Payel Ghosh

There is a significant advancement in the modification of extruders for the commercial application in food processing sector, especially during the last three decades. Extrusion is one among the most commercially successful technology, escalating its demand in the diverse field of the food industry, including food processing, digital food marketing (3-D printed food) and food packaging. The paper aims to review the developments in the last 5 years. The novel innovations include hot-melt extrusion, supercritical fluid assisted extrusion and extrusion-based 3-D printing. Hot-melt extrusion finds application in developing food with taste-masking properties of functional components and with high repeatability andy targeted delivery with widespread application in meat replacements, cheese, cocoa etc. The supercritical fluids assisted extrusion is used to develop products rich in nutrients that are heat sensitive. Extrusion based 3-D printing is the latest trend focusing on digitalizing commercial food market with nutritionally personalized and geometrically complex food products. The review also gives lights to the application of extrusion in the food packaging sector as biodegradable polymers replacing synthetic petroleum products. It can be inferred that novel technologies in the extrusion have a promising future for the commercialization of both product and technology.

Flowers that can be consumed by human being safely are known as edible flower (EF). In the fast and nutritive food thrive scenario; flowers breaking all the odds out to put their picture as the food grade material with their rich nutritive value. However, there is a strong aspiration for scientific evidences to justify positive impact of EF on health through superior nutritional and bioactive attributes. This review summarizes the outcome of various studies performed until now on edible flowers, focusing on nutritional, bioactive, preservation and toxicological properties and health effects. This article also provides valuable information through systematic compilation and interpretation of published data on edible flowers in order to increase their popularization among the food industry and consumers. Analysis of previously published outcomes revealed that the nutritional and bioactive attributes makes the EF as complete form of nutrition available for mankind and need further exploration for value added product development, without neglecting the identification and documentation of potential toxicological elements for safe and desirable application for future expansion of EF in to value added products.

Jamun (Syzygium cuminii) is an important minor fruits in India. Minor fruits are good source of nutrition and pharmaceuticals properties. Among all minor fruits Jamun is highly perishable but nutritious. It is mainly used for diabetes patients and in the pharmaceuticals industries. It is a good source of anthocyanin, effective against the analgesic properties. There is no proper data available for the Indian Jamun. The fruit is having a very good market value, but due to its unavailability and perishability it is still unexploited. Physicochemical, mechanical and sensory properties had been investigated for Jamun fruit as well as seed in this paper for further use and storage. Weight of the whole fruit was 8.99±1.89gm whereas the seed weight was 1.64±0.21gm. In case of mechanical property whole fruit can be penetrated up-to 4.1mm whereas, at the same load for seed it can penetrate up-to 2.53mm. Purple colour for pulp, juice and whole fruit was -9.7, -0.9, and -0.76 respectively. High amount of polyphenol (203.76±9.84, 386.51±10.25) tannin (94.52±9.19, 388.99±7.34) and anthocyanin (195.58±6.15, 18.47±1.99) present in both fruit and seed. In case of minerals, presence of K, Ca and Na are significant. In case of sensory analysis mouthfeel and colour was good compared to market sample. This study is helpful for the postharvest processing, machine designing and for further analysis of Jamun.

Segmentation of medical images is challenging due to poor image contrast and artifacts that result in missing or diffuse organ/tissue boundaries. Consequently, this task involves incorporating as much prior information as possible (e.g., texture, shape, and spatial location of organs) into a single framework. In this paper, we present a genetic algorithm for automating the segmentation of the prostate on two-dimensional slices of pelvic computed tomography (CT) images. In this approach the segmenting curve is represented using a level set function, which is evolved using a genetic algorithm (GA). Shape and textural priors derived from manually segmented images are used to constrain the evolution of the segmenting curve over successive generations.We review some of the existing medical image segmentation techniques. We also compare the results of our algorithm with those of a simple texture extraction algorithm (Laws' texture measures) as well as with another GA-based segmentation tool called GENIE. Our preliminary tests on a small population of segmenting contours show promise by converging on the prostate region. We expect that further improvements can be achieved by incorporating spatial relationships between anatomical landmarks, and extending the methodology to three dimensions.