Hypoxia inducible factor-1α (HIF-1α) as an early predictor of acute hydrogen cyanamide (Dormex) poisoning.

Hydrogen cyanamide (Dormex) is a plant growth regulator that is classified as a highly toxic poison. There are no definite investigations to help in its diagnosis and follow-up. This study aimed to investigate the role of hypoxia-inducible factor-1α (HIF-1α) in the diagnosis, prediction, and follow-up of Dormex-intoxicated patients. Sixty subjects were equally divided into two groups: group A, the control group, and group B, the Dormex group. Clinical and laboratory evaluations, including arterial blood gases (ABG), prothrombin concentration (PC), the international normalized ratio (INR), a complete blood count (CBC), and HIF-1α, were done on admission. CBC and HIF-1α were repeated for group B 24 and 48 h after admission to track abnormalities. Group B also had brain computed tomography (CT). Patients with abnormal CT scans were referred for brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Significant differences in levels of HB, WBCs, and platelets were also detected in group B up to 48 h after admission, as white blood cells (WBCs) rose with time and hemoglobin (HB) and platelets diminished. The results described a highly significant difference in HIF-1α between the groups, and it depended on the clinical condition; therefore, it can be used in the prediction and follow-up of patients up to 24 h after admission.

Secure biometric systems based on bio-signals and DNA encryption of optical spectrograms.

Recently, biometrics has become widely used in applications to verify an individual's identity. To address security issues, biometrics presents an intriguing window of opportunity to enhance the usability and security of the Internet of Things (IoT) and other systems. It can be used to secure a variety of newly emerging IoT devices. However, biometric scenarios need more protection against different hacking attempts. Various solutions are introduced to secure biometrics. Cryptosystems, cancelable biometrics, and hybrid systems are efficient solutions for template protection. The new trend in biometric authentication systems is to use bio-signals. In this paper, two proposed authentication systems are introduced based on bio-signals. One of them is unimodal, while the other is multimodal. Protected templates are obtained depending on encryption. The deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) encryption is implemented on the obtained optical spectrograms of bio-signals. The authentication process relies on the DNA sensitivity to variations in the initial values. In the multimodal system, the singular value decomposition (SVD) algorithm is implemented to merge bio-signals. Different evaluation metrics are used to assess the performance of the proposed systems. Simulation results prove the high accuracy and efficiency of the proposed systems as the equal error rate (EER) value is close to 0 and the area under the receiver operator characteristic curve (AROC) is close to 1. The false accept rate (FAR), false reject rate (FRR), and decidability (D) are also estimated with acceptable results of 1.6 × 10-8, 9.05 × 10-6, and 29.34, respectively. Simulation results indicate the performance stability of the proposed systems in the presence of different levels of noise.

Cancelable biometric system for IoT applications based on optical double random phase encoding.

The security issue is essential in the Internet-of-Things (IoT) environment. Biometrics play an important role in securing the emerging IoT devices, especially IoT robots. Biometric identification is an interesting candidate to improve IoT usability and security. To access and control sensitive environments like IoT, passwords are not recommended for high security levels. Biometrics can be used instead, but more protection is needed to store original biometrics away from invaders. This paper presents a cancelable multimodal biometric recognition system based on encryption algorithms and watermarking. Both voice-print and facial images are used as individual biometrics. Double Random Phase Encoding (DRPE) and chaotic Baker map are utilized as encryption algorithms. Verification is performed by estimating the correlation between registered and tested models in their cancelable format. Simulation results give Equal Error Rate (EER) values close to zero and Area under the Receiver Operator Characteristic Curve (AROC) equal to one, which indicates the high performance of the proposed system in addition to the difficulty to invert cancelable templates. Moreover, reusability and diversity of biometric templates is guaranteed.

Methodology for the remote transfer of GPS receiver station data through a GSM network.

Coastline alterations severely impact the socio-economic conditions of populations living in coastal regions. Climate changes, together with land subsidence considerations, have increased recently according to high-accuracy fixed tide gauges and land subsidence sensors. In addition, networks of measurement devices are spread throughout the oceans, seas, and coastal areas to capture ongoing changes and to predict future impacts. However, some of these devices still require the in-situ extraction of data for postprocessing. This increases the cost, wastes time, and increases the probability of human errors leading to inaccurate results. This study presents a developed approach to remotely access the Trimble NetR9 GPS receiver device that is fixed at the Coastal Research Institute station in the city of Rosetta in Egypt. This will ease the remote retrieval of the station data for its processing and interpretation.

