Abstract: The presented invention provides a detection method for free fluid in the human body. The preprocessing procedure is applied to reduce the speckle noise and enhance tissue volumetric pixels (voxels) intensity levels to make tissue and non-tissue voxels more distinguishable from each other. An initial surface selection step provides flexibility to either manually or automatically selecting a seed point to segment fluid regions in the volumetric data. A kidney and liver organ detection procedure provides a method for determining whether the detected fluid region is a normal fluid-carrying body organ or if it is due to a medical condition as a free fluid region. A combinational approach using a 3-dimensional Snake and Level-Set is utilized to accurately detect fluid regions in the volumetric ultrasound data.

Abstract: A two component interpenetrating polymer network (IPN) wound dressing material is formed of a biocompatible, hydrophilic first component such as gelatin or polyvinyl alcohol and a biocompatible elastomer such as HydroThane (trademark) by dissolving the components in a common solvent, initiating cross-linking of at least one of the components in the solution, and forming a film, fiber, bead or mesh from the solution. When the first component is a methacrylated gelatin aged for an extended period, e.g. 1 to 8 weeks, the resulting IPN is more stable with a higher tensile strength. Heating of the methacrylated gelatin during aging and/or freeze-drying of the product also increase tensile strength of the product.

Abstract: Enhanced immunogenicity is achieved by covalently linking immunogens to liposomes and injecting the membrane-bound-proteins into an appropriate vertebrate host. Methods and compositions are provided for producing antibodies.