BACKGROUND Viable embryos secrete preimplantation factor (PIF), a peptide that has autocrine effects where levels correlate with cultured embryos development. sPIF (PIF synthetic analog) promotes implantation by regulating decidual-cells immunity, adhesion, apoptosis and enhances trophoblastic cell invasion. Herein sPIF priming effects on non-decidualized endometrium and decidualized-stroma are...

This paper introduces the current developments of the SPIF (Système de Prototypage à Implantation rapide et Faible coût) project. The goal of SPIF is to provide a low cost environment for quick prototyping of embedded distributed real-time applications. The hardware platform is built with reusable, standard off-the-shelf components. SPIF is the name of the testbed itself, a mobile autonomous ro...

From the earliest stages of gestation, embryonic-maternal interaction has a key role in a successful pregnancy. Various factors present during gestation may significantly influence this type of juxta/paracrine interaction. PreImplantation Factor (PIF) is a recently identified factor with activity at the fetomaternal interface. PIF is secreted by viable embryos and directly controls placental de...

In search for new manufacturing process, Single Point Incremental Forming (SPIF) emerged to be one of the useful processes for forming complicated shapes. This is a flexible forming process which eliminates the die, punch and errors due to them. It is widely used for batch production of different shapes which has applications in diverse fields like automobile, aerospace, medical industry, packa...

The deformation mechanism of incremental sheet forming (ISF) is examined experimentally through forming specially prepared copper sheets. Strain distributions through the thickness of the sheets are measured for two configurations of ISF: two-point incremental forming (TPIF) and single-point incremental forming (SPIF), and a comparison is made to pressing. The measurements show that the deforma...

Recently, exemplar-based sparse representation phone identification features (Spif ) have shown promising results on large vocabulary speech recognition tasks. However, one problem with exemplar-based techniques is that they are computationally expensive. In this paper, we present two methods to speed up the creation of Spif features. First, we explore a technique to quickly select a subset of ...

Dysfunction and loss of neurons are the major characteristics of CNS disorders that include stroke, multiple sclerosis, and Alzheimer's disease. Activation of the Toll-like receptor 7 by extracellular microRNA let-7, a highly expressed microRNA in the CNS, induces neuronal cell death. Let-7 released from injured neurons and immune cells acts on neighboring cells, exacerbating CNS damage. Here w...

The aim of the present paper is to evaluate the possibility of producing low-cost, small-batch, polymer sheet components by means of single point incremental forming (SPIF) at room temperature. During the research work, five different thermoplastic materials were incrementally formed into cones with an increasing wall angle on a conventional CNC milling machine. In designed experiments, signifi...

The single point incremental forming (SPIF) is one of the dieless forming processes which is widely used in the sheet metal forming. The correct selection of the SPIF parameters influences the formability and quality of the product. In the present study, the Gurson-Tvergaard Needleman (GTN) damage model was used for the fracture prediction in the numerical simulation of the SPIF process of alum...

Sparse representation phone identification features (SPIF) is a recently developed technique to obtain an estimate of phone posterior probabilities conditioned on an acoustic feature vector. In this paper, we explore incorporating SPIF phone posterior probability estimates in large vocabulary continuous speech recognition (LVCSR) task by including them as additional features of exponential dens...