Artificial Intelligence for Antimicrobial Resistance Prediction: Challenges and Opportunities towards Practical Implementation.

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is emerging as a potential threat to many lives worldwide. It is very important to understand and apply effective strategies to counter the impact of AMR and its mutation from a medical treatment point of view. The intersection of artificial intelligence (AI), especially deep learning/machine learning, has led to a new direction in antimicrobial identification. Furthermore, presently, the availability of huge amounts of data from multiple sources has made it more effective to use these artificial intelligence techniques to identify interesting insights into AMR genes such as new genes, mutations, drug identification, conditions favorable to spread, and so on. Therefore, this paper presents a review of state-of-the-art challenges and opportunities. These include interesting input features posing challenges in use, state-of-the-art deep-learning/machine-learning models for robustness and high accuracy, challenges, and prospects to apply these techniques for practical purposes. The paper concludes with the encouragement to apply AI to the AMR sector with the intention of practical diagnosis and treatment, since presently most studies are at early stages with minimal application in the practice of diagnosis and treatment of disease.

The Effect of Soil-Structure Interaction on the Seismic Response of Structures Using Machine Learning, Finite Element Modeling and ASCE 7-16 Methods.

Seismic design of structures taking into account the soil-structure interaction (SSI) methods is considered to be more efficient, cost effective, and safer then fixed-base designs, in most cases. Finite element methods that use direct equations to solve SSI problems are very popular, but the prices of the software are very high, and the analysis time is very long. Even though some low-cost and efficient software are available, the structures are mostly analyzed for the superstructure only, without using the geotechnical properties of the ground and its interaction effects. The reason is that a limited number of researchers have the knowledge of both geotechnical and structural engineering to model accurately the coupled soil-structure system. However, a cost-effective, less time-consuming and easy-to-implement technique is to analyze the structure along with ground properties using machine learning methods. The database techniques using machine learning are robust and provide reliable results. Thus, in this study, machine learning techniques, such as artificial neural networks and support vector machines are used to investigate the effect of soil-structure interactions on the seismic response of structures for different earthquake scenarios. Four frame structures are investigated by varying the soil and seismic properties. In addition, varying sample sizes and different optimization algorithms are used to obtain the best machine learning framework. The input parameters contain both soil and seismic properties, while the outputs consist of three engineering demand parameters. The network is trained using three and five-story buildings and tested on a three-story building with mass irregularity and a four-story building. Furthermore, the proposed method is compared with the dynamic responses obtained using fixed-base and ASCE 7-16 SSI methods. The proposed machine learning method showed better results compared with fixed-base and ASCE 7-16 methods with the nonlinear time history analysis results as a reference.

A Machine Learning Architecture Replacing Heavy Instrumented Laboratory Tests: In Application to the Pullout Capacity of Geosynthetic Reinforced Soils.

For economical and sustainable benefits, conventional retaining walls are being replaced by geosynthetic reinforced soil (GRS). However, for safety and quality assurance purposes, prior tests of pullout capacities of these materials need to be performed. Conventionally, these tests are conducted in a laboratory with heavy instruments. These tests are time-consuming, require hard labor, are prone to error, and are expensive as a special pullout machine is required to perform the tests and acquire the data by using a lot of sensors and data loggers. This paper proposes a data-driven machine learning architecture (MLA) to predict the pullout capacity of GRS in a diverse environment. The results from MLA are compared with actual laboratory pullout capacity tests. Various input variables are considered for training and testing the neural network. These input parameters include the soil physical conditions based on water content and external loading applied. The soil used is a locally available weathered granite soil. The input data included normal stress, soil saturation, displacement, and soil unit weight whereas the output data contains information about the pullout strength. The data used was obtained from an actual pullout capacity test performed in the laboratory. The laboratory test is performed according to American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) standard D 6706-01 with little modification. This research shows that by using machine learning, the same pullout resistance of a geosynthetic reinforced soil can be achieved as in laboratory testing, thus saving a lot of time, effort, and money. Feedforward backpropagation neural networks with a different number of neurons, algorithms, and hidden layers have been examined. The comparison of the Bayesian regularization learning algorithm with two hidden layers and 12 neurons each showed the minimum mean square error (MSE) of 3.02 × 10-5 for both training and testing. The maximum coefficient of regression (R) for the testing set is 0.999 and the training set is 0.999 for the prediction interval of 99%.

DEVELOPMENT OF COMPRESSED COATED POLYPILL WITH MUCOADHESIVE CORE COMPRISING OF ATORVASTATIN/CLOPIDOGREL/ASPIRIN USING COMPRESSION COATING TECHNIQUE.

The study was conducted to formulate and assess a novel polypill comprising of atorvastatin calci- um (ATVC), clopidogrel bisulfate (CLB) and aspirin (ASP) which, after in vivo correlation, can be intended for use in hyperlipidemic chronic heart disease patients. Polypill was made by the compression coating technique (CCT) with multiple active ingredients along with different concentrations of mucoadhesive and sustained release polymers, i.e., Carbopol 934 (CAB), Methocel k15 (MTH) and sodium carboxymethyl cellulose (NaCMC). The effect of different concentration of polymers on physical properties, wash off time, mucoadhe- sion strength, swelling behavior, surface pH and drug release kinetics were investigated. In vitro drug release studies showed that combination of CAB-NaCMC (1 : 1) retarded drug release up to 96.7 ± 1.15%, while com- bination of CAB-MTH and MTH-NaCMC retarded drug release up to 81.9 ± 1.5% and 101.4 ± 1.3%, respec- tively, at the same polymer concentration. Core enteric coated tablet of ATVC (K 11) was compressed over with CLB and ASP granules with the help of CCT and produced the desired results with zero order release rate thus indicating successful formulation of proposed polypill.