Background: small diameter vascular grafts are limited by their restricted availability, early thrombosis, and requirement for anticoagulants.
The puncta were identified based on having a fluorescence intensity that exceeded a threshold set by a blind observer to maximize discrimination of puncta from the background, and a diameter between 0.5 and 5 µm.
We used the EURAD European Air Pollution Dispersionn) model, a dispersion and chemistry transport model (Memmesheimer et al. 2004) to estimate the annual mean values for background PM2.5 (aerodynamic diameter ≤ 2.5 μm) concentrations (year 2002) on a spatial scale of 5-km grid-cell length and assigned these to the addresses of the participants (ArcGIS software; ESRI, Redlands, CA, USA).
The sample powders were placed on a zero-background silicon holder (diameter, 32 mm; thickness, 2 mm) and scanned from 4 60° 2 θ with a step size of 0.008° and a time per step of 35 s.
All images were processed using ImageJ software with enhanced contrast and background subtraction (rolling ball diameter of 50 was used for spinning disc images; for scanning confocal images a rolling ball diameter of 50 was used for actin filaments and 75 for all other labels).
Detailed trends of both the local and overall dispersion behaviors of the solid phase in the system were quantitatively studied, and the impact of various operating parameters (namely, spouting gas velocity (Usp), background velocity (Ubg), particle diameter (dp), the bed depth (L) and bed height) and flow regime on lateral and vertical solid dispersion was investigated.
Sphere diameter and background activity strongly affect the possibility of a correct quantification.
The line probe was superimposed on a 36° diameter circular background picture with a neutral grey image.
Mean pixel intensity (ranging 0 to 255 grayscale values, after background subtraction) and vessel diameter were measured using the Zeiss LSM 5 software.
Band patterns were imported into the BioNumerics v5.1 software (Applied Maths, Belgium) and normalised; parameters used: background subtraction (10% disc diameter), filtering (arithmetic average), band search (minimum profiling 0.5% relative to the maximum value).
