Thermoplastic Elastomer Systems Containing Carbon Nanofibers as Soft Piezoresistive Sensors.

Soft, wearable or printable strain sensors derived from conductive polymer nanocomposites (CPNs) are becoming increasingly ubiquitous in personal-care applications. Common elastomers employed in the fabrication of such piezoresistive CPNs frequently rely on chemically cross-linked polydiene or polysiloxane chemistry, thereby generating relatively inexpensive and reliable sensors that become solid waste upon application termination. Moreover, the shape anisotropy of the incorporated conductive nanoparticles can produce interesting electrical effects due to strain-induced spatial rearrangement. In this study, we investigate the morphological, mechanical, electrical, and electromechanical properties of CPNs generated from thermoplastic elastomer (TPE) triblock copolymer systems containing vapor-grown carbon nanofiber (CNF). Modulus-tunable TPE gels imbibed with a midblock-selective aliphatic oil exhibit well-behaved properties with increasing CNF content, but generally display nonlinear negative piezoresistance at different strain amplitudes and stretch rates due to nanofiber mobility upon CPN strain-cycling. In contrast, a neat TPE possessing low hard-block content yields a distinctive strain-reversible piezoresistive response, as well as low electrical hysteresis, upon cyclic deformation. Unlike their chemically cross-linked analogs, these physically cross-linked and thus environmentally benign CPNs are fully reprocessable by thermal and/or solvent means.

[The correlation between the distant metastases and organ-specific symptoms in the patients with lung cancer]. / Akciger kanserli hastalarda uzak metastaz ile organa özgül semptomlarin iliskisi.

In this study, the correlation between distant metastases and metastatic organ-specific abnormalities in patients with lung cancer was evaluated. There were 197 patients who have lung cancer with distant metastases in this study. 141 (71.5%) of them were nonsmall cell lung cancer and 56 (28.5%) of them were small cell lung cancer. While one site of liver, brain and bone metastases were detected in 128 (64.9%) patients, remainders (69 patients, 35.1%) had surrenal, renal, pancreatic, skin, lung, thyroid, abdominal lymph node metastases. Organ-specific symptoms, findings on physical examination and abnormalities in laboratory data were detected in 121 (56.5%), 45 (21%) and 52 (24.2 %) patients, respectively. Sensitivity of predilection of organ-specific symptoms for bone, liver and brain metastases were 67%, 43% and 74% and specificity were 86%, 90% and 76%, respectively. We concluded that organ-specific abnormalities were not so effective to predict metastases in lung cancer. We considered that this result could be due to retrospective analysis and not included enough patients.