A biochemical study on the effect of Riboflavin on cataractous rat lenses. II Proteins and Glutathione

Proteins and glutathione (GSH) levels were estimated in the experimental groups. Levels of both proteins and glutathione in the control and the treated groups were found to be significantly decreased compared to the normal group. The results show that supplementation of riboflavin has beneficial effect by alleviating the oxidant injuries to GSH and proteins, which are involved in the maintenance of transparency and protection of thiol groups of the lens. Thus, riboflavin has an active role in the lens metabolism and has a potential to improve the metabolic activity of the cataractous lenses.     

A theory for decoupling lossless coupled tapered lines with applications to directional couplers

A simple theory is presented for decoupling a pair of lossless coupled nonuniform transmission lines (CNUTL), with a common return and supporting TEM waves, into two lossless nonuniform transmission lines (NUTL). This theory is independent of the port terminations, symmetry conditions, etc. The method directly relates the line parameters of the lossless CNUTL's to those of the decoupled lines and vice versa; further, the matrix parameters of the CNUTL's as a four-port are explicitly expressed in terms of those of the decoupled lines as two-ports. This theory is then utilized to study the applications of CNUTL's as directional couplers.It is shown that for CNUTL's to behave as a codirectional coupler, each of the decoupled lines should be a proportional line, while for contradirectional coupler action, the two decoupled lines have to be duals of each other. The coupling response of the codirectional coupler is found to be periodic, while the phase shift between coupled and transmitted signals varies linearly with frequency. The coupling response of various contradirectional couplers with smooth transition at one of the ends, for which the decoupled lines are “basic NUTL's with hyperbolic solutions”, are studied in detail. It is shown that all these couplers have a high-pass response and that the CNUTL's with “hyperbolic cosine squared lines” as decoupled lines have the best response of all the CNUTL's considered.     

Sum and product separabilities of multivariable functions and applications

Necessary and sufficient conditions for reducibility of certain classes of multivariable polynomials are considered. The special case when a polynomial in that class can be factored into a finite product of single variable polynomials is investigated. A set of necessary and sufficient conditions for decomposing a multivariable p.r.f. into a sum of single variable p.r.f.'s is given. Examples to illustrate applications of sum and product separabilities of functions are given.     

External quality assessment for the RIA of thyroid related hormones: Second phase

An external quality assessment was conducted to assess the performance of various laboratories for RIA of thhyroid related hormones in two phases. In the first phase thirty five laboratories participated. At the end of first phase a meeting cum workshop was organised to discuss the results of first phase, difficultires faced by the participants and pinpoint the short oming. A second phase was then initiated with an objective of improvement in the performance, if any, where twelve samples from four pools were distributed to twenty four laboratories who participated for the second phase. The overall return of the results increased significantly from 71.8% (1586/2208) for the first phase to 92.4% (732/792) for the second phase. The inter laboratory %CV for T₃, T₄ and TSH were lower during the second phase (30.6%, 19.0% and 31.6% respectively) as compared to those observed during first phase (36.3%, 22.7% and 52.8% respectively). Similarly, there was an improvement in reproducibility of ALTM as %CV for T₃, T₄ and TSH decreased from 6.0%, 9.8% and 13.4% respectively to 4.5%, 4.6% and 8.5% respectively. The individual performances of the participating laboratories viz. bias, variability of bias and imprecision also showed a trend towards improvement as percent laboratories having desirable or acceptable results for T₃, T₄ and TSH increased from 10.7%, 60.7% and 0.0% respectively to 20.8%, 66.7% and 22.2% respectively. External quality assessment thus appears to be beneficial in assessing the performane of a laboratory in comfparison with other laboratories and indeed helps in improving the performance.     

Synthesis of RC transfer immittance functions with a minimum number of capacitors

In this paper a method for the realization of RC transfer immittance functions with an unsymmetrical lattice is presented. The method yields minimal capacitor realizations for Z₁₂(s) with no pole at s = 0 and ?y₁₂(s) having no pole at s = ∞. The number of resistors needed are only two more than the minimum needed.     

Feedback factorizing control of 3-D transfer functions via a canonical state-space model

The problem factorizing (separating) the transfer function of a given SISO 3-D discrete system, ie of a system depending on three independent variables, is considered. The 3-D system is assumed to be available in its transfer function representation, which is converted to a canonical state-space model by a simple inspection procedure. Then applying state-feedback to this canonical model we choose the feedback matrix gain (under certain conditions) such that the transfer function of the closed-loop system has the desireed factorized form, ie a product of three 1-D transfer functions each one being dependent on a single variable. The method is illustrated by a nontrivial numerical example.