Search results for: clinical application.

Authors: M. Ghasemi-Varnamkhasti, S. H. Yoosefian. A. Mohammad- Razdari

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The effect of 1.0 kJ/m² Ultraviolet-C (UV-C) light on pH, weight loss, color, and firmness of button mushroom (Agaricus bisporus) tissues during 21-days storage at 4 ºC was studied. UV-C irradiation enhanced pH, weight, color parameters, and firmness of mushroom during storage compared to control treatment. However, application of 1.0 kJ/m² UV-C treatment could effectively induce the increase of weight loss, firmness, and pH to 14.53%, 49.82%, and 10.39%, respectively. These results suggest that the application of UV-C irradiation could be an effective method to maintain the postharvest quality of mushrooms.

Keywords: Mushroom, polyethylene film, quality, UV-C irradiation.

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Authors: Maruf Yinka Kolawole, Jacob Olayiwola Aweda, Farasat Iqbal, Asif Ali, Sulaiman Abdulkareem

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Zinc is a non-ferrous metal with potential application in orthopaedic implant materials. However, its poor mechanical properties were major challenge to its application. Therefore, this paper studies the mechanical properties of biodegradable Zn-based alloy for biomedical application. Pure zinc powder with varying (0, 1, 2, 3 & 6) wt% of magnesium powders were ball milled using ball-to-powder ratio (B:P) of 10:1 at 350 rpm for 4 hours. The resulting milled powders were compacted and sintered at 300 MPa and 350 °C respectively. Microstructural, phase and mechanical properties analyses were performed following American standard of testing and measurement. The results show that magnesium has influence on the mechanical properties of zinc. The compressive strength, hardness and elastic modulus of 210 ± 8.878 MPa, 76 ± 5.707 HV and 45 ± 11.616 GPa respectively as obtained in Zn-2Mg alloy were optimum and meet the minimum requirement of biodegradable metal for orthopaedics application. These results indicate an increase of 111, 93 and 93% in compressive strength, hardness and elastic modulus respectively as compared to pure zinc. The increase in mechanical properties was adduced to effectiveness of compaction pressure and intermetallic phase formation within the matrix resulting in high dislocation density for improving strength. The study concluded that, Zn-2Mg alloy with optimum mechanical properties can therefore be considered a potential candidate for orthopaedic application.

Keywords: Biodegradable metal, biomedical application mechanical properties, powder metallurgy, zinc.

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Authors: Sunitha Abburu, Golla Suresh Babu

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The issues that limit application interoperability is lack of common vocabulary, common structure, application domain knowledge ontology based semantic technology provides solutions that resolves application interoperability issues. Ontology is broadly used in diverse applications such as artificial intelligence, bioinformatics, biomedical, information integration, etc. Ontology can be used to interpret the knowledge of various domains. To reuse, enrich the available ontologies and reduce the duplication of ontologies of the same domain, there is a strong need to integrate the ontologies of the particular domain. The integrated ontology gives complete knowledge about the domain by sharing this comprehensive domain ontology among the groups. As per the literature survey there is no well-defined methodology to represent knowledge of a whole domain. The current research addresses a systematic methodology for knowledge representation using multiple sub-ontologies at different levels that addresses application interoperability and enables semantic information retrieval. The current method represents complete knowledge of a domain by importing concepts from multiple sub ontologies of same and relative domains that reduces ontology duplication, rework, implementation cost through ontology reusability.

Keywords: Knowledge acquisition, knowledge representation, knowledge transfer, ontologies, semantics.

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Authors: Saratu Yusuf Ilu, Mumtaz B. Mustafa, Siti Salwah Salim, Mehdi Malekzadeh

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Children today use computer based application in various activities especially for learning and education. Many of these tools and application such as the Computer Aided Pronunciation Training (CAPT) systems enable children to explore and experience them with little supervision from the adults. In order for these tools and application to have maximum effect on the children’s learning and education, it must be attractive to the children to use them. This could be achieved with the proper user interface (UI) design. As children grow, so do their ability, taste and preferences. They interact differently with these applications as they grow older. This study reviews several articles on how age factors influence the UI design. The review focuses on age related abilities such as cognitive, literacy, concentration and feedback requirement. We have also evaluated few of existing CAPT systems and determine the influence of age-based factors on the interface design.

Keywords: Children, age-based interaction, learning application, age-based UI.

