2.2.1. Structural Design

In order to enhance the sensitivity of the fiber MZI, the SMBMS MZI was developed on the basis of the SMS MZI, as shown in Figure 2; a waist-enlarged bitaper was fused to the middle multimode segment. The function of the fusion point in front of the waistenlarged bitaper was to distribute the light transmitted through the single mode fiber to the multimode fiber core and fiber cladding, while the function of the waist-enlarged bitaper was to redistribute the light transmitted in the core and the cladding, which excited higher-order modes and entered the multimode cladding transmission section behind the waist-enlarged bitaper. The function of the fusion point behind the waist-enlarged bitaper was to couple the light transmitted in the core and the cladding to the output fiber, and through the spectrometer for storage and analysis. In order to verify whether the position of the waist-enlarged bitaper had an effect on the sensor performance, we made a control sensor, and set the position of the waist-enlarged bitaper at one-third of the sensing arm, as shown in Figure 3. *Micromachines* **2022**, *13*, x FOR PEER REVIEW 2 of 19

**Figure 2.** Schematic diagram of the Single mode–Multimode–Bitaper–Multimode–Single mode Mach–Zehnder Interferometer (SMBMS MZI). **Figure 2.** Schematic diagram of the Single mode–Multimode–Bitaper–Multimode–Single mode Mach–Zehnder Interferometer (SMBMS MZI).

**Figure 3.** Schematic diagram of the SMBMS MZI with the position of the bitaper set to one third of the sensing arm. **Figure 3.** Schematic diagram of the SMBMS MZI with the position of the bitaper set to one third of the sensing arm.

### 2.2.2. Analysis of Coupling Response Characteristics of Waist-Enlarged Bitaper

The following section focused on analyzing the response characteristics of the optical fiber waist-enlarged bitaper. The inverted taper was composed of a multimode fiber and an inverted taper fiber with a gradually enlarged diameter. The waist-enlarged bitaper part played the role of expanding the beam of the fundamental mode spot. The waistenlarged bitaper directly affected the propagation response characteristics of the beam in it, as shown in Figure 4. Therefore, we used the waist-enlarged bitaper to make more light waves leak into the cladding and excite higher-order modes. In the following, by explaining the propagation response characteristics of Gaussian beams in tapered fibers, the reasons for the improvement of the coupling efficiency by the waist-enlarged bitaper are theoretically given. *Micromachines* **2022**, *13*, x FOR PEER REVIEW 4 of 19

**Figure 4.** Optical path analysis of waist-enlarged bitaper in SMBMS MZI. **Figure 4.** Optical path analysis of waist-enlarged bitaper in SMBMS MZI.

The propagation response characteristics of Gaussian beams in tapered fibers are given by the spot size *ω(z)* and the wavefront curvature radius *R(z),* used to describe the The propagation response characteristics of Gaussian beams in tapered fibers are given by the spot size *ω(z)* and the wavefront curvature radius *R(z),* used to describe the propagation response characteristics of Gaussian beams [17].

$$
\omega^2(z) = \omega^2(0) \cdot \left[A^2 + \left(\mathcal{B}/k\omega^2(0)\right)^2\right]^{\frac{1}{2}}\tag{7}
$$

ω

$$\frac{1}{R(z)} = \frac{\omega'(z)}{\omega(z)}\tag{8}$$

$$\text{fations can change to the following form:}$$

sin

2

θ

First, the above two equations can change to the following form:

propagation response characteristics of Gaussian beams [17].

ω

$$
\omega^2(z) = \omega^2(0)[(g(0)/g(z))\cos^2\theta + \frac{1}{g(0)g(z)} \cdot \frac{\sin\theta^2}{k\_1^2\omega(0)}]\tag{9}
$$

2 2 2 This can be obtained by derivation:

ω

med need by derivation:

$$
\omega^2(z) = a\_0 f(z) / (\frac{2\pi m\_1}{\lambda})\sqrt{2\Delta} \tag{10}
$$

This can be obtained by derivation: The spot magnification factor M can be expressed as:

ω

$$M = \omega(z) / \omega(0) = f(z) = 1 + c \cdot \exp \gamma(z) \tag{11}$$

λ The spot magnification factor M can be expressed as: *M* =ω(*z*)/ω(0) = *f* (*z*) =1+ *c* ⋅expγ (*z*) (5) Therefore, at the position of the waist-enlarged bitaper, the light spot was enlarged. In a coupled system, the coupling tolerance of the system was only related to the spot size. The larger the spot size, the larger the vertical and horizontal tolerances. In a word, the waist-enlarged bitaper played the role of spot amplification in the optical fiber coupling system, improving the coupling tolerance of the system, and redistributing the spectrum.

