Disposition, bioavailability and clinical efficacy of orally administered acepromazine in the horse

The pharmacokinetics and pharmacological efficacy of orally (p.o.) administered acepromazine were studied and compared with the intravenous (i.v.) route of administration in a cross-over study using six horses. The oral kinetics of acepromazine can be described by a two-compartment open model with first-order absorption. The drug was rapidly absorbed after p.o. administration with a half-life of 0.84 h, tmax of 0.4 h and Cmax of 59 ng/ml. The elimination was slower after p.o. administration (half-life 6.04 h) than after i.v. injection (half-life 2.6 h). The bioavailability of the orally administered drug formulation was 55.1%. After p.o. administration of 0.5 mg/kg acepromazine, the parameters of the sedative effect were similar to those obtained after i.v. injection of 0.1 mg/kg. The effect of the drug on blood cell count and haemoglobin content was similar after both p.o. administration and injection, while the effects on the parameters of penile prolapse and on the mean arterial blood pressure were less pronounced after p.o. administration than after injection. After p.o. administration, no significant effects on haematocrit-level as well as on the heart and respiratory rates were observed, while these parameters were significantly affected after injection. It is concluded that the high initial plasma level of the drug after i.v. injection may play a role in producing adverse effects of acepromazine.     

Improving model accuracy using optimal linear combinations of trained neural networks

Neural network (NN) based modeling often requires trying multiple networks with different architectures and training parameters in order to achieve an acceptable model accuracy. Typically, only one of the trained networks is selected as "best" and the rest are discarded. The authors propose using optimal linear combinations (OLC's) of the corresponding outputs on a set of NN's as an alternative to using a single network. Modeling accuracy is measured by mean squared error (MSE) with respect to the distribution of random inputs. Optimality is defined by minimizing the MSE, with the resultant combination referred to as MSE-OLC. The authors formulate the MSE-OLC problem for trained NN's and derive two closed-form expressions for the optimal combination-weights. An example that illustrates significant improvement in model accuracy as a result of using MSE-OLC's of the trained networks is included.     

Energy-spectral efficient resource allocation and power control in heterogeneous networks with D2D communication

Wireless Networks - Heterogeneous networks (HetNets) provide the demand for high data rates. In this study, we analyze the coexistence of femtocells and device-to-device (D2D) communication with...     

Molecularly Engineered Near‐Infrared Light‐Emitting Electrochemical Cells

The development of near‐infrared (NIR) luminescent materials has emerged as a promising research field with important applications in solid‐state lighting (SSL), night‐vision‐readable displays, and the telecommunication industry. Over the past two decades, remarkable advances in the development of light‐emitting electrochemical cells (LECs) have stunned the SSL community, which has in turn driven the quest for new classes of stable, more efficient NIR emissive molecules. In this review, an overview of the state of the art in the field of near‐infrared light‐emitting electrochemical cells (NIR‐LEC) is provided based on three families of emissive compounds developed over the past 25 years: i) transition metal complexes, ii) ionic polymers, and iii) host–guest materials. In this context, ionic and conductive emitters are particularly attractive since their emission can be tuned via molecular design, which involves varying the chemical nature and substitution pattern of their ancillary ligands. Herein, the challenges and current limitations of the latter approach are highlighted, particularly with respect to developing NIR‐LECs with high external quantum efficiencies. Finally, useful guidelines for the discovery of new, efficient emitters for tailored NIR‐LEC applications are presented, together with an outlook towards the design of new NIR‐SSL materials.     

User grouping and power allocation for energy efficiency maximization in mmWave-NOMA heterogeneous networks

Wireless Networks - This paper investigates the application of non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) and millimeter-wave (mmWave) transmission in the fifth-generation (5G) of heterogeneous cellular...     