Optimum model selection and statistical analysis for DNA sequences.

In this article, we study the statistical characteristics and examine the performance of original representation and mathematical modelling of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) sequences. The proposed mathematical modelling approach is presented to create closed formulas for the original DNA data sequences with different methods. Accuracy of representation is studied based on evaluation metric values. The root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) and correlation coefficient (R) are used for examining the accuracy of all mathematical models to select the optimum one for DNA representation. In addition, statistical parameters such as energy, entropy, standard deviation, variance, mean, range, Mean Absolute Deviation (MAD), skewness and kurtosis are also used for the selection of the optimum model for DNA representation. Finally, spectral estimation methods are used for exon prediction, which means determination of the coding region (exon) for actual sequences and selected mathematical model: Sum of Sinusoids (SoS) with 8 terms and Gaussian with 8 terms. The exon prediction results from original DNA sequences and mathematically modelled DNA sequences coincide and ensure the success of the proposed sum-of--sinusoids for modelling of DNA sequences, while the Gaussian model is not appropriate for this task.

Optical wireless communication performance enhancement using Hamming coding and an efficient adaptive equalizer with a deep-learning-based quality assessment.

Optical wireless communication (OWC) technology is one of several alternative technologies for addressing the radio frequency limitations for applications in both indoor and outdoor architectures. Indoor optical wireless systems suffer from noise and intersymbol interference (ISI). These degradations are produced by the wireless channel multipath effect, which causes data rate limitation and hence overall system performance degradation. On the other hand, outdoor OWC suffers from several physical impairments that affect transmission quality. Channel coding can play a vital role in the performance enhancement of OWC systems to ensure that data transmission is robust against channel impairments. In this paper, an efficient framework for OWC in developing African countries is introduced. It is suitable for OWC in both indoor and outdoor environments. The outdoor scenario will be suitable to wild areas in Africa. A detailed study of the system stages is presented to guarantee the suitable modulation, coding, equalization, and quality assessment scenarios for the OWC process, especially for tasks such as image and video communication. Hamming and low-density parity check coding techniques are utilized with an asymmetrically clipped DC-offset optical orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (ADO-OFDM) scenario. The performance versus the complexity of both utilized techniques for channel coding is studied, and both coding techniques are compared at different coding rates. Another task studied in this paper is how to perform efficient adaptive channel estimation and hence equalization on the OWC systems to combat the effect of ISI. The proposed schemes for this task are based on the adaptive recursive least-squares (RLS) and the adaptive least mean squares (LMS) algorithms with activity detection guidance and tap decoupling techniques at the receiver side. These adaptive channel estimators are compared with the adaptive estimators based on the standard LMS and RLS algorithms. Moreover, this paper presents a new scenario for quality assessment of optical communication systems based on the regular transmission of images over the system and quality evaluation of these images at the receiver based on a trained convolutional neural network. The proposed OWC framework is very useful for developing countries in Africa due to its simplicity of implementation with high performance.

Efficient implementation of parametric spectral estimation techniques for DNA exon prediction.

This paper is mainly concerned with the application of different parametric spectral estimation techniques on deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) sequences. The objective of this study is to allow the analysis of these sequences for useful information extraction such as exon information. It is known that the exon, if existing, is represented with a spectral peak at the normalized frequency of 0.667. A comparison study is presented between Burg, Covariance, Modified Covariance, Yule-Walker, MUltiple SIgnal Classification (MUSIC) and Auto-Regressive Moving Average (ARMA) techniques for efficient representation of DNA sequences in the frequency domain for further exon prediction. Moreover, to filter the out-of-band noise that appears in the frequency domain in the prediction process, an inverse Chebyshev bandpass filter tuned at 0.667 is utilized. The obtained results reveal the importance of bandpass filtering and ensure that Burg, Covariance and Modified Covariance techniques are the best for exon prediction with a detection range of about 60 dB.

Ferroelectric behavior and spectroscopic properties of La-Modified lead titanate nanoparticles prepared by a sol-gel method.