0

### Therefore, at the position of the waist-enlarged bitaper, the light spot was enlarged. 2.2.3. Manufacture

2.2.3. Manufacture

In a coupled system, the coupling tolerance of the system was only related to the spot size. The larger the spot size, the larger the vertical and horizontal tolerances. In a word, the Fiber MZI waist-enlarged bitaper is manufactured using a common fusion splicer (FITEL, S178A). In the sensing system, a fiber cleaver (Furukawa, S325) was used to obtain

waist-enlarged bitaper played the role of spot amplification in the optical fiber coupling system, improving the coupling tolerance of the system, and redistributing the spectrum.

Fiber MZI waist-enlarged bitaper is manufactured using a common fusion splicer

(FITEL, S178A). In the sensing system, a fiber cleaver (Furukawa, S325) was used to obtain a flat fiber end, and make a waist-enlarged bitaper based on commercial fusion splicers. Multimode optical fiber has a core diameter of 40 µm and a cladding diameter of 125 µm. By increasing the splicing time to 500 ms, and increasing the splicing strength to 155 unit, the waist-enlarged bitaper is obtained. Figure 5 is the photo of the waist-enlarged bitaper observed through a microscope. The diameter of the waist-enlarged bitaper is expanded

to 152 µm, and the length of the cone region is 350 µm.

a flat fiber end, and make a waist-enlarged bitaper based on commercial fusion splicers. Multimode optical fiber has a core diameter of 40 µm and a cladding diameter of 125 µm. By increasing the splicing time to 500 ms, and increasing the splicing strength to 155 unit, the waist-enlarged bitaper is obtained. Figure 5 is the photo of the waist-enlarged bitaper observed through a microscope. The diameter of the waist-enlarged bitaper is expanded to 152 µm, and the length of the cone region is 350 µm. *Micromachines* **2022**, *13*, x FOR PEER REVIEW 5 of 19

**Figure 5.** The waist-enlarged bitaper in SMBMS MZI. **Figure 5.** The waist-enlarged bitaper in SMBMS MZI.

*2.3. Etched Single mode–Multimode–Bitaper–Multimode–Single mode Mach–Zehnder Interferometer (ESMBMS MZI)*


*2.4. Comparative Effects of T. lutea F&M-M36 Extract and FX on PGE2 Production and COX-2 Protein Expression*

As shown in Figure 3, the methanolic extract of *T. lutea* F&M-M36 (1–100 μg/mL) significantly decreased the LPS-induced production of PGE2 in a concentration-dependent manner, whereas FX was significantly effective (*p* < 0.05) only at the highest concentration tested (470 ng/mL). When we compared directly the PGE2 levels measured in the media

from cells treated with the methanolic extract and those of the cells treated with FX at equivalent concentrations, we observed a clear and significant reduction at all concentrations (*p* < 0.001).

**Figure 3.** Effect of *T. lutea* F&M-M36 extract and FX on PGE2 production in RAW 264.7 stimulated with LPS for 18 h. ### *p* < 0.001 vs. unstimulated RAW 264.7 macrophages (CTRL); \*\*\* *p* < 0.001 vs. LPS ˆˆˆ *p* < 0.001 vs. FX by ANOVA test and Dunnett's Multiple Comparison test. Data are expressed as the mean ± SEM of four replicates.

Immunofluorescent staining for COX-2 protein expression (Figure 4 Panels A–D) and dot blot analyses (Panel F) demonstrated that the methanolic extract from *T. lutea* F&M-M36 significantly counteracted LPS induced COX-2 protein expression (*p* < 0.001) as it did in FX alone, although to a lower extent (*p* < 0.05) (Figure 4 panel E). Similar to the results on PGE2, *T. lutea* F&M-M36 extract also significantly decreased COX-2 protein expression compared to FX alone (*p* < 0.01).

The effects on COX-2 were much more evident at the protein level than gene level, since COX-2 mRNA expression was not significantly decreased neither by *T. lutea* F&M-M36 extract nor by FX compared to LPS-treated cells; in this regard, however, it should be highlighted that when directly compared, the mRNA expression of COX-2 was significantly decreased by *T. lutea* F&M-M36 extract compared to FX (*p* < 0.05).


However, although we found some evidence of selection, we also observed that divorce had a large impact on health status. The findings from this investigation allow us to draw some policy-relevant conclusions. First, we note that the uptake of work disability is an important outcome, because work disability limits the scope of labour market participation and of access to secure income. Spending longer periods in work disability might even reduce an individual's employability, retirement income, and material well-being. As well as having personal costs, long-term disability creates public costs, including the loss of working days and the costs associated with providing sick pay, health services, and rehabilitation services. Our results show that separation and the anticipation of separation had immediate effects on health for all of the subsamples. Thus, we conclude that to ensure that spouses and their children emerge from the divorce process less compromised and healthier, psychological help or mediation services should be made available (Hannighofer et al. 2017).