Secured cloud SCADA system implementation for industrial applications

The proposed Remote SCADA System (RSS) is a smarter, faster and more reliable way to control high power machines and monitor their sensors, data, and failures. The proposed system focuses mainly on building our own complete SCADA software and not using open-source SCADA software. The proposed RSS can use unlimited number of added Remote Terminal Units (RTU) nodes and each of them can handling unlimited number of input/output and can be used under different operating systems like Windows and Android. Using RSS all machines can be monitored and controlled by a single click from anywhere at any time. By doing this a real-time response from RSS system can be achieved. It’s mainly based on standard communication techniques between remote nodes and single server-side application that talk to each node with its own ID and modify its instant database. So that every time accessing this web application, a real-time access to these nodes data and a virtual control room controls each General Purpose Input/Output (GPIO) in the selected node can be gotten. When a new event is happened in server-side program, it will be broadcasted to all related. On RSS there are two main points to deal with, the request latency and security of the system. This paper studied how the system latency and security are improved to obtain the needed values. The proposed RSS is a very secure program which have 4 security levels; authentication, authorization, RSA and CBC encryption system. Also, the encryption algorithms used in RSS are RSA and CBC block cipher encryption system. It is mixed way to prevent any attacker from breaking the cipher. First of all, RSA generates the public and private keys, and then CBC generates its Initialization vector and a random encryption key. Then a special function sends all of these keys encrypted with a pre-stored token in the data base and node memory which varied from node to another. Finally, node generates its private key from loaded public key. With this combination the speed of symmetric encryption system and the security of asymmetric encryption system can be achieved. On the other hand, the level of security firewalls needed to be Brocken by the attacker to brock the cipher is increased. The proposed system achieved low cost comparing with reported work; it is lower than Arduino + WIFI method by five times and 13 times lower than Raspberry-PI method. The proposed system is applied in educational systems, where it is used for teaching unlimited number of students Online.

     

An EM based probabilistic two-dimensional CCA with application to face recognition

Recently, two-dimensional canonical correlation analysis (2DCCA) has been successfully applied for image feature extraction. The method instead of concatenating the columns of the images to the one-dimensional vectors, directly works with two-dimensional image matrices. Although 2DCCA works well in different recognition tasks, it lacks a probabilistic interpretation. In this paper, we present a probabilistic framework for 2DCCA called probabilistic 2DCCA (P2DCCA) and an iterative EM based algorithm for optimizing the parameters. Experimental results on synthetic and real data demonstrate superior performance in loading factor estimation for P2DCCA compared to 2DCCA. For real data, three subsets of AR face database and also the UMIST face database confirm the robustness of the proposed algorithm in face recognition tasks with different illumination conditions, facial expressions, poses and occlusions.     

Protecting privacy for distance and rank based group nearest neighbor queries

World Wide Web - This paper proposes a novel approach to safeguarding location privacy for GNN (group nearest neighbor) queries. Given the locations of a group of dispersed users, the GNN query...     

On pseudo-fractional integral inequalities related to Hermite–Hadamard type

General versions of Hermite–Hadamard type inequality for pseudo-fractional integrals of the order \(\alpha >0\) on a semiring \(\left( \left[ a,b\right] ,\oplus ,\odot \right) \) are studied. These inequalities include both pseudo-integral and fractional integral. The well-known previous results are shown to be special cases of our results. Finally, two open problems for further investigations are given.     

Improving easy care nonformaldehyde finishing performance using polycarboxylic acids via precationization of cotton fabric

Cotton fabric were first subjected to quaternization (cationization) reaction using 3‐chloro‐2‐hydroxypropyl trimethyl ammonium chloride commercially known as Quat®‐188. Cationization was carried out under different conditions for optimization of the preparation of cationized cotton with different degrees of cationization, using the pad‐batch method. Also, established was the optimal condition for cationization that involves Quat‐188/NaOH molar ratio 1/2 at 70°C for 4 h. Besides, a thorough investigation of factors affecting reaction of these cationized cotton with citric acid (CA) or 1,2,3,4‐butanetetracarboxylic acid (BTCA) was carried out with a view of improving the ease of care characteristics of nonformaldehyde finishing. The dependence of fabric performance as measured by strength properties, dry wrinkle recovery angles, whiteness index, and dyeability with reactive dyes was also evaluated. It was postulated that reaction of cationized cotton with either CA or BTCA involves estercrosslinking as well as ionic crosslinking. This, indeed, was largely positively reflected on the fabric performance especially when the properties of both uncationized cotton were compared with those of the cationized cotton. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci 100: 2697–2704, 2006