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Authors: Antti Pirhonen, Minna Silvennoinen

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The only relevant basis for the design of an educational application are objectives of learning for the content area. This study analyses the process in which the real – not only the formal – objectives could work as the starting point for the construction of an educational game. The application context is the education of perioperative nursing. The process is based on the panel discussions of nursing teachers. In the panels, the teachers elaborated the objectives. The transcribed discussions were analysed in terms of the conceptions of learning and teaching of perioperative nursing. The outcome of the study is first the elaborated objectives, which will be used in the implementation of an educational game for the needs of pre-, intra and post-operative nursing skills learning. Second, the study shows that different views of learning are necessary to be understood in order to design an appropriate educational application.

Keywords: Perioperative nursing, conceptions of learning, educational applications.

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Authors: Vallejo Michael, Acuña Edgar, Roa Juan David, Peñuela Rosa, Parra Alejandra, Casallas Daniela, Rodriguez Sheyla

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Congenital Zika Virus Syndrome is an entity composed by a variety of birth defects presented in newborns that have been exposed to the Zika Virus during pregnancy. The syndrome characteristic features are severe microcephaly, cerebral tissue abnormalities, ophthalmological abnormalities such as uveitis and chorioretinitis, arthrogryposis, clubfoot deformity and muscular tone abnormalities. The confirmatory test is the Reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) associated to the physical findings. Here we present the case of a newborn with microcephaly whose mother presented a confirmed Zika Virus infection during the third trimester of pregnancy, despite of the evident findings and the history of Zika infection the RT-PCR in amniotic and cerebrospinal fluid of the newborn was negative. RT-PCR has demonstrated a low sensibility in samples with low viral loads, reason why, we propose a clinical diagnosis in patients with clinical history of Zika Virus infection during pregnancy accompanied by evident clinical manifestations of the child.

Keywords: Zika Virus, polymerase chain reaction, microcephaly, amniotic fluid.

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Authors: Shankar Kambhampaty, Venkata Srinivas Modali

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When architecting an application, key nonfunctional requirements such as performance, scalability, availability and security, which influence the architecture of the system, are some times not adequately addressed. Performance of the application may not be looked at until there is a concern. There are several problems with this reactive approach. If the system does not meet its performance objectives, the application is unlikely to be accepted by the stakeholders. This paper suggests an approach for performance modeling for web based J2EE and .Net applications to address performance issues early in the development life cycle. It also includes a Performance Modeling Case Study, with Proof-of-Concept (PoC) and implementation details for .NET and J2EE platforms.

Keywords: Performance Measures, Performance Modeling, Performance Testing, Resource Utilization, Response Time, Throughput.

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Authors: Jeroen S. de Bruin, Karin Schindler, Christian Schuh

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With increasingly more mobile health applications appearing due to the popularity of smartphones, the possibility arises that these data can be used to improve the medical diagnostic process, as well as the overall quality of healthcare, while at the same time lowering costs. However, as of yet there have been no reports of a successful combination of patient-generated data from smartphones with data from clinical routine. In this paper we describe how these two types of data can be combined in a secure way without modification to hospital information systems, and how they can together be used in a medical expert system for automatic nutritional classification and triage.

Keywords: Data integration, disease-related malnutrition, expert systems, mobile health.

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Authors: Sheikh Shams Azam, Manoj Raju, Venkatesh Pagidimarri, Vamsi Kasivajjala

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Over the past decade, there has been a steep rise in the data-driven analysis in major areas of medicine, such as clinical decision support system, survival analysis, patient similarity analysis, image analytics etc. Most of the data in the field are well-structured and available in numerical or categorical formats which can be used for experiments directly. But on the opposite end of the spectrum, there exists a wide expanse of data that is intractable for direct analysis owing to its unstructured nature which can be found in the form of discharge summaries, clinical notes, procedural notes which are in human written narrative format and neither have any relational model nor any standard grammatical structure. An important step in the utilization of these texts for such studies is to transform and process the data to retrieve structured information from the haystack of irrelevant data using information retrieval and data mining techniques. To address this problem, the authors present Q-Map in this paper, which is a simple yet robust system that can sift through massive datasets with unregulated formats to retrieve structured information aggressively and efficiently. It is backed by an effective mining technique which is based on a string matching algorithm that is indexed on curated knowledge sources, that is both fast and configurable. The authors also briefly examine its comparative performance with MetaMap, one of the most reputed tools for medical concepts retrieval and present the advantages the former displays over the latter.

