The Incidence Rate of Acute Transfusion Reactions in Thalassemia Patients Referred to the Shiraz Thalassemia Centre, Shiraz, Iran, Before and After the Establishment of the Hemovigilance System.

This study aimed to investigate the incidence rate of acute transfusion reactions in thalassemia patients before and after the establishment of the hemovigilance system. This prospective descriptive study was conducted at the Dastgheyb Hospital, Shiraz, Iran, from 2009 to 2012. The incidence rate, type, imputability and severity of acute transfusion reactions were compared in thalassemia patients before and after the establishment of the hemovigilance system. A total of 741 thalassemia patients were referred to the Dastgheyb Hospital for transfusions during the study period. The incidence rates of acute transfusion reactions were reported as 0.06% (11 out of 16,214), 0.11% (23 out of 19,660), 0.10% (28 out of 26,129) and 0.2% (50 out of 24,121), respectively, from 2009 to 2012. The most frequent were major allergic reactions and febrile non hemolytic transfusion reactions (FNHTR). The transfusion reactions were increasingly reported after the establishment of the hemovigilance system in 2011 (p < 0.05). The establishment of the hemovigilance system can improve reporting of transfusion reactions. Moreover, evaluation of the incidence rate of transfusion reactions is necessary to design preventive measures to reduce transfusion risks.

Surface defect detection in tiling Industries using digital image processing methods: analysis and evaluation.

Ceramic and tile industries should indispensably include a grading stage to quantify the quality of products. Actually, human control systems are often used for grading purposes. An automatic grading system is essential to enhance the quality control and marketing of the products. Since there generally exist six different types of defects originating from various stages of tile manufacturing lines with distinct textures and morphologies, many image processing techniques have been proposed for defect detection. In this paper, a survey has been made on the pattern recognition and image processing algorithms which have been used to detect surface defects. Each method appears to be limited for detecting some subgroup of defects. The detection techniques may be divided into three main groups: statistical pattern recognition, feature vector extraction and texture/image classification. The methods such as wavelet transform, filtering, morphology and contourlet transform are more effective for pre-processing tasks. Others including statistical methods, neural networks and model-based algorithms can be applied to extract the surface defects. Although, statistical methods are often appropriate for identification of large defects such as Spots, but techniques such as wavelet processing provide an acceptable response for detection of small defects such as Pinhole. A thorough survey is made in this paper on the existing algorithms in each subgroup. Also, the evaluation parameters are discussed including supervised and unsupervised parameters. Using various performance parameters, different defect detection algorithms are compared and evaluated.

Association of cytokine/costimulatory molecule polymorphism and allograft rejection: a comparative review.

One reason for genetic variations among human individuals is SNP which may confer diverse disease susceptibility or resistance in a population. Genetic variations in a key immunoregulatory agent can manifest various immunological responses, such as graft rejection. In fact, the outcome of organ transplantation can be impacted by several genetic causes including polymorphisms in genes encoding cytokines and costimulatory molecules in the donor or recipient. Thus, it can be helpful to contemplate the SNPs relating to these immunological determinants in order to achieve an improved transplantation therapy.