Abstract
Common breast cancer treatment techniques, such as radiation therapy or the surgical removal of the axillary lymphatic nodes, result in several impairments in women's upper-body function. These impairments include restricted shoulder mobility and arm swelling. As a consequence, several daily life activities are affected, which contribute to a decreased quality of life (QOL). Therefore, it is of extreme importance to assess the functional restrictions caused by cancer treatment, in order to evaluate the quality of procedures and to avoid further complications. Although the research in this field is still very limited and the methods currently available suffer from a lack of objectivity, this highlights the relevance of the pioneer work presented in this paper, which aims to develop an effective method for the evaluation of the upper-body function, suitable for breast cancer patients. For this purpose, the use of both depth and skeleton data, provided by the Microsoft Kinect, is investigated to extract features of the upper-limbs motion. Supervised classification algorithms are used to construct a predictive model of classification, and very promising results are obtained, with high classification accuracy.

Abstract
We obtained a propagation equation for an optical pulse at an electromagnetically induced transparency window guided on a gas-filled hollow-core photonic crystal fiber. This equation admits dissipative solitons whose analytical expression was also obtained. Depending on the parameter region, they may be stable or unstable. We simulated a typical experimental arrangement and found some cases for which the equation parameters are such that it admits stable solitons.

Abstract
We developed an experimental setup for electromagnetically induced transparency able to manufacture microcells, suitable for optical fiber communications technology. A hollow-core photonic crystal fiber (HC-PCF) is filled with acetylene, to work in the 1500 nm telecommunications window. We used a HC-PCF with the mode-field diameter compatible with standard single-mode fibers, with the purpose of achieving low-loss splicing and enabling us to work at low pumping powers. This allows to induce a narrow transparency window, which can be spectrally adjusted and dynamically controlled. (c) 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett 57:348-352, 2015

Abstract

Abstract
Part of the optical clearing study in biological tissues concerns the determination of the diffusion characteristics of water and optical clearing agents in the subject tissue. Such information is sufficient to characterize the time dependence of the optical clearing mechanisms-tissue dehydration and refractive index (RI) matching. We have used a simple method based on collimated optical transmittance measurements made from muscle samples under treatment with aqueous solutions containing different concentrations of ethylene glycol (EG), to determine the diffusion time values of water and EG in skeletal muscle. By representing the estimated mean diffusion time values from each treatment as a function of agent concentration in solution, we could identify the real diffusion times for water and agent. These values allowed for the calculation of the correspondent diffusion coefficients for those fluids. With these results, we have demonstrated that the dehydration mechanism is the one that dominates optical clearing in the first minute of treatment, while the RI matching takes over the optical clearing operations after that and remains for a longer time of treatment up to about 10 min, as we could see for EG and thin tissue samples of 0.5 mm. (C) 2015 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE)

Abstract
We found two stationary solutions of the cubic complex Ginzburg-Landau equation (CGLE) with an additional term modeling the delayed Raman scattering. Both solutions propagate with nonzero velocity. The solution that has lower peak amplitude is the continuation of the chirped soliton of the cubic CGLE and is unstable in all the parameter space of existence. The other solution is stable for values of nonlinear gain below a certain threshold. The solutions were found using a shooting method to integrate the ordinary differential equation that results from the evolution equation through a change of variables, and their stability was studied using the Evans function method. Additional integration of the evolution equation revealed the basis of attraction of the stable solutions. Furthermore, we have investigated the existence and stability of the high amplitude branch of solutions in the presence of other higher order terms originating from complex Raman, self-steepening, and imaginary group velocity.