Keywords: Information retrieval (IR), unified medical language system (UMLS), Syntax Based Analysis, natural language processing (NLP), medical informatics.

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Authors: Nisha Singhal, Usha Chouhan

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At present, application of the extension of soft set theory in decision making problems in day to day life is progressing rapidly. The concepts of fuzzy soft set and its properties have been evolved as an area of interest for the researchers. The generalization of the concepts recently got importance and a rapid growth in the research in this area witnessed its vital-ness. In this paper, an application of the concept of generalized fuzzy soft set to make decision in a social problem is presented. Further, this paper also highlights some of the key issues of the related areas.

Keywords: Soft set, Fuzzy Soft set, Generalized Fuzzy Soft set, Membership and Non-Membership Score.

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Authors: Sebastian Bertsch

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In the past decades, the environment of production companies showed a permanent increase in dynamic and volatility in the form of demand fluctuations, new technologies or global crises. As a reaction to these new requirements, changeability of production systems came into attention. A changeable production system can adapt to these changes quickly and with little effort. Even though demand for changeable production exists for some time, the practical application is still insufficient.

To overcome this deficit, a three year research project at the Department of Production Systems and Logistics at the Leibniz University of Hanover/ Germany was initiated. As a result of this project, different concepts have been developed to design production changeable. An excerpt of the results will be presented in this paper. An eight step procedure will be presented to design the changeability of production logistics. This procedure has been applied at a German manufacturer of high demanding weighing machines. The developed procedure, their application in industry, as well as the major results of the application will be presented.

Keywords: Changeability, Change Drivers, Production Logistics.

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Authors: M. A. Mebrek, L.H.Abderrahmane, A. Himeur, S. Bendoukha

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In this article, we are going to do a study that consist in the configuration of a link between an earth station to broadcast multimedia service and a user of this service via a geostationary satellite in Ka- band and the set up of the different components of this link and then to make the calculation of the link budget for this system. The application carried out in this work, allows us to calculate the link budget in both directions: the uplink and downlink, as well as all parameters used in the calculation and the development of a link budget. Finally, we will try to verify using the application developed the feasibility of implementation of this system.

Keywords: Geostationary satellite, ground station, ka band, link budget, telecommunication.

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Authors: Yuko Hiramatsu, Fumihiro Sato, Atsushi Ito, Hiroyuki Hatano, Mie Sato, Yu Watanabe, Akira Sasaki

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This paper presents a mobile phone application developed for sightseeing in Nikko, one of the cultural world heritages in Japan, using the BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) beacon. Based on our pre-research, we decided to design our application for young people who walk around the area actively, but know little about the tradition and culture of Nikko. One solution is to construct many information boards to explain; however, it is difficult to construct new guide plates in cultural world heritage sites. The smartphone is a good solution to send such information to such visitors. This application was designed using a combination of the smartphone and beacons, set in the area, so that when a tourist passes near a beacon, the application displays information about the area including a map, historical or cultural information about the temples and shrines, and local shops nearby as well as a bus timetable. It is useful for foreigners, too. In addition, we developed quizzes relating to the culture and tradition of Nikko to provide information based on the Zeigarnik effect, a psychological effect. According to the results of our trials, tourists positively evaluated the basic information and young people who used the quiz function were able to learn the historical and cultural points. This application helped young visitors at Nikko to understand the cultural elements of the site. In addition, this application has a function to send notifications. This function is designed to provide information about the local community such as shops, local transportation companies and information office. The application hopes to also encourage people living in the area, and such cooperation from the local people will make this application vivid and inspire young visitors to feel that the cultural heritage site is still alive today. This is a gateway for young people to learn about a traditional place and understand the gravity of preserving such areas.

Keywords: BLE beacon, smartphone application, Zeigarnik effect, world heritage site, school trip.

