Search results for: Amir Zahedi

Authors: Amir E. Amirzadeh, Richard K. Strand

Abstract:

Moisture-induced problems are a significant concern for building owners, architects, construction managers, and building engineers, as they can have substantial impacts on building enclosures' durability and performance. Computational analyses, such as hygrothermal and thermal analysis, can provide valuable information and demonstrate the expected relative performance of building enclosure systems but are not grounded in absolute certainty. This paper evaluates the hygrothermal performance of common enclosure systems in hospitals in cold climates. The study aims to investigate the impact of exterior wall systems on hospitals, focusing on factors such as durability, construction deficiencies, and energy performance. The study primarily examines the impact of air leakage and vapor retarding layers relative to energy consumption. While these factors have been studied in residential and commercial buildings, there is a lack of information on their impact on hospitals in a holistic context. The study integrates various research studies and professional experience in hospital building design to achieve its objective. The methodology involves surveying and observing exterior wall assemblies, reviewing common exterior wall assemblies and details used in hospital construction, performing simulations and numerical analyses of various variables, validating the model and mechanism using available data from industry and academia, visualizing the outcomes of the analysis, and developing a mechanism to demonstrate the relative performance of exterior wall systems for hospitals under specific conditions. The data sources include case studies from real-world projects and peer-reviewed articles, industry standards, and practices. This research intends to integrate and analyze the in-situ and as-designed performance and durability of building enclosure assemblies with numerical analysis. The study's primary objective is to provide a clear and precise roadmap to better visualize and comprehend the correlation between the durability and performance of common exterior wall systems used in the construction of hospitals and the energy consumption of these buildings under certain static and dynamic conditions. As the construction of new hospitals and renovation of existing ones have grown over the last few years, it is crucial to understand the effect of poor detailing or construction deficiencies on building enclosure systems' performance and durability in healthcare buildings. This study aims to assist stakeholders involved in hospital design, construction, and maintenance in selecting durable and high-performing wall systems. It highlights the importance of early design evaluation, regular quality control during the construction of hospitals, and understanding the potential impacts of improper and inconsistent maintenance and operation practices on occupants, owner, building enclosure systems, and Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) systems, even if they are designed to meet the project requirements.

Keywords: hygrothermal analysis, building enclosure, hospitals, energy efficiency, optimization and visualization, uncertainty and decision making

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Authors: Amir Shouri, Fereshteh Tabe

Abstract:

Master planning and urban infrastructure’s thoughtful and sequential design strategies will play the major role in reducing the damages of natural disasters, war and or social/population related conflicts for cities. Defensive strategies have been revised during the history of mankind after having damages from natural depressions, war experiences and terrorist attacks on cities. Lessons learnt from Earthquakes, from 2 world war casualties in 20th century and terrorist activities of all times. Particularly, after Hurricane Sandy of New York in 2012 and September 11th attack on New York’s World Trade Centre (WTC) in 21st century, there have been series of serious collaborations between law making authorities, urban planners and architects and defence related organizations to firstly, getting prepared and/or prevent such activities and secondly, reduce the human loss and economic damages to minimum. This study will work on developing a model of planning for New York City, where its citizens will get minimum impacts in threat-full time with minimum economic damages to the city after the stress is passed. The main discussion in this proposal will focus on pre-hazard, hazard-time and post-hazard transformative policies and strategies that will reduce the “Life casualties” and will ease “Economic Recovery” in post-hazard conditions. This proposal is going to scrutinize that one of the key solutions in this path might be focusing on all overlaying possibilities on architectural platforms of three fundamental infrastructures, the transportation, the power related sources and defensive abilities on a dynamic-transformative framework that will provide maximum safety, high level of flexibility and fastest action-reaction opportunities in stressful periods of time. “Planning Fore Stress” is going to be done in an analytical, qualitative and quantitative work frame, where it will study cases from all over the world. Technology, Organic Design, Materiality, Urban forms, city politics and sustainability will be discussed in deferent cases in international scale. From the modern strategies of Copenhagen for living friendly with nature to traditional approaches of Indonesian old urban planning patterns, the “Iron Dome” of Israel to “Tunnels” in Gaza, from “Ultra-high-performance quartz-infused concrete” of Iran to peaceful and nature-friendly strategies of Switzerland, from “Urban Geopolitics” in cities, war and terrorism to “Design of Sustainable Cities” in the world, will all be studied with references and detailed look to analysis of each case in order to propose the most resourceful, practical and realistic solutions to questions on “New City Divisions”, “New City Planning and social activities” and “New Strategic Architecture for Safe Cities”. This study is a developed version of a proposal that was announced as winner at MoMA in 2013 in call for ideas for Rockaway after Sandy Hurricane took place.

