Bücher veröffentlicht von IntechOpen

Optical amplifiers are indispensable in long-haul communication systems operating in a relatively broad range of electromagnetic spectra. Various forms of optical amplifiers and their advancements have been extensively discussed in the literature emphasizing the relative merits and demerits of different types of configurations and/or designs and also usefulness in specific applications. The book - Optical Amplifiers: A Few Different Dimensions - aims at reporting developments in these devices in the recent years. The contributed chapters in this book encompass both theoretical and experimental results covering various aspects in the relevant research directions. This somehow makes the volume useful to both experts and novice researchers. Finally, the expectation remains of the contents to be of some merit for the R

Temperature is the most often-measured environmental quantity and scientists are continuously improving ways of sensing it. To present their work in the field of temperature sensing, researchers from distant parts of the world have joined their efforts and contributed their ideas according to their interest and engagement. Their articles will give you the opportunity to understand concepts and uses of fiber-optic sensing technology. The optical fiber Mach-Zehnder interferometer for temperature sensing is presented, as well as the optical fiber-distributed temperature sensor and fiber Bragg grating-based sensor. You can learn about tunable diode laser absorption spectroscopy and its various industrial applications. Last but not least, cutting temperature measurements during the machining of aluminum alloys provides us with an insight into the correlation between cutting conditions, mechanical strength of the aluminum alloy, and the cutting temperature measured using the tool-workpiece thermocouple system. The editors hope that the presented contributions will allow both professionals and readers not involved in the immediate field to understand and enjoy the topic.

The rock matrix and the fluids contained therein define the aquifer as a whole, the custodian of continuity of life on this planet Earth. Its sustainable development, equitable utilization, quality maintenance, and balanced discharge and recharge are the essential elements to ensure that the next generation receives the resource baton passed on by the current generation. Spanning across the political and regional frontiers, transboundary aquifers have the potential to provide a uniting platform to the participatory nations. The common good of water can be enhanced by synergized research, data and knowledge sharing, joint development ventures, and hazard mitigation. Covering the multifarious facets of aquifers, this book will form an essential and interesting reading for all stakeholders?researchers, engineers, academia, intelligentsia, and the common consumer.

Understanding the complexity of the hand and the specific reconstructive techniques is mandatory for every hand specialist. The objective of this book is to update hand specialists on the diagnosis and treatment of some of the most common pathologies affecting the hand and to provide new insights and recent advances in this field.

Hydrocephalus is a common manifestation of many diseases. Caring and treating a patient with hydrocephalus involve engagement and acquire a deep knowledge of anatomy, physiology, and technical details. Despite the technological developments, treatment of hydrocephalus is still a challenge for every neurological surgeon. The aim of this project is to provide a detailed and accessible information for every single discipline, not only for neurological surgeons, involved in the diagnosis and treatment of the patients with hydrocephalus.

This book reviews current research, including applications of matrices, spaces, and other characteristics. It discusses the application of matrices, which has become an area of great importance in many scientific fields. The theory of row/column determinants of a partial solution to the system of two-sided quaternion matrix equations is analyzed. It introduces a matrix that has the exponential function as one of its eigenvectors and realizes that this matrix represents finite difference derivation of vectors on a partition. Mixing problems and the corresponding associated matrices have different structures that deserve to be studied in depth. Special compound magic squares will be considered. Finally, a new type of regular matrix generated by Fibonacci numbers is introduced and we shall investigate its various topological properties.

This book has been written to represent the efficient applications of sustainability upon building designs. The book intends to illustrate various techniques of action of sustainability on building conceptions. The book is divided into four parts and eight chapters. Part I "Introduction into Target Theme" includes a chapter with title "Introductory Chapter." It makes an overview of the meaning and the target of sustainable building and sustainable building material. Part II "Sustainable Building Design, Process, and Management" discusses many forms and concepts of sustainable building and includes three chapters. Part III "Sustainable Building by Using Energy Efficiency in Building Design" includes one chapter. Part IV "Sustainability in Building Materials: Study Cases" includes three chapters.

