Flexible large-area ultrasound arrays for medical applications made using embossed polymer structures.

With the huge progress in micro-electronics and artificial intelligence, the ultrasound probe has become the bottleneck in further adoption of ultrasound beyond the clinical setting (e.g. home and monitoring applications). Today, ultrasound transducers have a small aperture, are bulky, contain lead and are expensive to fabricate. Furthermore, they are rigid, which limits their integration into flexible skin patches. New ways to fabricate flexible ultrasound patches have therefore attracted much attention recently. First prototypes typically use the same lead-containing piezo-electric materials, and are made using micro-assembly of rigid active components on plastic or rubber-like substrates. We present an ultrasound transducer-on-foil technology based on thermal embossing of a piezoelectric polymer. High-quality two-dimensional ultrasound images of a tissue mimicking phantom are obtained. Mechanical flexibility and effective area scalability of the transducer are demonstrated by functional integration into an endoscope probe with a small radius of 3 mm and a large area (91.2×14 mm2) non-invasive blood pressure sensor.

Lipase regio- and stereoselectivities toward three enantiomeric pairs of didecanoyl-deoxyamino-O methyl glycerol: a kinetic study by the monomolecular film technique.

A kinetic study was carried out on the regio- and stereoselectivities of 12 lipases of animal and microbial origin. For this purpose, monomolecular films consisting of three pairs of enantiomers (didecanoyl-deoxyamino-O methyl glycerol, DDG) containing a single hydrolyzable decanoyl ester bond and two lipase-resistant groups were spread at the air-water interface. Each of the lipases tested displayed a particular type of behavior, on the basis of which they were classified in two groups, depending on their ability to hydrolyze the sn-2 position. From the qualitative point of view, the sn-2 preference measured on triacylglycerides and DDG were in good agreement. The inductive chemical effect might explain why a greater level of hydrolytic activity was observed with the diglycerides than with DDG. With most of the lipases tested, it was observed that the enantiomeric pair having two distal acyl chains was more clearly differentiated stereochemically than the two homologous pairs with two adjacent acyl chains. This finding is consistent with the hypothesis that during the chiral recognition process two of the three attachment points may be the external (distal) hydrophobic chains, which is in line with the hypothesis of a tuning fork conformation of a triglyceride in the lipase active site.