Abstract: Cytogenetic analysis still remains the gold standard method for prenatal diagnosis of trisomy 21 (Down syndrome, DS). Nevertheless, the conventional cytogenetic analysis needs live cultured cells and is too time-consuming for clinical application. In contrast, molecular methods such as FISH, QF-PCR, MLPA and quantitative Real-time PCR are rapid assays with results available in 24h. In the present study, we have successfully used a novel MGB TaqMan probe-based real time PCR assay for rapid diagnosis of trisomy 21 status in Down syndrome samples. We have also compared the results of this molecular method with corresponding results obtained by the cytogenetic analysis. Blood samples obtained from DS patients (n=25) and normal controls (n=20) were tested by quantitative Real-time PCR in parallel to standard G-banding analysis. Genomic DNA was extracted from peripheral blood lymphocytes. A high precision TaqMan probe quantitative Real-time PCR assay was developed to determine the gene dosage of DSCAM (target gene on 21q22.2) relative to PMP22 (reference gene on 17p11.2). The DSCAM/PMP22 ratio was calculated according to the formula; ratio=2 -ΔΔCT. The quantitative Real-time PCR was able to distinguish between trisomy 21 samples and normal controls with the gene ratios of 1.49±0.13 and 1.03±0.04 respectively (p value
Abstract: Morphogenesis is the process that underpins the selforganised development and regeneration of biological systems. The ability to mimick morphogenesis in artificial systems has great potential for many engineering applications, including production of biological tissue, design of robust electronic systems and the co-ordination of parallel computing. Previous attempts to mimick these complex dynamics within artificial systems have relied upon the use of evolutionary algorithms that have limited their size and complexity. This paper will present some insight into the underlying dynamics of morphogenesis, then show how to, without the assistance of evolutionary algorithms, design cellular architectures that converge to complex patterns.
Abstract: Estimation of runoff water quality parameters is required to determine appropriate water quality management options. Various models are used to estimate runoff water quality parameters. However, most models provide event-based estimates of water quality parameters for specific sites. The work presented in this paper describes the development of a model that continuously simulates the accumulation and wash-off of water quality pollutants in a catchment. The model allows estimation of pollutants build-up during dry periods and pollutants wash-off during storm events. The model was developed by integrating two individual models; rainfall-runoff model, and catchment water quality model. The rainfall-runoff model is based on the time-area runoff estimation method. The model allows users to estimate the time of concentration using a range of established methods. The model also allows estimation of the continuing runoff losses using any of the available estimation methods (i.e., constant, linearly varying or exponentially varying). Pollutants build-up in a catchment was represented by one of three pre-defined functions; power, exponential, or saturation. Similarly, pollutants wash-off was represented by one of three different functions; power, rating-curve, or exponential. The developed runoff water quality model was set-up to simulate the build-up and wash-off of total suspended solids (TSS), total phosphorus (TP) and total nitrogen (TN). The application of the model was demonstrated using available runoff and TSS field data from road and roof surfaces in the Gold Coast, Australia. The model provided excellent representation of the field data demonstrating the simplicity yet effectiveness of the proposed model.
Abstract: Mouse L929 fibroblastic cell line, which is widely
used in many experiment aspects, was tested for their differentiation
potency in osteogenic differentiation and adipogenic differentiation.
Human dermal fibroblasts, which their differentiation potency are
still be in confliction, also be taken in the experiment. The
differentiations were conducted by using the inducing medium
ingredients which is generally used to induce differentiation of stem
cells. By the inducing media used, L929 mouse fibroblasts
successfully underwent osteogenic differentiation and adipogenic
differentiation while human dermal fibroblasts underwent only
osteogenic differentiation but not for adipogenic differentiation.
Human dermal fibroblasts are hard to be differentiated in adipogenic
lineage and need specific proper condition for induction.
Abstract: This study aims to identify cellular phone users- shopping motivating factors towards online shopping. 100 university students located in Klang Valley, Malaysia were involved as the respondents. They were required to complete a set of questionnaire and had to own a cellular phone in order to be selected as sample in this study. Three from five proposed hypotheses were supported: purchasing information, shopping utilities and service quality. As a result, marketers and retailers should concentrate more on the less important factors in order to encourage and create willingness of the consumers to purchase online. Recommendation for future research is also presented.
