High-throughput microscopy (HTM) was developed recently for the automatic detection of airborne asbestos fibers that can cause lung cancer, asbestosis and mesothelioma. The HTM method has been applied to couting the airborne asbestos fibers as an alternative to the conventional phase contrast microscopy (PCM). In this paper, we demonstrated that the HTM enabled us to obtain quantitative results for low-concentration airborne asbestos samples under detection limit, and we made a comparison between the results from HTM and PCM. In addition, a verification study was conducted using proficiency analytical testing (PAT) samples of chrysotile and amosite. The HTM method can be applied to the existing PCM method by reducing analysis time and labors. Potential applications can be extended to detection of asbestos fibers in soil and water.

This paper describes the design concept of a bio-inspired legged underwater and estimating its performance by implementing simulations. Especially the leg structure of an underwater organism, diving beetles, is fully adopted to our designing to employ its efficiency for swimming. To make it possible for the robot to both walk and swim, the transformable kinematic model according to applications of the leg is proposed. To aid in the robot development and estimate swimming performance of the robot in advance, an underwater simulator has been constructed and an approximated model based on the developing robot was set up in the simulation. Furthermore, previous work that we have done, the swimming locomotion produced by a swimming patten generator based on the control parameters, is briefly mentioned in the paper and adopted to the simulation for extensive studies such as path planning and control techniques. Through the results, we established the strategy of leg joints which make the robot swim in the three dimensional space to reach effective controls.