The sol-gel method was used to prepare perovskite type (Pb1-1.5x Lax□0.5x)TiO3 (PLT) ceramics with x = 0.21, 0.22, 0.23, 0.24, 0.25 in order to investigate their structural, optical, and dielectric properties. The crystallite compounds were obtained by calcinating the mixture of PbCO3, TiO2, and La2O3 at 1000 °C for different time periods. After 4 h annealing, PLT23 sample, approximately a very little secondary phases have been observed in the XRD spectrum of the PLT sample with 23% La content (PLT23). The presence of La dopants might have affected the tetragonality of the Lead titanate crystal structure. The PLT samples tolerance factor decreases from 0.991 as in x = 0.21 to 0.986 for x = 0.25. Hence, these structures tend, generally, to be in the perovskite phase as t ~ 1. In the doped ceramics, characteristic phase transitions were shifted to lower temperatures. The dielectric permittivity value showed the tendency of a slight increase with lanthanum addition and achieved its maximum εm (3649) at x = 0.23, then it decreases for higher concentrations of La. The samples' estimated average crystallite size ranged from 40 nm to 50 nm, the maximum crystallite size about (49.6 nm) at x = 0.23 La. The calculated bandgaps were 3.1, 3.26, 3.28, 3.08, and 3.12 for the PLT with 0.21, 0.22, 0.23,0.24 and 0.25% La, respectively. The Curie constant C was obtained as the slope of the curve of the inverse values of εr vs. temperature. The highest C value (5.2 × 105 K) was measured for the 23% La sample. The sample with 23% La content appears to be notably distinguished in its structural, optical, and dielectric characteristics compared with other samples.

Counted cycles method to measure the block inception time of kiloHertz frequency mammalian motor nerve block.

BACKGROUND: Kilohertz frequency alternating currents (KHFAC) produce rapid nerve conduction block of mammalian peripheral nerves and have potential clinical applications in reducing nerve hyperactivity. However, there are no experimental measurements of the block inception time (BIT) for the complete block of mammalian motor axons, i.e. the time from the start of delivery of the KHFAC to the axons reaching a fully blocked state. NEW METHOD: A "counted cycles" method (CCM) was designed to exploit characteristics of the onset response, which is typical of KHFAC block, to measure the BIT with a millisecond time resolution. Randomized and repeated experiments were conducted in an in-vivo rodent model, using trains of KHFAC over a range of complete cycle counts at three frequencies (10, 20, and 40 kHz). RESULTS: Complete motor nerve conduction block was obtained in the rat sciatic nerve (N = 4) with an average BIT range of 5 ms-10 ms. The fastest BIT measured was 2.5 ms-5 ms. There was no statistical difference between the block inception times for the three frequencies tested. COMPARISON WITH EXISTING METHODS: There are no comparable methods to measure the KHFAC BIT. CONCLUSION: The KHFAC BIT is faster than previously estimated. KHFAC motor nerve block is established in milliseconds. These results may assist in the design of methods to eliminate the onset response produced by KHFAC nerve block.

[Chronic thromboembolic pulmonary hypertension: Recommendations of the Cologne Consensus Conference 2016]. / Chronisch thromboembolische pulmonale Hypertonie: Empfehlungen der Kölner Konsensus Konferenz 2016.

The 2015 European Guidelines on Pulmonary Hypertension did not cover only pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH), but also other significant subgroups of pulmonary hypertension (PH). In June 2016, a Consensus Conference organized by the PH working groups of the German Society of Cardiology (DGK), the German Society of Respiratory Medicine (DGP) and the German Society of Pediatric Cardiology (DGPK) was held in Cologne, Germany to discuss open and controversial issues surrounding the practical implementation of the European Guidelines. Several working groups were initiated, one of which was dedicated to the diagnosis and treatment of chronic thromboembolic pulmonary hypertension (CTEPH). In every patient with PH of unknown cause CTEPH should be excluded. The primary treatment option is surgical pulmonary endarterectomy (PEA) in a specialized multidisciplinary CTEPH center. Inoperable patients or patients with persistent or recurrent CTEPH after PEA are candidates for targeted drug therapy. For balloon pulmonary angioplasty (BPA), there is currently only limited experience. This option - as PEA - is reserved to specialized centers with expertise for this treatment method. In addition, a brief overview is given on pulmonary artery sarcoma, since its surgical treatment is often analogous to PEA. The recommendations of this working group are summarized in the present paper.

Uvulopalatopharyngoplasty for sleep apnea in mentally retarded obese 14-year-old: an anaesthetic challenge.

Anaesthetic management of patients with obstructive sleep apnea for upper airway surgery has always been a challenging task. We report our anaesthetic approach for a young, mentally retarded obese patient with documented obstructive sleep apnea undergoing uvulopalatopharyngoplasty. The therapeutic intervention before, during and after operation is discussed.