Finally, there are several caveats to this study. First, the register data do not constitute a full sample of the population. For example, civil servants and farmers are not included. It is possible that these groups behave very differently. Most importantly, our approach was based on a nearest neighbour matching method that relied on the observable covariates in the data. Variables such as psychological disposition, lifestyle factors, and work characteristics were not included in our data, but may be important for understanding health impairments after divorce. Furthermore, to allow for a causal interpretation of our results, more rigorous testing and further sensitivity analysis would be needed.

**Acknowledgments** I am grateful to Anke Radenacker for her valuable comments. I would also like to acknowledge the Research Data Centre at the statutory German pension fund as my data distributer, and, in particular, Tatjana Mika. I am thankful for the valuable comments at the conference "18. Graduierten-Kolloquium des Forschungsnetzwerk Alterssicherung" held at the statutory German pension fund in Berlin. Finally, I want to thank the Forschungsnetzwerk Alterssicherung for providing me with financial support.

#### **Appendix**

**Table 14.3** Four nearest neighbour matching summary parameter

Notes: The mean and median bias are summary indicators of the standardised percentage bias. The bias refers to the percent difference of the sample means in the divorced and control sub-samples (for details see Rosenbaum and Rubin 1985)

Notes: ∗∗∗ p < 0.001, ∗∗ p < 0.01, ∗ p < 0.05. Further control variables are time since separation (coefficients are displayed in Figs. 14.1, 14.2 and 14.3)

#### 14 Work Disability and Divorce

**Table 14.5** Adjusted Wald test for the equality of two coefficients

Notes: Displayed are p-values for the H0 hypothesis that two coefficients (control and divorced) are equal

#### **References**

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.


**1. Introduction**

Recent advances in biomedical imaging have led several imaging modalities to improve our understanding of various ophthalmological and/or neurological diseases. First developed by Fujimoto's group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1991, Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) works based on tissue

backscattering properties [1]. OCT utilizes the short coherence length of broadspectrum light sources to obtain cross-sectional images of biological tissue samples on a microscopic scale. Since its inception in the 1990s, it has rapidly become a crucial imaging technique in various biomedical fields, particularly in ophthalmology, where it can be used to visualize the anterior eye and retina through transparent media. As the brain and retina originate from the same embryologic origin, the retina provides a unique "window" into the central nervous system (CNS) because of having unmyelinated axons and a low concentration of glial cells. That is why retina is called "a relative vacuum" while studying neurons and axons and it can serve as a valuable surrogate marker of neurodegeneration, neuroprotection, and neurorestoration [2].

The major users of OCT technology over the last 20 years have been mostly ophthalmologists, but in these days, it is also being used widely by more specifically neuro-ophthalmologists and neurologists on patients with ocular and/or neurologic disorders. We previously summarized the updates on OCT's applications in neuroscience and interested readers may refer to it [2]. Besides, one of the modern-day OCT successors, OCT Angiography (OCT-A) has drawn significant attention from biomedical communities for its unique capabilities in imaging microvasculature in different neuro-ophthalmological and neurological conditions. Some purely neuroophthalmological conditions (e.g., optic neuropathies, papilledema, glaucoma) and some neurologic conditions with ocular manifestations (e.g., multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease, stroke) show changes in eye vasculature that can be detected, studied and monitored using OCT-A, are discussed together in this chapter due to their significant inter-relations [3–9].

In neuro-ophthalmology, OCT-A has been used in different types of optic nerve head (ONH) edema (e.g., ischemic, inflammatory, papilledema) and optic neuropathies (e.g., ischemic, inflammatory, hereditary) [10, 11]. There has been recent attention to implementing OCT-A in diabetic retinopathy as well [12, 13]. The key advantage OCT-A provides in addition to conventional structural OCT images, it can capture the microvascular architecture in unprecedented detail which can synergize the clinical diagnosis, monitoring disease progression and prognosis [14, 15]. Again, some central nervous system (CNS) diseases have retinal microvasculature involvement. For instance, neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's disease (AD) affects retina as well. The mechanism behind the reduced retinal vessel density in AD is not clear, but it has been proposed that decreased angiogenesis due to sequestration of vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) by Aβ plaques and competition between Aβ and VEGF receptor 2 is a factor. Studies have found Aβ plaques in the retinas of postmortem AD patients and in mice with AD. These findings suggest that Optical Coherence Tomography Angiography (OCT-A) could be used to detect microvascular abnormalities in even pre-clinical AD pathology [8]. Recent applications of OCT-A have shed light on acute stroke diagnosis even from retina though it requires further research [7]. In this chapter, we will explore the potential applications of OCT-A in these fields, their challenges, and future directions.