Abstract: This paper presents a novel method for inferring the
odor based on neural activities observed from rats- main olfactory
bulbs. Multi-channel extra-cellular single unit recordings were done
by micro-wire electrodes (tungsten, 50μm, 32 channels) implanted in
the mitral/tufted cell layers of the main olfactory bulb of anesthetized
rats to obtain neural responses to various odors. Neural response
as a key feature was measured by substraction of neural firing rate
before stimulus from after. For odor inference, we have developed a
decoding method based on the maximum likelihood (ML) estimation.
The results have shown that the average decoding accuracy is about
100.0%, 96.0%, 84.0%, and 100.0% with four rats, respectively. This
work has profound implications for a novel brain-machine interface
system for odor inference.
Abstract: In this paper, we use Radial Basis Function Networks
(RBFN) for solving the problem of environmental interference
cancellation of speech signal. We show that the Second Order Thin-
Plate Spline (SOTPS) kernel cancels the interferences effectively.
For make comparison, we test our experiments on two conventional
most used RBFN kernels: the Gaussian and First order TPS (FOTPS)
basis functions. The speech signals used here were taken from the
OGI Multi-Language Telephone Speech Corpus database and were
corrupted with six type of environmental noise from NOISEX-92
database. Experimental results show that the SOTPS kernel can
considerably outperform the Gaussian and FOTPS functions on
speech interference cancellation problem.
Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to assess the value of neural networks for classification of cancer and noncancer prostate cells. Gauss Markov Random Fields, Fourier entropy and wavelet average deviation features are calculated from 80 noncancer and 80 cancer prostate cell nuclei. For classification, artificial neural network techniques which are multilayer perceptron, radial basis function and learning vector quantization are used. Two methods are utilized for multilayer perceptron. First method has single hidden layer and between 3-15 nodes, second method has two hidden layer and each layer has between 3-15 nodes. Overall classification rate of 86.88% is achieved.
Abstract: Oxidative stress and overwhelming free radicals
associated with diabetes mellitus are likely to be linked with
development of certain complication such as retinopathy,
nephropathy and neuropathy. Treatment of diabetic subjects with
antioxidant may be of advantage in attenuating these complications.
Olive leaf (Oleaeuropaea), has been endowed with many beneficial
and health promoting properties mostly linked to its antioxidant
activity. This study aimed to evaluate the significance of
supplementation of Olive leaves extract (OLE) in reducing oxidative
stress, hyperglycemia and hyperlipidemia in Sterptozotocin (STZ)-
induced diabetic rats. After induction of diabetes, a significant rise in
plasma glucose, lipid profiles except High density lipoproteincholestrol
(HDLc), malondialdehyde (MDA) and significant decrease
of plasma insulin, HDLc and Plasma reduced glutathione GSH as
well as alteration in enzymatic antioxidants was observed in all
diabetic animals. During treatment of diabetic rats with 0.5g/kg body
weight of Olive leaves extract (OLE) the levels of plasma (MDA)
,(GSH), insulin, lipid profiles along with blood glucose and
erythrocyte enzymatic antioxidant enzymes were significantly
restored to establish values that were not different from normal
control rats. Untreated diabetic rats on the other hand demonstrated
persistent alterations in the oxidative stress marker (MDA), blood
glucose, insulin, lipid profiles and the antioxidant parameters. These
results demonstrate that OLE may be of advantage in inhibiting
hyperglycemia, hyperlipidemia and oxidative stress induced by
diabetes and suggest that administration of OLE may be helpful in
the prevention or at least reduced of diabetic complications
associated with oxidative stress.
