Construction of a human body model for acupuncture and moxibustion treatment by colored Petri nets.

Acupuncture and moxibustion treatment has been widely spread all over the world because it has few side effects and is effective for ahead sick and incurable disease. However, the treatment is often performed empirically and clinically, and the mechanism and process of the treatment are not yet scientifically elucidated. Therefore, it is required to establish objective and unified research methods and evaluation criteria that incorporate modern Western medicine and scientific and technological viewpoints. In this paper, a human body model is constructed, which includes the internal organs and the meridians for acupuncture and moxibustion treatment based on traditional Chinese medicine using colored Petri nets. This model aims at expressing the relationship between acupoints and internal organs realistically and accurately in acupuncture and moxibustion treatment, and leading to realization of an objective analysis method of the mechanism and process of acupuncture and moxibustion treatment. Firstly, the calculation of the acupoints' efficacy on internal organs is discussed, and measurement equations and model construction methods are proposed. Next, an interface is established as a bridge to connect the internal organs and the meridians with acupoints. By Java language, a simulation system is developed based on the proposed Petri net model. Finally, simulations of acupuncture and moxibustion treatment are performed to verify the validity of model.

Simple and reliable direct patterning method for carbon-free solution-processed metal oxide TFTs.

Metal oxide TFT fabrication based on a solution-processing method is considered a promising alternative to conventional vacuum processing and has a number of advantages such as low cost, large-area fabrication, and process simplicity. A simple and reliable, direct patterning method for obtaining a carbon-free aqueous metal oxide film is presented herein. Patterning, which is achieved by selective photoreaction of water molecules under ultraviolet irradiation and by a safe, environment-friendly chemical etching process using a non-toxic organic acid, is followed by an annealing process at a temperature of 350 °C to obtain carbon-free metal oxide TFTs. In-Ga-Zn oxide (IGZO), TFTs on SiO2 dielectrics that were fabricated with a direct patterning method exhibited an average mobility of 4.3 cm2/V·s with good uniformity, which is comparable to TFTs formed by conventional photolithography. The TFTs exhibited stable performance with small (within 0.5 V) shifts in switch-on voltage under positive and negative bias stress. Fabrication of flexible IGZO TFTs by direct patterning was also achieved.

Modelling and simulation of signal transductions in an apoptosis pathway by using timed Petri nets.

This paper first presents basic Petri net components representing molecular interactions and mechanisms of signalling pathways, and introduces a method to construct a Petri net model of a signalling pathway with these components. Then a simulation method of determining the delay time of transitions, by using timed Petri nets - i.e. the time taken in fi ring of each transition - is proposed based on some simple principles that the number of tokens flowed into a place is equivalent to the number of tokens fl owed out. Finally, the availability of proposed method is confirmed by observing signalling transductions in biological pathways through simulation experiments of the apoptosis signalling pathways as an example.

Structural modeling and analysis of signaling pathways based on Petri nets.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss how to model and analyze signaling pathways by using Petri net. Firstly, we propose a modeling method based on Petri net by paying attention to the molecular interactions and mechanisms. Then, we introduce a new notion "activation transduction component" in order to describe an enzymic activation process of reactions in signaling pathways and shows its correspondence to a so-called elementary T-invariant in the Petri net models. Further, we design an algorithm to effectively find basic enzymic activation processes by obtaining a series of elementary T-invariants in the Petri net models. Finally, we demonstrate how our method is practically used in modeling and analyzing signaling pathway mediated by thrombopoietin as an example.