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Authors: Jitendra Jain, Cassandra Hidajat, Hansraj Riteesh Bookun

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Graft patency underpins long-term prognosis after coronary artery bypass grafting surgery (CABG). The benefits of the combined use of only the left internal mammary artery and radial artery, referred to as total arterial revascularisation (TAR), on long-term clinical outcomes and quality of life are relatively unknown. The aim of this study was to identify whether there were differences in long term clinical outcomes between recipients of TAR compared to a cohort of mostly arterial revascularization involving the left internal mammary, at least one radial artery and at least one saphenous vein graft. A retrospective analysis was performed on all patients who underwent TAR or were re-vascularized with supplementary saphenous vein graft from February 1996 to December 2004. Telephone surveys were conducted to obtain clinical outcome parameters including major adverse cardiac and cerebrovascular events (MACCE) and Short Form (SF-36v2) Health Survey responses. A total of 176 patients were successfully contacted to obtain postop follow up results. The mean follow-up length from time of surgery in our study was TAR 12.4±1.8 years and conventional 12.6±2.1. PCS score was TAR 45.9±8.8 vs LIMA/Rad/ SVG 44.9±9.2 (p=0.468) and MCS score was TAR 52.0±8.9 vs LIMA/Rad/SVG 52.5±9.3 (p=0.723). There were no significant differences between groups for NYHA class 3+ TAR 9.4% vs. LIMA/Rad/SVG 6.6%; or CCS 3+ TAR 2.35% vs. LIMA/Rad/SVG 0%.

Keywords: CABG, MACCEs, quality of life, total arterial revascularization.

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Authors: I. McCulloh, A. Placona, D. Stewart, D. Gause, K. Kiernan, M. Stuart, C. Zinner, L. Cartwright

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We find in our data that an alarming number of viable deceased donor kidneys are discarded every year in the US, while waitlisted candidates are dying every day. We observe as many as 85% of transplanted organs are refused at least once for a patient that scored higher on the match list. There are hundreds of clinical variables involved in making a clinical transplant decision and there is rarely an ideal match. Decision makers exhibit an optimism bias where they may refuse an organ offer assuming a better match is imminent. We propose a semi-parametric Cox proportional hazard model, augmented by an accelerated failure time model based on patient-specific suitable organ supply and demand to estimate a time-to-next-offer. Performance is assessed with Cox-Snell residuals and decision curve analysis, demonstrating improved decision support for up to a 5-year outlook. Providing clinical decision-makers with quantitative evidence of likely patient outcomes (e.g., time to next offer and the mortality associated with waiting) may improve decisions and reduce optimism bias, thus reducing discarded organs and matching more patients on the waitlist.

Keywords: Decision science, KDPI, optimism bias, organ transplant.

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Authors: Jana Chvalkovska, Petr Jansky, Petr Teply

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The impact assessment in its various forms has recently become a very important part of policy-making and legislation in many different countries. Regulatory impact assessment (RIA) is yet another set of analytical methods deployed in the legislation of the European Union, of many developed countries as well as in many developing ones such as Mexico, Malaysia and Philippines. The aim of this paper is to provide a theoretical background for economic models in regulatory impact assessment and an overview of their application especially on the financial market in the Czech Republic. We found out an inadequate application of these models, what makes room for further research in this field.

Keywords: regulatory impact assessment, RIA, impact evaluation, building societies, Czech Republic

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Authors: Mais Haj Qasem, Maen M. Al Assaf, Ali Rodan

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Parallel hybrid storage systems consist of a hierarchy of different storage devices that vary in terms of data reading speed performance. As we ascend in the hierarchy, data reading speed becomes faster. Thus, migrating the application’ important data that will be accessed in the near future to the uppermost level will reduce the application I/O waiting time; hence, reducing its execution elapsed time. In this research, we implement trace-driven two-levels parallel hybrid storage system prototype that consists of HDDs and SSDs. The prototype uses data mining techniques to classify application’ data in order to determine its near future data accesses in parallel with the its on-demand request. The important data (i.e. the data that the application will access in the near future) are continuously migrated to the uppermost level of the hierarchy. Our simulation results show that our data migration approach integrated with data mining techniques reduces the application execution elapsed time when using variety of traces in at least to 22%.

Keywords: Data mining, hybrid storage system, recurrent neural network, support vector machine.