Abstract: In this paper, the periodic surveillance scheme has
been proposed for any convex region using mobile wireless sensor
nodes. A sensor network typically consists of fixed number of
sensor nodes which report the measurements of sensed data such as
temperature, pressure, humidity, etc., of its immediate proximity
(the area within its sensing range). For the purpose of sensing an
area of interest, there are adequate number of fixed sensor
nodes required to cover the entire region of interest. It implies
that the number of fixed sensor nodes required to cover a given
area will depend on the sensing range of the sensor as well as
deployment strategies employed. It is assumed that the sensors to
be mobile within the region of surveillance, can be mounted on
moving bodies like robots or vehicle. Therefore, in our
scheme, the surveillance time period determines the number of
sensor nodes required to be deployed in the region of interest.
The proposed scheme comprises of three algorithms namely:
Hexagonalization, Clustering, and Scheduling, The first algorithm
partitions the coverage area into fixed sized hexagons that
approximate the sensing range (cell) of individual sensor node.
The clustering algorithm groups the cells into clusters, each of
which will be covered by a single sensor node. The later
determines a schedule for each sensor to serve its respective cluster.
Each sensor node traverses all the cells belonging to the cluster
assigned to it by oscillating between the first and the last cell for
the duration of its life time. Simulation results show that our
scheme provides full coverage within a given period of time using
few sensors with minimum movement, less power consumption,
and relatively less infrastructure cost.
Abstract: Design and implementation of a novel B-ACOSD CFAR algorithm is presented in this paper. It is proposed for detecting radar target in log-normal distribution environment. The BACOSD detector is capable to detect automatically the number interference target in the reference cells and detect the real target by an adaptive threshold. The detector is implemented as a System on Chip on FPGA Altera Stratix II using parallelism and pipelining technique. For a reference window of length 16 cells, the experimental results showed that the processor works properly with a processing speed up to 115.13MHz and processing time0.29 ┬Ás, thus meets real-time requirement for a typical radar system.
Abstract: Flash memory has become an important storage device
in many embedded systems because of its high performance, low
power consumption and shock resistance. Multi-level cell (MLC) is
developed as an effective solution for reducing the cost and increasing
the storage density in recent years. However, most of flash file system
cannot handle the error correction sufficiently. To correct more errors
for MLC, we implement Reed-Solomon (RS) code to YAFFS, what is
widely used for flash-based file system. RS code has longer computing
time but the correcting ability is much higher than that of Hamming
code.
Abstract: This paper is devoted to predict laminar and turbulent
heating rates around blunt re-entry spacecraft at hypersonic
conditions. Heating calculation of a hypersonic body is normally
performed during the critical part of its flight trajectory. The
procedure is of an inverse method, where a shock wave is assumed,
and the body shape that supports this shock, as well as the flowfield
between the shock and body, are calculated. For simplicity the
normal momentum equation is replaced with a second order pressure
relation; this simplification significantly reduces computation time.
The geometries specified in this research, are parabola and ellipsoids
which may have conical after bodies. An excellent agreement is
observed between the results obtained in this paper and those
calculated by others- research. Since this method is much faster than
Navier-Stokes solutions, it can be used in preliminary design,
parametric study of hypersonic vehicles.
Abstract: Atherosclerosis is the condition in which an artery
wall thickens as the result of a build-up of fatty materials such as
cholesterol. It is a syndrome affecting arterial blood vessels, a
chronic inflammatory response in the walls of arteries, in large part
due to the accumulation of macrophage white blood cells and
promoted by low density (especially small particle) lipoproteins
(plasma proteins that carry cholesterol and triglycerides) without
adequate removal of fats and cholesterol from the macrophages by
functional high density lipoproteins (HDL). It is commonly referred
to as a hardening or furring of the arteries. It is caused by the
formation of multiple plaques within the arteries.
Abstract: Hierarchical classification is a problem with applications in many areas as protein function prediction where the dates are hierarchically structured. Therefore, it is necessary the development of algorithms able to induce hierarchical classification models. This paper presents experimenters using the algorithm for hierarchical classification called Multi-label Hierarchical Classification using a Competitive Neural Network (MHC-CNN). It was tested in ten datasets the Gene Ontology (GO) Cellular Component Domain. The results are compared with the Clus-HMC and Clus-HSC using the hF-Measure.
