Indian Institute of Technology Palakkad&nbsp;(IIT Palakkad or IIT PKD) is a public autonomous&nbsp;engineering&nbsp;and&nbsp;research&nbsp;institute located in&nbsp;Palakkad,&nbsp;Kerala. It was&nbsp;one of the five new&nbsp;IITs&nbsp;proposed in the&nbsp;2014 Union budget of India. The campus was inaugurated on 3 August 2015. The institute has 94 faculty, 978 students, and 63 non-teaching staffs.

IT Palakkad currently offers four-year Bachelor of Technology (B.Tech) and two years MS programmes in 8 different engineering disciplines including&nbsp;Computer Science, Electrical, Mechanical, Civil among others.

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IIT Palakkad

The present work illustrated an accurate GC/MS measurement for the low isotopomer enrichment assay of formic acid, acetic acid, propionic aicd, butyric acid, and pentanoic acid. The pentafluorobenzyl bromide derivatives of these very short chain fatty acids have high sensitivity of isotopoic enrichment due to their low natural isotopomer distribution in negative chemical ionization mass spectrometric mode. Pentafluorobenzyl bromide derivatization reaction was optimized in terms of pH, temperature, reaction time, and the amount of pentafluorobenzyl bromide versus sample. The precision, stability, and accuracy of this method for the isotopomer analysis were validated. This method was applied to measure the enrichments of formic acid, acetic acid, and propionic acid in the perfusate from rat liver exposed to Krebs-Ringer bicarbonate buffer only, 0-1 mM [3,4-13C2]-4-hydroxynonanoate, and 0-2 mM [5,6,7-13C3]heptanoate. The enrichments of acetic acid and propionic acid in the perfusate are comparable to the labeling pattern of acetyl-CoA and propionyl-CoA in the rat liver tissues. The enrichment of the acetic acid assay is much more sensitive and precise than the enrichment of acetyl-CoA by LC-MS/MS. The reversibility of propionyl-CoA from succinyl-CoA was confirmed by the low labeling of M1 and M2 of propionic acid from [5,6,7- 13C3]heptanoate perfusates. © 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

World University root node

Department of Chemistry

Analytical Biochemistry

Isotopomer enrichment assay for very short chain fatty acids and its metabolic applications

A microfluidic strategy for the encapsulation and stimulus-responsive release of molecules with distinct polarities from the interior of microgels is reported. The approach relies on (i) the generation of a primary O/W emulsion by the ultrasonication method, (ii) MF emulsification of the primary emulsion, and (iii) photopolymerization of the monomer present in the aqueous phase of the droplets, thereby transforming them into microgels. Non-polar molecules are dissolved in oil droplets embedded in the microgels. Polar molecules are physically associated with the hydrogel network. Upon heating, the microgels contract and release polar and non-polar cargo molecules. The approach paves the way for stimuli-responsive vehicles for multiple drug delivery. Poly( N -isopropylacrylamide) microgel particles encapsulated with oil droplets are synthesized using microfluidics. The particles are loaded with molecules of different polarities. A temperature-induced release of the cargo is observed. This has potential for multiple drug delivery systems. © 2011 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim.

Macromolecular Bioscience

Microgels for the encapsulation and stimulus-responsive release of molecules with distinct polarities

Metabolomics is a data-based research strategy, the aims of which are to identify biomarker pictures of metabolic systems and metabolic perturbations and to formulate hypotheses to be tested. It involves the assay by mass spectrometry or NMR of many metabolites present in the biological system investigated. In this minireview, we outline studies in which metabolomics led to useful biomarkers of metabolic processes. We also illustrate how the discovery potential of metabolomics is enhanced by associating it with stable isotopic techniques. © 2011 by The American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Inc.

