The Effect of Rotational Disorder on the Microwave Transmission of Checkerboard Metal Square Arrays.

The effect of rotational disorder on the microwave transmission through thin metallic checkerboard arrays has been experimentally studied. Broad resonant features below the onset of diffraction, attributed to electromagnetic radiation coupling through the structure via the evanescent fields of bound surface waves, are found to be strongly dependent on the electrical connectivity of the surface. By applying rotational disorder to the elements comprising the arrays, with the lattice constant and element size unchanged, the electrical connectivity of the structure can be controlled whilst maintaining periodicity. The results show that rotational disorder can significantly affect transmission only when it changes the structure's connectivity. When the initial structure is just above the connectivity threshold (where the metallic occupancy is 50%), increasing disorder causes the resonant features in transmission to invert as the structure switches from a predominantly connected array to a disconnected array. When approximately half of the connections are broken, the resonant features are suppressed, with scattering loss shown to dramatically increase to as much as 40% of the incident power over a broad frequency range. The result is a thin, highly effective scatterer of microwaves.

A method of indirect registration of the coordinates of condylar points with a six-degree-of-freedom jaw tracker.

Previous studies have indicated that the location of a condylar point can significantly influence its trajectory. The aim of this investigation was to develop a method of registering the location of radiographically defined condylar points in the coordinate system of a six-degree-of-freedom jaw-tracking device and to determine the accuracy of this method by using a perspex model in one experiment and a dry skull in another. A direct measurement ('the gold standard') of condylar point coordinates in the coordinate system of JAWS3D was done using a three-dimensional (3D) digitizer (MicroScribe-3DX). The indirect measurement used a distributed fiducial marker as the interface between the coordinate system of MicroScribe-3DX (which was used to register the fiducial marker and the JAWS3D coordinate system) and the coordinate system of the CT scans (used to define condyle anatomy and the relation with the fiducial marker). The coordinates of condylar points could then be calculated in the coordinate system of JAWS3D. The results showed that the indirect method could register condylar point coordinates on either side to an accuracy of approximately 0.5 mm.

Evidence of red cell alignment in the magnetic field of an NMR spectrometer based on the diffusion tensor of water.

The alignment of human erythrocytes in aqueous suspensions in the magnetic field B(0) (called the z-direction) of an NMR spectrometer was shown by calculating the diffusion tensor for water in the sample. The diffusion was measured using a pulsed-field-gradient spin-echo NMR method. The extent of diffusion anisotropy for water was exemplified by the values of the apparent diffusion coefficients with erythrocytes of normal shape and volume: for a typical experiment the values for the x-, y-, and z-directions were (6.88 +/- 0.17) x 10(-10), (7.07 +/- 0.17) x 10(-10), and (10.20 +/- 0.17) x 10(-10) m(2) s(-1), respectively. Cells in hypo- and hyperosmotic media were also studied and they too showed the anisotropy of the apparent diffusion coefficients but the extents were different. A new method of data analysis was developed using the Standard Add-On Packages in a Mathematica program. The experimental findings support evidence of erythrocyte alignment that was previously obtained with a high-field-gradient q-space method.

Permeability coefficients from NMR q-space data: models with unevenly spaced semi-permeable parallel membranes.

The NMR "q-space" experiment conducted on water provides information on the sizes of repeated structures on the micrometer-length scale in heterogeneous samples, including cell suspensions or tissues. Under some circumstances these plots display coherence peaks, and it has been implied theoretically that the position of the peaks will vary with the rate of molecular exchange across the membranes. This has been demonstrated (qualitatively) with human erythrocytes in suspension. Thus, in the quest for a quantitative approach to the interpretation of such data, we address here the "inverse problem," namely the estimate of the permeability coefficient of membranes from q-space experiments. The present work describes theoretical predictions of q-space plots from molecules diffusing in a simple system of parallel semi-permeable membranes arranged with separations that alternate between two different values; this was designed to (loosely) mimic the intra- and extracellular compartments in a suspension of cells or a tissue. The development of the theory was facilitated by symbolic computation, and the analysis of synthetic data was shown to be achievable by the use of a three-layer back-propagation artificial neural network.