Keywords: urban scale, city safety, natural disaster, war and terrorism, city divisions, architecture for safe cities

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Authors: Omer Zvi Shaked, Amir Tirosh

Abstract:

Type 1 Diabetes (T1DM) is an incurable chronic illness with no known preventive measures. Excess to insulin therapy can lead to hypoglycemia with neuro-glycogenic symptoms such as shakiness, nausea, sweating, irritability, fatigue, excessive thirst or hunger, weakness, seizure, and coma. Severe Hypoglycemia (SH) is also considered a most aversive event since it may put patients at risk for injury and death, which matches the criteria of a traumatic event. SH has a ranging prevalence of 20%, which makes it a primary medical Issue. One of the results of SH is an intense emotional fear reaction resembling the form of post-traumatic stress symptoms (PTS), causing many patients to avoid insulin therapy and social activities in order to avoid the possibility of hypoglycemia. As a result, they are at risk for irreversible health deterioration and medical complications. Fear of Hypoglycemia (FOH) is, therefore, a major disturbance for T1DM patients. FOH differs from prevalent post-traumatic stress reactions to other forms of traumatic events since the threat to life continuously exists in the patient's body. That is, it is highly probable that orthodox interventions may not be sufficient for helping patients after SH to regain healthy social function and proper medical treatment. Accordingly, the current presentation will demonstrate the results of a study conducted among T1DM patients after SH. The study was designed in two stages. First, a preliminary qualitative phenomenological study among ten patients after SH was conducted. Analysis revealed that after SH, patients confuse between stress symptoms and Hypoglycemia symptoms, divide life before and after the event, report a constant sense of fear, a loss of freedom, a significant decrease in social functioning, a catastrophic thinking pattern, a dichotomous split between the self and the body, and internalization of illness identity, a loss of internal locus of control, a damaged self-representation, and severe loneliness for never being understood by others. The second stage was a two steps study of intervention among five patients after SH. The first part of the intervention included three months of therapeutic 3rd wave CBT therapy. The contents of the therapeutic process were: acceptance of fear and tolerance to stress; cognitive de-fusion combined with emotional self-regulation; the adoption of an active position relying on personal values; and self-compassion. Then, the intervention included a one-week practical real-time 24/7 support by trained medical personnel, alongside a gradual exposure to increased insulin therapy in a protected environment. The results of the intervention are a decrease in stress symptoms, increased social functioning, increased well-being, and decreased avoidance of medical treatment. The presentation will discuss the unique emotional state of T1DM patients after SH. Then, the presentation will discuss the effectiveness of the intervention for patients with chronic conditions after a traumatic event. The presentation will make evident the unique situation of illness-related PTSD. The presentation will also demonstrate the requirement for multi-professional collaboration between social work and medical care for populations with chronic medical conditions. Limitations of the study and recommendations for further research will be discussed.

Keywords: type 1 diabetes, chronic illness, post-traumatic stress, illness-related PTSD

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Authors: Fahimeh Palizban, Farshad Noravesh, Amir Hossein Saeidian, Mahya Mehrmohamadi

Abstract:

In the recent decade, the emergence of liquid biopsy has significantly improved cancer monitoring and detection. Dying cells, including those originating from tumors, shed their DNA into the blood and contribute to a pool of circulating fragments called cell-free DNA. Accordingly, identifying the tissue origin of these DNA fragments from the plasma can result in more accurate and fast disease diagnosis and precise treatment protocols. Open chromatin regions are important epigenetic features of DNA that reflect cell types of origin. Profiling these features by DNase-seq, ATAC-seq, and histone ChIP-seq provides insights into tissue-specific and disease-specific regulatory mechanisms. There have been several studies in the area of cancer liquid biopsy that integrate distinct genomic and epigenomic features for early cancer detection along with tissue of origin detection. However, multimodal analysis requires several types of experiments to cover the genomic and epigenomic aspects of a single sample, which will lead to a huge amount of cost and time. To overcome these limitations, the idea of predicting OCRs from WGS is of particular importance. In this regard, we proposed a computational approach to target the prediction of open chromatin regions as an important epigenetic feature from cell-free DNA whole genome sequence data. To fulfill this objective, local sequencing depth will be fed to our proposed algorithm and the prediction of the most probable open chromatin regions from whole genome sequencing data can be carried out. Our method integrates the signal processing method with sequencing depth data and includes count normalization, Discrete Fourie Transform conversion, graph construction, graph cut optimization by linear programming, and clustering. To validate the proposed method, we compared the output of the clustering (open chromatin region+, open chromatin region-) with previously validated open chromatin regions related to human blood samples of the ATAC-DB database. The percentage of overlap between predicted open chromatin regions and the experimentally validated regions obtained by ATAC-seq in ATAC-DB is greater than 67%, which indicates meaningful prediction. As it is evident, OCRs are mostly located in the transcription start sites (TSS) of the genes. In this regard, we compared the concordance between the predicted OCRs and the human genes TSS regions obtained from refTSS and it showed proper accordance around 52.04% and ~78% with all and the housekeeping genes, respectively. Accurately detecting open chromatin regions from plasma cell-free DNA-seq data is a very challenging computational problem due to the existence of several confounding factors, such as technical and biological variations. Although this approach is in its infancy, there has already been an attempt to apply it, which leads to a tool named OCRDetector with some restrictions like the need for highly depth cfDNA WGS data, prior information about OCRs distribution, and considering multiple features. However, we implemented a graph signal clustering based on a single depth feature in an unsupervised learning manner that resulted in faster performance and decent accuracy. Overall, we tried to investigate the epigenomic pattern of a cell-free DNA sample from a new computational perspective that can be used along with other tools to investigate genetic and epigenetic aspects of a single whole genome sequencing data for efficient liquid biopsy-related analysis.

Keywords: open chromatin regions, cancer, cell-free DNA, epigenomics, graph signal processing, correlation clustering

Procedia PDF Downloads 110