This book is designed and styled in order to give researchers a vast horizon about pyridine. A deep look in the structural analysis of pyridine provides a base for all the building blocks derived from it and its applications. Pyridines and pyridine moieties are found in many natural products, such as vitamins, coenzymes, alkaloids, many drugs, and pesticides. The book is divided into three parts: the first takes to the introduction, the second part deals with composition of various compounds using heterocyclic ring of pyridine, and the third part discusses about applications of pyridine compounds.

Ozone has an important and irreplaceable function in nature and human society. It preserves life on the Earth by stratospheric ozone layer. On the other hand, the formation of ground-level ozone by reactions of hydrocarbons with nitrogen dioxide in the presence of sunlight has adverse effects on humans and animals as well as on various materials. This book concentrates on the protection of stratospheric ozone and prevention of ground-level ozone formation; applications of its strong oxidizing properties in the treatment of water, wastewater and sludge; odor and color removal; uses in medicine as a disinfectant; and various other ozone therapies. It also deals with catalytic ozonation in water treatment, control methods for ozone applications on biological systems, various areas of ozone use in dental care, follow-up therapy and prevention.

This edited volume Supercapacitors: Theoretical and Practical Solutions is a collection of reviewed and relevant research chapters, offering a comprehensive overview of recent developments in the field of electronic devices and materials. The book comprises single chapters authored by various researchers and is edited by a group of experts. Each chapter is complete in itself but united under a common research study topic. This publication aims at providing a thorough overview of the latest research efforts by international authors on electronic devices and materials and opens new possible research paths for further novel developments.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is taking an increasingly important role in our society. From cars, smartphones, airplanes, consumer applications, and even medical equipment, the impact of AI is changing the world around us. The ability of machines to demonstrate advanced cognitive skills in taking decisions, learn and perceive the environment, predict certain behavior, and process written or spoken languages, among other skills, makes this discipline of paramount importance in today's world. Although AI is changing the world for the better in many applications, it also comes with its challenges. This book encompasses many applications as well as new techniques, challenges, and opportunities in this fascinating area.

The book Current Issues in the Diagnostics and Treatment of Acute Appendicitis is devoted to the actual and in some cases controversial and unresolved problems associated with acute appendicitis, as well as peculiarities of its clinical picture, diagnosis, and treatment in children. The materials of the book will be of interest to anyone who considers emergency abdominal surgery their specialty.

This book takes the vocal and visual modalities and human-robot interaction applications into account by considering three main aspects, namely, social and affective robotics, robot navigation, and risk event recognition. This book can be a very good starting point for the scientists who are about to start their research work in the field of human-robot interaction.

Bioinformatics has evolved significantly in the era of post genomics and big data. Huge advancements were made toward storing, handling, mining, comparing, extracting, clustering and analysis as well as visualization of big macromolecular data using novel computational approaches, machine and deep learning methods, and web-based server tools. There are extensively ongoing world-wide efforts to build the resources for regional hosting, organized and structured access and improving the pre-existing bioinformatics tools to efficiently and meaningfully analyze day-to-day increasing big data. This book intends to provide the reader with updates and progress on genomic data analysis, data modeling and network-based system tools.

This book is about the novel aspects and future trends of the hyperspectral imaging in agriculture, food, and environment. The topics covered by this book are hyperspectral imaging and their applications in the nondestructive quality assessment of fruits and vegetables, hyperspectral imaging for assessing quality and safety of meat, multimode hyperspectral imaging for food quality and safety, models fitting to pattern recognition in hyperspectral images, sequential classification of hyperspectral images, graph construction for hyperspectral data unmixing, target visualization method to process hyperspectral image, and soil contamination mapping with hyperspectral imagery. This book is a general reference work for students, professional engineers, and readers with interest in the subject.

Tissue regeneration is a vast subject, with many different important aspects to consider. Regenerative medicine is a new branch of medicine that tries to change the course of chronic diseases and, in many cases, regenerates the organ systems that fail due to age, disease, damage, or genetic defects. The main purpose of this book is to point out the interest of some important topics of tissue regeneration and the progress in this field as well as the variety of different surgical fields and operations. This book includes 7 sections and 11 chapters that provide an overview of the essentials in tissue regeneration science and their potential applications in surgery. The authors of each chapter have given consolidated information on ground realities and attempted to provide a comprehensive knowledge of tissue engineering and regeneration. This book will be useful to researchers and students of biological and biomedical sciences (medical and veterinarian researchers).