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Authors: M. McHugh, D. Lillis

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Mobile applications are being used to perform a wide variety of tasks in day-to-day life, ranging from checking email to controlling your home heating. Application developers have recognized the potential to transform a smart device into a medical device, by using a mobile medical application i.e. a mobile phone or a tablet. When initially conceived these mobile medical applications performed basic functions e.g. BMI calculator, accessing reference material etc.; however, increasing complexity offers clinicians and patients a range of functionality. As this complexity and functionality increases, so too does the potential risk associated with using such an application. Examples include any applications that provide the ability to inflate and deflate blood pressure cuffs, as well as applications that use patient-specific parameters and calculate dosage or create a dosage plan for radiation therapy. If an unapproved mobile medical application is marketed by a medical device organization, then they face significant penalties such as receiving an FDA warning letter to cease the prohibited activity, fines and possibility of facing a criminal conviction. Regulatory bodies have finalized guidance intended for mobile application developers to establish if their applications are subject to regulatory scrutiny. However, regulatory controls appear contradictory with the approaches taken by mobile application developers who generally work with short development cycles and very little documentation and as such, there is the potential to stifle further improvements due to these regulations. The research presented as part of this paper details how by adopting development techniques, such as agile software development, mobile medical application developers can meet regulatory requirements whilst still fostering innovation.

Keywords: Medical, mobile, applications, software Engineering, FDA, standards, regulations, agile.

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Authors: Dorota Witkowska, Paweł Gosek, Lukasz Swiecicki, Wojciech Jernajczyk, Bruce J. West, Miroslaw Latka

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In clinical practice, the selection of an antidepressant often degrades to lengthy trial-and-error. In this work we employ a normalized wavelet power of alpha waves as a biomarker of antidepressant treatment response. This novel EEG metric takes into account both non-stationarity and intersubject variability of alpha waves. We recorded resting, 19-channel EEG (closed eyes) in 22 inpatients suffering from unipolar (UD, n=10) or bipolar (BD, n=12) depression. The EEG measurement was done at the end of the short washout period which followed previously unsuccessful pharmacotherapy. The normalized alpha wavelet power of 11 responders was markedly different than that of 11 nonresponders at several, mostly temporoparietal sites. Using the prediction of treatment response based on the normalized alpha wavelet power, we achieved 81.8% sensitivity and 81.8% specificity for channel T4.

Keywords: Alpha waves, antidepressant, treatment outcome, wavelet.

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Authors: Sarra Roubi, Mohammed Erramdani, Samir Mbarki

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This paper presents an approach for the model-driven generating of Rich Internet Application (RIA) focusing on the graphical aspect. We used well known Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) frameworks and technologies, such as Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF), Graphical Modeling Framework (GMF), Query View Transformation (QVTo) and Acceleo to enable the design and the code automatic generation of the RIA. During the development of the approach, we focused on the graphical aspect of the application in terms of interfaces while opting for the Model View Presenter pattern that is designed for graphics interfaces. The paper describes the process followed to define the approach, the supporting tool and presents the results from a case study.

Keywords: Code generation, Design Pattern, metamodel, Model Driven Engineering, MVP, Rich Internet Application, transformation, User Interface.

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Authors: Nidhi Gaur, Padmaja Joshi, Vijay Jain, Rajeev Srivastava

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Web application architecture is important to achieve the desired performance for the application. Performance analysis studies are conducted to evaluate existing or planned systems. Web applications are used by hundreds of thousands of users simultaneously, which sometimes increases the risk of server failure in real time operations. We use Coloured Petri Net (CPN), a very powerful tool for modelling dynamic behaviour of a web application system. CPNs extend the vocabulary of ordinary Petri nets and add features that make them suitable for modelling large systems. The major focus of this work is on server side of web applications. The presented work focuses on modelling restructuring aspects, with major focus on concurrency and architecture, using CPN. It also focuses on bringing out the appropriate architecture for web and database servers given the number of concurrent users.

Keywords: Coloured petri nets, concurrent users, performance modelling, web application architecture.

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Authors: Abbas Ghanbari-Malidareh

Abstract:

Silicon is a beneficial element for plant growth. It helps plants to overcome multiple stresses, alleviates metal toxicity and improves nutrient imbalance. Field experiment was conducted as split-split plot arranged in a randomized complete block design with four replications. Irrigation system include continues flooding and deficit as main plots and nitrogen rates N0, N46, N92, and N138 kg/ha as sub plots and silicon rates Si0 & Si500 kg/ha as sub-subplots. Results indicate that grain yield had not significant difference between irrigation systems. Flooding irrigation had higher biological yield than deficit irrigation whereas, no significant difference in grain and straw yield. Nitrogen application increased grain, biological and straw yield. Silicon application increased grain, biological and straw yield but, decreased harvest index. Flooding irrigation had higher number of total tillers / hill than deficit irrigation, but deficit irrigation had higher number of fertile tillers / hill than flooding irrigation. Silicon increased number of filled spikelet and decreased blank spikelet. With high nitrogen application decreased 1000-grain weight. It can be concluded that if the nitrogen application was high and water supplied was available we could have silicon application until increase grain yield.

