt1/2 group displayed evident increases in the expression of the Ang/Tie2-PI3K/Akt/mTOR pathway.The number of cells passing through the lower chamber and the basement membrane and the number of blood vessels formed by cells compared with the SHP-2WT+Angpt1/2 group,while these indexes were subjected to no changes under the simultaneous stimulation of Angpt1/2+Neamine.To sum up,the conditional knockout of SHP-2 can activate the Ang/Tie2-PI3K/Akt/mTOR pathway in TEMs,thereby strengthening tumor micro angiogenesis in the microenvironment and facilitating CRC liver metastasis.
基金supported by Shenzhen Science and Technology Program(JCYJ20180508152046428).
文摘As high-dynamics and weak-signal are of two primary concerns of navigation using Global Navigation Satellite System(GNSS)signals,an acquisition algorithm based on threetime fractional Fourier transform(FRFT)is presented to simplify the calculation effectively.Firstly,the correlation results similar to linear frequency modulated(LFM)signals are derived on the basis of the high dynamic GNSS signal model.Then,the principle of obtaining the optimum rotation angle is analyzed,which is measured by FRFT projection lengths with two selected rotation angles.Finally,Doppler shift,Doppler rate,and code phase are accurately estimated in a real-time and low signal to noise ratio(SNR)wireless communication system.The theoretical analysis and simulation results show that the fast FRFT algorithm can accurately estimate the high dynamic parameters by converting the traditional two-dimensional search process to only three times FRFT.While the acquisition performance is basically the same,the computational complexity and running time are greatly reduced,which is more conductive to practical application.