The main scope of this study is to emphasize exergy efficiency in all fields of industry. The chapters collected in the book are contributed by invited researchers with a long-standing experience in different research areas. I hope that the material presented here is understandable to a wide audience, not only energy engineers but also scientists from various disciplines. The book contains seven chapters in three sections: (1) "General Information about Exergy," (2) "Exergy Applications," and (3) "Thermoeconomic Analysis." This book provides detailed and up-to-date evaluations in different areas written by academics with experience in their fields. It is anticipated that this book will make a scientific contribution to exergy workers, researchers, academics, PhD students, and other scientists in both the present and the future.

Plants are the basic source of food for both humans and animals. Most of the food is made of fruits and seeds. For these to be formed, pollination must first take place. This process is the transfer of pollen grains from the anther, which is the male structure of the flower, to the sigma on the female structure of the flower. The transfer process requires agents to be carried out. The agents can be either biotic or abiotic. Nature perfected this arrangement between the pollination agents and the plants. As ecosystems and agricultural systems are changing, this balanced arrangement becomes disturbed. This makes it necessary that pollination systems be studied so that necessary measures can be undertaken to ensure productivity. The chapters of this book present results in research undertaken to improve productivity in crops such as Actinidia chinensis (the kiwifruit), Theobroma cacao (cocoa), and Manicaria saccifera (a tropical forest palm). Some results are presented on tests to check the viability of pollen grains and the delivery of sperm cells through pollen tubes to the embryo sac. These results can serve as guidelines to any person seeking to improve pollination and productivity or to check the efficiency on pollination in ecosystems or agricultural production systems.

Nonhuman primates (referred to here as primates) provide an invaluable source of information for a multitude of scientific fields including ecology, evolution, biology, psychology, and biomedicine. This volume addresses various topics related to primate research that includes phylogeny, natural observations, primate ecosystem, sociocognitive abilities, disease pathophysiology, and neuroscience. Topics discussed here provide a platform for which to address human evolution, habitat preservation, human psyche, and pathophysiology of disease.

The book Reflections on Bioethics is an effort that brings together works grouped into five sections: "Bioethics and Health", "Bioethics and Education", "Bioethics and Technology", "Bioethics in the Use of Experimental Animals",and "Selected Topics of Bioethics". In each of these sections, the fundamental concepts of bioethics and their relationship with each of these branches of knowledge are covered. The purpose is to give the reader a specific document of topics, it is not intended to be a treaty because the study of any of the five sections is very broad. However, this is an effort that manages to combine in interdisciplinary subjects that are fundamental for professionals of all fields of knowledge.

Superfood is a food that contains active ingredients or important nutrients at extremely high levels. Protective effects of superfoods on diseases have been remarked. Recently, several foods such as camu camu, chia seeds and goji berries are well known, and their trade has been rapidly increasing in the past 10 years. The purpose of this book is the development of a novel concept of superfoods and diet-containing superfoods. In the chapters, researchers have introduced the active components of superfoods and diets using such foods. Superfoods derived from fish and by-products of beer brewing are also introduced. Moreover, the procedure of bio-accessibility is also considered. I expect that the readers understand this novel concept of superfoods.

The main objective of this volume is to diffuse the latest information related to hearing loss, which is among the most prevalent chronic disabilities worldwide. Nowadays, it is clear that the identification and rehabilitation of hearing impairment, when possible, have to be adequately and promptly managed because hearing loss can seriously interfere with psychosocial development, family dynamics, and social interactions. This book has been edited with a strong educational perspective (all chapters include an extensive introduction to their corresponding topic and an extensive glossary of terms). This book contains various materials suitable for graduate students in audiology, ENT, hearing science, and neurosciences.