Keywords: Grain yield, Irrigation, Nitrogen, Rice, Silicon.

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Authors: A. Jabbari, R. Jedermann, W. Lang

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The new idea of this research is application of a new fault detection and isolation (FDI) technique for supervision of sensor networks in transportation system. In measurement systems, it is necessary to detect all types of faults and failures, based on predefined algorithm. Last improvements in artificial neural network studies (ANN) led to using them for some FDI purposes. In this paper, application of new probabilistic neural network features for data approximation and data classification are considered for plausibility check in temperature measurement. For this purpose, two-phase FDI mechanism was considered for residual generation and evaluation.

Keywords: Fault detection and Isolation, Neural network, Temperature measurement, measurement approximation and classification.

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Authors: Haji Ali Haji, Hussein Suleman, Ulrike Rivett

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This paper presents the design, development and evaluation of an application prototype developed to support tuberculosis (TB) patients’ treatment adherence. The system makes use of graphics and voice reminders as opposed to text messaging to encourage patients to follow their medication routine. To evaluate the effect of the prototype applications, participants were given mobile phones on which the reminder system was installed. Thirty-eight people, including TB health workers and patients from Zanzibar, Tanzania, participated in the evaluation exercises. The results indicate that the participants found the mobile image-based application is useful to support TB treatment. All participants understood and interpreted the intended meaning of every image correctly. The study findings revealed that the use of a mobile visualbased application may have potential benefit to support TB patients (both literate and illiterate) in their treatment processes.

Keywords: ICT4D, mobile technology, tuberculosis, visualbased reminder.

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Authors: Minh Tuan, Nguyen, Chung-Ruey Yen

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The experiment was performed to evaluate the effect of GA3, 2,4-D on fruit growth and fruit quality of wax apple. The experiment consisted of Red A, Monulla, Atu, Red B cultivars. GA3 and 2,4-D were applied at the small bud and petal fall stage. Physiological, biochemical characters of fruit were recoded. The result showed application of GA3, 2,4-D greatly response in increasing fruit set for all treatment as compared to control. Fruit weight, fruit size were increased at 10 ppm 2,4-D in ‘Red A’, ‘Red B’, however it was also enhancing at 10 ppm GA3 in ‘Monulla’, ‘Atu’. For ‘Monulla’, ‘Atu’ fruit crack reduced by 10 ppm 2,4-D application, but ‘Red B’, ‘Red A’ gave least fruit crack at 10 and 30 ppm GA3, respectively. ‘Monulla’, ‘Atu’ and ‘Red B’ resulted in response well to 10 ppm GA3 on improving TSS, whereas application of 30 ppm GA3 greatly enhancing TSS in ‘Red A’. For ‘Atu’ titratable acidity markedly reduced by 10 ppm GA3 application, but spraying with 30 ppm GA3 greatly response in reducing titratable acidity in ‘Red A’, ‘Red B’ and ‘Monulla’. It was concluded that GA3, 2,4-D can be an effective tool to enhancing fruit set, fruit growth as well as improving fruit quality of wax apple.

Keywords: Wax apple, GA3, 2, 4-D, fruit growth, fruit quality. Abbreviations: GA3, gibberellic acid; 2, 4-D, 2, 4- dichlorophenoxyacetic acid.

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Authors: Helena Dvořáčková, Jakub Elbl, Irina Mikajlo, Antonín Kintl, Jaroslav Hynšt, Olga Urbánková, Jaroslav Záhora

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Application of biochar to arable soils represents a new approach to restore soil health and quality. Many studies reported the positive effect of biochar application on soil fertility and development of soil microbial community. Moreover biochar may affect the soil water retention, but this effect has not been sufficiently described yet. Therefore this study deals with the influence of biochar application on: microbial activities in soil, availability of mineral nitrogen in soil for microorganisms, mineral nitrogen retention and plant production. To demonstrate the effect of biochar addition on the above parameters, the pot experiment was realized. As a model crop, Lactuca sativa L. was used and cultivated from December 10th 2014 till March 22th 2015 in climate chamber in thoroughly homogenized arable soil with and without addition of biochar. Five variants of experiment (V1 – V5) with different regime of irrigation were prepared. Variants V1 – V2 were fertilized by mineral nitrogen, V3 – V4 by biochar and V5 was a control. The significant differences were found only in plant production and mineral nitrogen retention. The highest content of mineral nitrogen in soil was detected in V1 and V2, about 250 % in comparison with the other variants. The positive effect of biochar application on soil fertility, mineral nitrogen availability was not found. On the other hand results of plant production indicate the possible positive effect of biochar application on soil water retention.