### **2. Basic concepts of OCT-A**

OCT-A is an imaging tool for visualizing the retinal vasculature in the eye based on the traditional OCT but allows for high-speed imaging acquisition of the retinal blood vessels. OCT-A uses algorithms such as Ultrahigh-sensitive optical microangiography, split-spectrum amplitude-decorrelation angiography, full spectrum amplitude


Preface

**Section 2 Social and Humanecological Aspects of Ecosystem**

Chapter 7 **Ecosystem Service Mapping: A Management-Oriented**

Lisa Pinto de Sousa, Ana I. Lillebø and Fátima L. Alves

Chapter 8 **The Role of Ecosystem Services in Community Well-Being 145**

Chapter 9 **Urban and Industrial Habitats: How Important They Are for**

Gabriela Woźniak, Edyta Sierka and Anne Wheeler

Chapter 10 **Integrating Ecosystem Services in Historically Polluted Areas: Bioremediation Techniques for Soils Contaminated by**

Mirela Nedelescu, Daniela Baconi, Miriana Stan, Ana-Maria

**Approach to Support Environmental Planning Process 127**

James Kevin Summers, Lisa M. Smith, Richard S. Fulford and Rebeca

**Services 125**

**VI** Contents

de Jesus Crespo

**Ecosystem Services 169**

**Heavy Metals 195**

Vlasceanu and Anne-Marie Ciobanu

Our book, *Ecosystem Services and Global Ecology*, provides a very stimulating report and over‐ view of the frontiers of natural and social aspects of ecosystem services throughout the world.

It consists of two sections: the first section looks at natural and the second section at societal and human ecological aspects of ecosystems and their services. The first section has five chapters concerning collapsing ecosystems, invasive species, benthic macroinvertebrate communities, watersheds, and plant anatomical patterns from a worldwide viewpoint.

In the second section we can read about the mapping of ecosystem services, community well-being, urban ecology, and some historical aspects.

In my opinion every chapter is very useful and original.

I am sure that this book will be very interesting to everybody—researchers, teachers, stu‐ dents, or others interested in the field—who would like to gain insight into the area of eco‐ logical research.

> **Levente Hufnagel, PhD habil** Szent István University, Hungary

**Section 1**

**Natural Aspects of Ecosystem Services**

**Natural Aspects of Ecosystem Services**

**Chapter 1**

**Provisional chapter**

**Introductory Chapter: Evaluation Methods of**

**Introductory Chapter: Evaluation Methods of**

Levente Hufnagel, Ferenc Mics and Réka Homoródi

Levente Hufnagel, Ferenc Mics and Réka Homoródi

Additional information is available at the end of the chapter

Additional information is available at the end of the chapter

http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.80227

**of the Humankind**

**1. Introduction**

**of the Humankind**

**Ecosystem Services and Their Scientific and Societal**

**Ecosystem Services and Their Scientific and Societal**

**Importance in Service of Solving the Global Problems**

**Importance in Service of Solving the Global Problems**

Reduction of ecosystem services plays a key role in the group of phenomena that is called global ecological crisis. Population explosion has resulted in overpopulation of our planet. Energy source of this overpopulation has been fossil fuels (coal, mineral oil and natural gas) produced by the biosphere over millions of years during the history of the Earth. Exploiting and burning of these natural resources have decreased living conditions of subsequent generations and have started a global climate change at the same time. However, it is more important that urban areas and agricultural land have extended in place of natural ecosystems, causing them to decrease drastically and malfunction, which has resulted in a biodiversity crisis, mass species extinction. Besides these, the global ecological crisis includes industrial, agricultural, traffic and residential pollution, which have damaged abiotic components of habitats, that is, air, soil and water. Deteriorating ecological conditions have caused social problems directly and indirectly, such as epidemics, poverty and humanitarian crises. Besides these, pollutant and nature-destroying economic activities increase wealth and income inequality among people, which results in further social tensions (crime, terrorism, riots and wars). At the same time, problems are aggravated by favorable processes whose disadvantages are not considered at first. Increasing scientific research has led to an information explosion. Due to this, experts have been forced back to a more and more narrow intellectual space; our excellent scientific specialists are less and less able to have an overview of their own wider discipline

> © 2016 The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

© 2018 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use,

distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

DOI: 10.5772/intechopen.80227

**Introductory Chapter: Evaluation Methods of Ecosystem Services and Their Scientific and Societal Importance in Service of Solving the Global Problems of the Humankind Introductory Chapter: Evaluation Methods of Ecosystem Services and Their Scientific and Societal Importance in Service of Solving the Global Problems of the Humankind**

DOI: 10.5772/intechopen.80227

Levente Hufnagel, Ferenc Mics and Réka Homoródi Levente Hufnagel, Ferenc Mics and Réka Homoródi

Additional information is available at the end of the chapter Additional information is available at the end of the chapter

http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.80227