Abstract: We present an integration approach of a CMOS biosensor into a polymer based microfluidic environment suitable for mass production. It consists of a wafer-level-package for the silicon die and laser bonding process promoted by an intermediate hot melt foil to attach the sensor package to the microfluidic chip, without the need for dispensing of glues or underfiller. A very good condition of the sensing area was obtained after introducing a protection layer during packaging. A microfluidic flow cell was fabricated and shown to withstand pressures up to Δp = 780 kPa without leakage. The employed biosensors were electrically characterized in a dry environment.
Abstract: Overloading is a technique to accommodate more
number of users than the spreading factor N. This is a bandwidth
efficient scheme to increase the number users in a fixed bandwidth.
One of the efficient schemes to overload a CDMA system is to use
two sets of orthogonal signal waveforms (O/O). The first set is
assigned to the N users and the second set is assigned to the
additional M users. An iterative interference cancellation technique is
used to cancel interference between the two sets of users. In this
paper, the performance of an overloading scheme in which the first N
users are assigned Walsh-Hadamard orthogonal codes and extra users
are assigned the same WH codes but overlaid by a fixed (quasi) bent
sequence [11] is evaluated. This particular scheme is called Quasi-
Orthogonal Sequence (QOS) O/O scheme, which is a part of
cdma2000 standard [12] to provide overloading in the downlink
using single user detector. QOS scheme are balance O/O scheme,
where the correlation between any set-1 and set-2 users are
equalized. The allowable overload of this scheme is investigated in
the uplink on an AWGN and Rayleigh fading channels, so that the
uncoded performance with iterative multistage interference
cancellation detector remains close to the single user bound. It is
shown that this scheme provides 19% and 11% overloading with
SDIC technique for N= 16 and 64 respectively, with an SNR
degradation of less than 0.35 dB as compared to single user bound at
a BER of 0.00001. But on a Rayleigh fading channel, the channel
overloading is 45% (29 extra users) at a BER of 0.0005, with an SNR
degradation of about 1 dB as compared to single user performance
for N=64. This is a significant amount of channel overloading on a
Rayleigh fading channel.
Abstract: Aims for this study: first, to compare the expertise
level in data analysis, communication and information technologies
in undergraduate psychology students. Second, to verify the factor
structure of E-ETICA (Escala de Experticia en Tecnologias de la Informacion, la Comunicacion y el Análisis or Data Analysis,
Communication and Information'Expertise Scale) which had shown
an excellent internal consistency (α= 0.92) as well as a simple factor
structure. Three factors, Complex, Basic Information and
Communications Technologies and E-Searching and Download
Abilities, explains 63% of variance. In the present study, 260
students (119 juniors and 141 seniors) were asked to respond to
ETICA (16 items Likert scale of five points 1: null domain to 5: total
domain). The results show that both junior and senior students report
having very similar expertise level; however, E-ETICA presents a
different factor structure for juniors and four factors explained also
63% of variance: Information E-Searching, Download and Process;
Data analysis; Organization; and Communication technologies.
Abstract: A compact tunable 10 W picosecond source based on
Yb-doped fiber amplification of gain switch laser diode has been
demonstrated. A gain switch semiconductor laser diode was used as
the seed source, and a multi-stage single mode Yb-doped fiber
preamplifier was combined with two large mode area double-clad
Yb-doped fiber main amplifiers to construct the amplification system.
The tunable pulses with high stability and excellent beam quality
(M2
Abstract: Recently, a vehicular ad-hoc networks(VANETs) for
Intelligent Transport System(ITS) have become able safety and convenience services surpassing the simple services such as
an electronic toll collection system. To provide the proper services,
VANET needs infrastructure over the country infrastructure. Thus, we have to spend a huge sum of
human resources. In this reason, several studies have been made on the
usage of cellular networks instead of new protocols
this study is to assess a performance evaluation of the
cellular network for VANET. In this paper, the result of a
for the suitability of cellular networks for VANET
experiment, The LTE(Long Term Evolution) of cellular networks found to be most suitable among the others cellular networks