Keywords: Arable soil, biochar, drought, mineral Nitrogen.

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Authors: Pardeep Singh, Sanjay Sharma

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Content-Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) has been one on the most vivid research areas in the field of computer vision over the last 10 years. Many programs and tools have been developed to formulate and execute queries based on the visual or audio content and to help browsing large multimedia repositories. Still, no general breakthrough has been achieved with respect to large varied databases with documents of difering sorts and with varying characteristics. Answers to many questions with respect to speed, semantic descriptors or objective image interpretations are still unanswered. In the medical field, images, and especially digital images, are produced in ever increasing quantities and used for diagnostics and therapy. In several articles, content based access to medical images for supporting clinical decision making has been proposed that would ease the management of clinical data and scenarios for the integration of content-based access methods into Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (PACS) have been created. This paper gives an overview of soft computing techniques. New research directions are being defined that can prove to be useful. Still, there are very few systems that seem to be used in clinical practice. It needs to be stated as well that the goal is not, in general, to replace text based retrieval methods as they exist at the moment.

Keywords: CBIR, GA, Rough sets, CBMIR

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Authors: Carlos Gonzalez

Abstract:

This paper describes a system to optimize the use of the internet by clients requiring downloading of videos at peak hours. The system consists of a web server belonging to a provider of video contents, a provider of internet communications and a software application running on a client’s computer. The client using the application software will communicate to the video provider a list of the client’s future video demands. The video provider calculates which videos are going to be more in demand for download in the immediate future, and proceeds to request the internet provider the most optimal hours to do the downloading. The times of the downloading will be sent to the application software, which will use the information of pre-established hours negotiated between the video provider and the internet provider to download those videos. The videos will be saved in a special protected section of the user’s hard disk, which will only be accessed by the application software in the client’s computer. When the client is ready to see a video, the application will search the list of current existent videos in the area of the hard disk; if it does exist, it will use this video directly without the need for internet access. We found that the best way to optimize the download traffic of videos is by negotiation between the internet communication provider and the video content provider.

Keywords: Internet optimization, video download, future demands, secure storage.

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Authors: R. Miniati, F. Dori, E. Iadanza, M. Fregonara Medici

Abstract:

management of medical devices in hospitals includes the planning of medical equipment acquisition and maintenance. The presence of critical and non-critical areas together with technological proliferation render the management of medical devices very complex. This study creates an easy and objective methodology for the analysis of medical equipment maintenance, that makes the management of medical devices more feasible. The study has been carried out at Florence Hospital Careggi and it aims to help the clinical engineering department to manage medical equipment by clarifying the hospital situation through a characterization of the different areas, technologies and fault typologies.

Keywords: Clinical Engineering, Maintenance, Medical DevicesManagement, Key Performance Indicators.

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Authors: B. Stroetmann, A. Aisenbrey

Abstract:

The Siemens Healthcare Sector is one of the world's largest suppliers to the healthcare industry and a trendsetter in medical imaging and therapy, laboratory diagnostics, medical information technology, and hearing aids. Siemens offers its customers products and solutions for the entire range of patient care from a single source – from prevention and early detection to diagnosis, and on to treatment and aftercare. By optimizing clinical workflows for the most common diseases, Siemens also makes healthcare faster, better, and more cost effective. The optimization of clinical workflows requires a multidisciplinary focus and a collaborative approach of e.g. medical advisors, researchers and scientists as well as healthcare economists. This new form of collaboration brings together experts with deep technical experience, physicians with specialized medical knowledge as well as people with comprehensive knowledge about health economics. As Charles Darwin is often quoted as saying, “It is neither the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change," We believe that those who can successfully manage this change will emerge as winners, with valuable competitive advantage. Current medical information and knowledge are some of the core assets in the healthcare industry. The main issue is to connect knowledge holders and knowledge recipients from various disciplines efficiently in order to spread and distribute knowledge.

Keywords: Business Excellence, Clinical Knowledge, Knowledge Management, Knowledge Services, Learning Organizations, Trust.

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