C. L. Tseng

Trace Elements in Hair of Blackfoot Disease

Blackfoot disease is a peripheral vascular disease resulting in gangrene of the lower extremities. Though extensive epidemiological study has implicated that high arsenic content in artesian well water of the endemic area, bears some important connection with the disease, the etiology of the disease is still unknown. In this study, attention is paid to multielement determination in order to find out whether the trace elements in hair of Blackfoot disease patients are different from those of the controls.Experimental results indicate that the concentrations of As and Se in hair of patients are significantly higher than those of the controls, but Ca and Zn are significantly lower than those of the controls. The possible connection of these elements with the etiology of the disease is discussed.

Determination of major, minor and trace elements in urinary stones by neutron activation analysis

In five kinds of human urinary stones 18 elements have been identified by instrumental neutron activation analysis (INAA). From the results it may be concluded that calcium is the most important initiating cation, magnesium is the second most significant one, and Na, Cl, Sr, Zn, Fe, Br and Co may also play an important role in the stone formation. The results indicate also that ions like Ca, Br and Cu are easily incorporated into the nucleus to form a urate stone; Mg and Sr, into the nucleus to form a magnesium ammonium phosphate stone; and Zn, into the nucleus to form a calcium oxalate combined with apatite stone. The differences in elemental composition among the different kinds of stones as well as across the layers of stones are statistically evaluated.

Radiochemical separation by magnesium oxide adsorption and applications

The radioactive tracer technique was used to investigate the adsorption behaviour of 47 ions onto hydrous magnesium oxide. Detailed studies on Co(II), Zn(II), La(III) and Ce(III) reveal that the adsorption isotherms of these ions obey Langmuirs law. Radiochemical separation using hydrous magnesium oxide was applied to the RNAA of NBS standard reference materials, and satisfactory results were obtained. Hydrous magnesium oxide was also used to adsorb various ions from aqueous solution for the purpose of preconcentration which was followed by NAA or ICP-AES analysis. Satisfactory results have been observed in both methods.

Sequential extraction separation for determination of technetium-99 in radwastes by ICP-MS

An approach based on sequential extraction separation and the subsequent ICP-MS measurement was introduced to determine 99Tc in radioactive wastes. The radwastes were firstly alkaline-fused and the 99Tc was separated by a sequential solvent extraction prior to ICP-MS measurement. NaDDC was selected as a chelation reagent in the solvent extraction processes. The influence of HCl and matrix concentration on the recovery yield and the effectiveness of removing isobar and unwanted radionuclides, such as 137Cs, 54Mn, 60Co and 110mAg, were evaluated. The designed sequential extraction procedure was optimized by an extraction experiment. The proposed technique is proven to be a simple and practical alternative for 99Tc determination in low-level radioactive wastes; chemical separation of 99Tc can be simplified and preconcentration such as precipitation and/or ion exchange, before the solvent extraction, can be excluded.

Power aware SID-based simulator for embedded multicore DSP subsystems

The embedded multicore DSP systems are playing increasingly important role for consumer electronic design. Such systems try to optimize the objective for both performance and power with mobile devices. Embedded application developers will then devise designs to optimize embedded applications for not only performance but also power. However, currently there are no power metrics support for popular application design platforms such as QEMU and SID, where application developers develop their applications. This hinders application developers to help tune optimizations for power. In this paper, we propose a power aware simulation framework on embedded multicore DSP subsystems for SID framework. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to attempt to build a power aware simulator based on SID simulation framework. The power estimation flow includes two phases, IP level power modeling and system level power prower profiling. In the IP level power modeling, PowerMixerIP is employed to build up the power model for PAC DSP and major IPs. In the system level power profiling, we provide a power profiling hierarchy that meets the demand of embedded software developers. The granularity of power profiling can be configured to the whole simulation stage or any specific time slot in the simulation such as a dedicated function loop. In our experiments, DSP programs with SIMD intrinsics for DSPStone benchmark are examined with our proposed power aware simulator. In addition, a face detection application is deployed as a running example on multi-core DSP systems to show how our power simulator can be used to help collaborate with developers in the optimization process to illustrate views of power dissipations of applications.

Instrumental neutron activation analysis of urinary calculi

Five kinds of urinary stones from 42 patients have been determined for a total of 19 elements by instrumental neutron activation analysis. Of these elements, Ca, Mg, Sr, Na, and Cl are found to be present in the core of all kinds of stones. The differences in elemental composition among the different kinds of stones as well as across the layers of stone are statistically evaluated.

Evaluation of minimum detectable amounts of iodine in biological samples by neutron activation analysis

Evaluation of minimal detectable amounts (MDA) of iodine in various or specified irradiation and measurement conditions is described. Interfering contributions due to Na and Cl to the spectral background as well as the dead time of detection system were calculated in details based on an experimental approach. The MDA of iodine for some important biological samples with various Na and Cl concentrations can be evaluated and predicted according to the specified irradiation and measurement arrangements to meet the requirement of analytical purposes.

Determination of trace elements by neutron activation analysis using dinonylnaphthalene sulfonic acid as a preconcentrating agent

Dinonylnaphthalene sulfonic acid (HD) has been used as a preconcentrating agent to enrich trace metal ions and to separate the interfering elements such as Na, K, Cl and Br which normally exist in the natural aqueous systems. Experiments were performed by extracting the ions in the aqueous medium with HD in n-hexane and subsequently back-extracted into a minimal volume of acid solution. Factors influencing the extraction efficiency of the ions of interest were investigated. The preconcentration technique developed in this study was applied to the determination of trace elements in biological and natural water samples by neutron activation analysis.

Instrumental neutron activation analysis of gallstones

Four kinds of gallstones from 40 patients have been analyzed for the presence of a total of 18 elements by instrumental neutron activation analysis. Of these elements, Ca, Mg, Fe, Co, Zn, Na, and Cl are found in the core of all types of stones. The differences in elemental composition of the various types of stones as well as the differences in the cross-sectional layers of stones are statistically evaluated.

SoC power analysis framework and its application to power-thermal co-simulation

In this paper, we introduce a systematic power analysis framework for SoC designs using bottom-up power modeling integrated with top-down power estimation. Four power analysis tools have been realized: (1) PowerBrick, a power characterization tool to construct power libraries for standard cell library and memory compiler, (2) PowerMixer, an RTL/gate-level power estimator for large logic design, (3) PowerMixerIP, an IP-based power model builder to build power models for general IPs as well as processor IPs, and (4) PowerDepot, an ESL power estimation tool to enable super-fast system-level SoC power estimation. Equipped with these highly automatic tools, one is able to drastically reduce the effort and time spent in building the power analysis environment for SoC designs. The simulation speedup can be up to 2,400X comparing with traditional simulation methodology, while retaining very high accuracy. We also introduce its application to a power-thermal co-simulation process, by which one can predict more accurately the steady-state temperature of an IC in full operation.