Computational science and engineering (CSE) is a broad multidisciplinary and integrative area including a variety of applications in science, engineering, numerical methods, applied mathematics, and computer science disciplines. The book covers a collection of different types of applications and visions to various disciplinary key aspects, which comprises both problem-driven and methodology-driven approaches at the same time. These selected applications are:Computational and information technologies for numerical models and large unstructured data processingEvolution of matrix computations and new concepts in computingInverse problems covering both classical and newer approachesIntegro-differential scheme (IDS) that combines finite volume and finite difference methodsSmart city wireless networksSignal processing methods

Musculoskeletal disorders are defined as disorders that affect a part of the body's musculoskeletal system, which includes bones, nerves, tendons, ligaments, joints, cartilage, blood vessels, and spinal disks. These are the injuries that result from repeated motions, vibrations, and forces placed on human bodies while performing various job actions. They are extremely common and costly problems for people and companies. Thus, this book is designed to include a wide array of extensive and comprehensive discussions provided on occupational, educational, and medical aspects of ergonomics. Thus, it can be utilized as a guide to identify and analyze the risk factors, reveal the impact of prevention and intervention, and discuss treatment of musculoskeletal disorders.

This book is devoted to different aspects of tectonic researches. New results and interpretations are presented here for diverse tectonic settings. Most of the chapters include up-to-date materials of detailed geological investigations, often combined with geophysical data, which can help understand more clearly the essence of mechanisms of different tectonic processes. Some chapters are devoted to the tectonic evolution of regions (East Antarctica, East Kazakhstan, Mongolo-Okhotsk orogenic belt), and others have dealt with the different aspects of tectonic events: influence of detachment structural deformation on pore structure evolution in shales, evolution of drainage in response to brittle-ductile dynamics and surface processes, soft sediment deformation structures triggered by the modern earthquakes, and post-opening deformation history of the Japan Sea back-arc basin.

This book is intended to gather recent studies on particle swarm optimization (PSO). In this book, readers can find the recent theoretical developments and applications on PSO algorithm. From the theoretical aspect, PSO has preserved its popularity because of the fast convergence rate, and a lot of hybrid algorithms have recently been developed in order to increase the performance of the algorithm. At the same time, PSO has also been used to solve different kinds of engineering optimization problems. In this book, a reader can find engineering applications of PSO, such as environmental economic dispatch and grid computing.

The rapid fragmentation and habitat change in natural environments have created a need for management and conservation, which will ensure areas are protected from anthropogenic interference. These protected areas are necessary to provide adequate location for biodiversity conservation, environmental monitoring, and scientific research where a complete understanding of the natural process and full protection of ecosystems can be attained. This book highlights various approaches for managing and conserving protected areas in temperate and tropical regions to respond to some pressing global challenges today. It is divided into five main sections, viz., protected area management, fish and wildlife conservation, biodiversity conservation, ecotourism and recreation, and local community participation. The book enhances the understanding of the important roles national parks play in the environment and society.

Oxygen represents only 20% of the Earth's atmosphere, yet it is vital for the survival of aerobic organisms. There is a dark part of the use of oxygen that consists in generating reactive species that are potentially harmful to living organisms. Moreover, reactive oxygen species can combine with nitrogen derivatives and generate many other reactive species. Thus, living organisms are continuously assaulted by reactive species from external or internal sources. However, the real danger comes in the case of high concentrations and prolonged exposure to these species. This book presents an image of the mechanisms of action of reactive species and emphasizes their involvement in diseases. Inflammation and cancer are examined to determine when and how reactive species turn the evolution of a benign process to a malignant one. Some answers may come from recent studies indicating that reactive species are responsible for epigenetic changes.

This edited volume Uranium: Safety, Resources, Separation, and Thermodynamic Calculation is a collection of reviewed and relevant research chapters, offering a comprehensive overview of recent developments in the study of uranium. This publication aims at providing a thorough overview of the latest research efforts by international authors on uranium studies and opens new possible research paths for further novel developments.

Human skin cancers, the most common type of tumors, represent a significant health burden. The deadliest is unquestionably melanoma. Half of melanomas have an activating mutation in the BRAF gene, prompting development of novel drugs, vemurafenib and dabrafenib, specifically targeting mutated BRAF. Trametinib and cobimetinib, which block MEK, a BRAF effector protein, have been used in combination with BRAF inhibitors. A promising new melanoma treatment is immunotherapy, approach that boosts patient's own immune system to attack cancer. Pembrolizumab and nivolumab inhibit PD-1, whereas Ipilimumab targets CTLA-4, another immunity check point, to boost the immune response. Here we focus on pathways, mechanisms, targets and treatments of human skin cancers, with particular emphasis on the new developments in the research on melanomas.