Fulltext

Journal of Biological Chemistry

Metabolomics, pathway regulation, and pathway discovery

Single molecule force spectroscopy (SMFS) has recently given access to an unprecedented level of information regarding the stress-response of a host of biopolymers at the single chain level. However, the difficulty of designing handles for the specific attachment of the different ends of polysaccharide chains to substrates, such as piezoelectric scanners, cantilevers or microbeads; particularly in contrast to nucleotides and proteins, has meant that progress in more sophisticated single carbohydrate measurements has been relatively slow. Herein, methods for generating specific covalent attachments of the terminal sugar residue at one end of a pectin chain to polystyrene microspheres are demonstrated. Using FT-IR spectroscopy in combination with density functional theory (DFT) calculations the attachment was unequivocally shown to be mediated by the introduction of a C-N bond between the reducing end of the polysaccharide chain and a pre-aminated bead. © 2011 Elsevier Ltd All rights reserved.

Carbohydrate Polymers

Towards polysaccharide handles for single molecule experiments: Spectroscopic evidence for the selective covalent coupling of terminal sugar residues to desired substrates

In recent decades, atmospheric scientists have been interested in measuring thermodynamic variables such as tropospheric water vapor and temperature with increasing temporal and spatial resolution due to their importance on the climate modeling. For this purpose, microwave radiometers have been used to measure columnar integrated water vapor. The radiative transfer equation (RTE) has been used to retrieve the contributions of individual atmospheric layers, assuming a stratified atmosphere. In recent years, significant advances have been made toward retrieval of these parameters in 2-D, 3-D and 4-D (3-D + time) distributions. This work presents a new radiometric concept to directly measure the contribution of each pixel (avoiding the use of the RTE inversion) by using pencil-beam antennas and interferometric techniques. This new approach has the potential to improve the quality of the retrieved thermodynamic variables to meet the research goals of atmospheric science. © 2011 IEEE.

Department of Electrical Engineering

International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS)

A radiometer concept to retrieve the 3-D radiometric emission from atmospheric temperature and water vapor density

Spaceborne interferometric synthetic aperture radar (SAR) (InSAR) imaging has been used for over a decade to monitor tectonic movements and landslides, as well as to improve digital elevation models. However, InSAR is affected by variations in round-trip propagation delay due to changes in ionospheric total electron content and in tropospheric humidity and temperature along the signal path. One of the largest sources of uncertainty in estimates of tropospheric path delay is the spatial and temporal variability of water vapor density, which currently limits the quality of InSAR products. This problem can be partially addressed by using a number of SAR interferograms from subsequent satellite overpasses to reduce the degradation in the images or by analyzing a long time series of interferometric phases from permanent scatterers. However, if there is a sudden deformation of the Earth's surface, the detection of which is one of the principal objectives of InSAR measurements over land, the effect of water vapor variations cannot be removed, reducing the quality of the interferometric products. In those cases, high-resolution information on the atmospheric water vapor content and its variation with time can be crucial to mitigate the effect of wet-tropospheric path delay variations. This paper describes the use of a ground-based microwave radiometer network to retrieve 3-D water vapor density with fine spatial and temporal resolution, which can be used to reduce InSAR ambiguities due to changes in wet-tropospheric path delay. Retrieval results and comparisons between the integrated water vapor measured by the radiometer network and satellite data are presented. © 2011 IEEE.

IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing

Three-dimensional humidity retrieval using a network of compact microwave radiometers to correct for variations in wet tropospheric path delay in spaceborne interferometric SAR imagery

The most computationally demanding block in the digital front-end of a software defined radio (SDR) receiver is the channelizer which operates at the highest sampling rate. Channelizers are employed in the SDR receivers for extracting individual channels (frequency bands) from the digitized wideband input signal. Reconfigurability and low complexity are the two key requirements in an SDR channelizer. A new reconfigurable filter bank (FB) architecture based on frequency response masking (FRM) for SDR channelizers is proposed. The proposed FB offers reconfigurability at the architectural level and at the channel filter level and is capable of extracting channels of nonuniform bandwidths corresponding to multiple wireless communication standards from the digitized wideband input signal. Design examples show that the proposed FB offers multiplier complexity reduction of 84% over the conventional per-channel (PC) approach, which is best suitable for the extraction of channels of nonuniform bandwidth. The proposed FB has been synthesized on 0.18 μm complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology and compared with the PC approach. Synthesis results show that the proposed FB offers area reduction of 85%, power reduction of 48.5%, and improvement in speed of 56.7% over the PC approach. The proposed FB has been implemented on Xilinx Virtex 2v3000ff1152-4 FPGA and tested using real-time inputs from a vector signal generator. © 2006 IEEE.

IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems

Reconfigurable low area complexity filter bank architecture based on frequency response masking for nonuniform channelization in software radio receivers

In this paper, we present a reliable and efficient automatic R-wave detection based on new nonlinear transformation and simple peak-finding strategy. The detection algorithm consists of four stages. In the first stage, the bandpass filtering and differentiation operations are used to enhance QRS complexes and to reduce out-of-band noise. In the second stage, we introduce a new nonlinear transformation based on energy thresholding, Shannon energy computation, and smoothing processes to obtain a positive-valued feature signal which includes large candidate peaks corresponding to the QRS complex regions. The energy thresholding reduces the effect of spurious noise spikes from muscle artifacts. The Shannon energy transformation amplifies medium amplitudes and results in small deviations between successive peaks. Therefore, the proposed nonlinear transformation is capable of reducing the number of false-positives and false-negatives under small-QRS and wide-QRS complexes and noisy ECG signals. In the third stage, we propose a simple peak-finding strategy based on the firstorder Gaussian differentiator (FOGD) that accurately identifies locations of candidate R-peaks in a feature signal. This stage computes convolution of the smooth feature signal and FOGD operator. The resultant convolution output has negative zero-crossings (ZCs) around the candidate peaks of feature signal due to the anti-symmetric nature of the FOGD operator. Thus, these negative ZCS are detected and used as guides to find locations of real R-peaks in an original signal at the fourth stage. Unlike other existing algorithms, the proposed algorithm does not use search back algorithm and learning phase. The proposed algorithm is validated using the standard MIT-BIH arrhythmia database and achieves an average sensitivity of 99. 94% and a positive predictivity of 99.96%. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms other existing algorithms in case of different QRS complex morphologies (negative, low-amplitude, wide), very big change in amplitudes of adjacent R-peaks, irregular heart rates, and noisy ECG signals. © 2011 Biomedical Engineering Society.

Cardiovascular Engineering and Technology

An efficient R-peak detection based on new nonlinear transformation and first-order Gaussian differentiator

This paper proposes a robust and automated applause detection algorithm for meeting speech. The features used in the proposed algorithm are the short-time autocorrelation features such as autocorrelation energy decay factor, amplitude and lag values of first local minimum and zero-crossing points extracted from the autocorrelation sequence of a windowed audio signal. We apply decision thresholds for the above acoustic features to identify applause and non-applause segments from the audio stream. The performance of the proposed algorithm is compared with the conventional method using mel frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC) feature vectors and Gaussian mixture model (GMM) as classifier. We have also analyzed the performance of these algorithms by varying the number of mixtures in GMM (2, 4, 8, 16 and 32) and various thresholds in the proposed method. The methods are tested with a multimedia database of 4 hours 37 minutes of meeting speech and the results are compared. The precision rate, recall rate and F1 score of the proposed method are 94.40%, 90.75% and 92.54% respectively while those of conventional method are 67.47%, 96.13% and 79.29% respectively. © 2011 IEEE.

2011 3rd International Conference on Electronics Computer Technology

Novel approach for detecting applause in continuous meeting speech

In this paper, we present a new automatic transient detection and localization for analysis of power quality disturbances. The proposed method is based on an over-complete dictionary (OCD) matrix and an ℓ 1-norm minimization algorithm. The OCD matrix is constructed using the spike-like (or identity) bases and discrete-cosine bases. The proposed method is validated using the four types of transient events and the results are compared with wavelet-based method. Experiment results show that the proposed method provides accurate time-information of impulsive and oscillatory transients under high levels of noise, and also preserves signature of transient events. © 2011 IEEE.