Several efficient counters are presented. A nine-transistor divide-by-two circuit is used as a basic building block. With transistor sizing, an input frequency of 400 MHz can be adopted by an asynchronous counter, while an eight-bit synchronous counter can achieve clock rates of more than 200 MHz in a 3-μm CMOS process. The power consumption of the proposed precharged dynamic synchronous counter i

A high-speed binary counter and a divider using a new carry propagation scheme is presented. The critical logic depth is one and the maximum fan-in of gates can be reduced to two, independent of the number of bits in both the counter and the divider. The hardware grows linearly with the number of bits, making them well suited for a wide range of applications.

We use the frequency doubled light from an optically trapped lithium niobate particle for non-intrusive scanning near-field optical microscopy. The detected power from this 50-100 nm diameter probe is currently tens of pW and is expected to approach nW with an improved detection system. The current experimental resolution is approximately 0.5 [mu]m, while the ultimate theoretical resolution is 70-

Several antibacterial proteins and peptides of the human innate immune system have additional roles in the regulation of adaptive immune responses. Among peptides with innate and adaptive immune functions are chemokines, a family of structurally related peptides with conserved amino-terminal motifs. Chemokines regulate leukocyte trafficking during both health and disease. In recent years, some che

OBJECTIVE: To investigate if patterns of CSF biomarkers (T-tau, P-tau, and Abeta42) can predict cognitive progression, outcome of cholinesterase inhibitor (ChEI) treatment, and mortality in Alzheimer disease (AD). METHODS: We included outpatients with AD (n = 151) from a prospective treatment study with ChEI. At baseline, patients underwent cognitive assessments and lumbar puncture. The patients w

This thesis treats two separate but connected themes. This affiliation originates in optimization being the common choice of method for solving most of the occurring challenges. The first theme of the thesis is image segmentation. This is usually defined as the task of distinguishing objects from background in unseen images. This visual grouping process is typically based on low-level cues suc

Background. HER2 is a treatment predictive factor for the effect of trastuzumab and associated with poor prognosis in breast cancer. The analysis of HER2 must be performed with good quality, with regard to both the immunohistochemical (IHC) and in situ hybridization (ISH) analysis. Material and methods. A tissue microarray (TMA) including 11 breast cancer samples was sent twice (once in 2005 and a

The complement system can be specifically targeted to tumor cells due to molecular changes on their surfaces that are recognized by complement directly or via naturally occurring antibodies. However, tumor cells often overexpress membrane-bound complement inhibitors protecting them from complement attack. We have previously shown that non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) cells, additionally to membr