Reconstruction and rehabilitation of short-range, high-velocity gunshot injury to the lower face: a case report

BACKGROUND: Germ cell tumors (GCTs) and their metastases may be found in numerous sites that are accessible to cytologic sampling, and many are responsive to chemotherapy. METHODS: The authors reviewed 20 examples of GCT cytology from 16 males and 3 females ranging in age from 1.5 to 61 years (median, 34 years). With two exceptions, one benign cystic ovarian teratoma in which intraoperative cytology was used to diagnose an associated adult-type carcinoma and one undescended testis in which seminoma presented as an abdominal mass, the material reviewed included no examples of primary gonadal GCT. RESULTS: The authors studied 7 primary and 13 metastatic GCTs; these studies were based on 13 in vivo aspirations, 4 intraoperative preparations, and 3 samples of body cavity fluids. All samples were correctly interpreted as malignant, and only one was incorrectly classified as a non-GCT malignancy. CONCLUSIONS: Clinical and cytologic findings are useful in the diagnosis of GCTs and their metastases. Incorrect interpretation of these neoplasms as poorly differentiated malignancies of other types may deprive the patient of effective chemotherapy. Air-dried, Romanowsky-stained smear material and cell block sections may contribute to the resolution of diagnostic dilemmas.     

Converting Daily Rainfall Data to Sub-daily—Introducing the MIMD Method

One of the most important analysis in many hydrological and agricultural studies is to convert the daily rainfall data into sub-daily (hourly) because in many rainfall stations, only the daily rainfall data are available and for a comprehensive rainfall analysis, these data should be converted to sub-daily. Many experimental and analytical methods are available for this conversion but one of the simplest yet accurate ones has been proposed by the Indian Meteorological Department (IMD). Since the IMD method has shown low accuracy in some regions, in this study, the IMD method is modified to a single parameter equation, called Modified Indian Meteorological Department (MIMD) in order to improve the accuracy of the conversion. For this reason, the parameter is calibrated so that the maximum correlation between observed and estimated values is achieved. Five stations in different regions with different climatic conditions were selected so that the daily and sub-daily rainfall data were available in each of them. Then, the parameter of the MIMD method was derived for each station. The results were compared with both observed data and IMD method and it was shown that the mean correlation coefficient of MIMD and IMD methods were 0.9 and 0.73 respectively for 12-h rainfall depth which indicated that the accuracy of the MIMD method in estimation of sub-daily rainfall depths was significantly increased. Moreover, the results showed that the accuracy of the MIMD method decreases as rainfall duration decreases.

     

Natural killer or T-lymphocyte cells: Which is the best immune therapeutic agent for cancer? An optimal control approach

Therapeutic vaccines are being developed as a promising new approach to treatment for cancer patients. There are still many unanswered questions about which kind of therapeutic vaccines are the best for the cancer treatments? In this paper we consider a mathematical model, in the form of a system of ordinary differential equations (ODE), this system is an example from a class of mathematical models for immunotherapy of the tumor that were derived from a biologically validated model by Lisette G. de Pillis. The problem how to schedule a variable amount of which vaccines to achieve a maximum reduction in the primary cancer volume is consider as an optimal control problem and it is shown that optimal control is quadratic with 0 denoting a trajectory corresponding to no treatment and 1 a trajectory with treatment at maximum dose along that all therapeutics are being exhausted. The ODE system dynamics characterized by locating equilibrium points and stability properties are determined by using appropriate Lyapunov functions. Especially we attend a parametric sensitivity analysis, which indicates the dependency of the optimal solution with respect to disturbances in model parameters.     

Smartphone Information Displays When Reading News in Persian and English Languages

By their nature, smartphones must have small screens, and that is one of their limitations. Many users have trouble reading information on the Internet on such small screens because Internet browsers are usually designed for computers that have larger screens than smartphones. This study evaluates the usability of alternative user interfaces when reading news articles on smartphones. An experiment was conducted involving 120 smartphone users who were asked to evaluate six types of user interfaces based on three methods (pop-up, full-screen, and auto-zooming) and two display orientations (horizontal, vertical) in one of two languages (English and Persian). The participants were assigned four typical tasks that users must perform to obtain information from the Internet, that is, finding, refinding, reading, and browsing; they were asked to conduct the tasks in random order. In addition, a questionnaire was used to measure the efficiency and effectiveness of the participants’ completion of the tasks, as well as their satisfaction, compatibility, and enjoyment of the undertakings. The results indicated that method, orientation, and language affected the actual usage and the time used. Based on the human factor experiment, the full-screen method was preferred in refinding and reading, whereas the pop-up method was preferred in browsing and finding. In terms of orientation, the vertical mode was preferred, and each user’s performance in the vertical mode was better in all tasks except browsing. Of interest, using the English language turned out to be more satisfying, enjoyable, and efficient to the Persian users who did the experiment in English as their second language.     

Role-based access to facilities lifecycle information on RFID tags

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) based systems have been used in different applications in the Architecture, Engineering, Construction, Owner and Operator (AECOO) industry. Applications are mainly designed for specific lifecycle stage of the facility and serve the needs of only one of the stakeholders. This would increase the cost and the labor for adding and removing tags and eliminate the chance of using shared resources. In this paper, the usage of tags permanently attached to components is proposed where the memory of the tags is used during the lifecycle by different stakeholders for data storage and handover. A Building Information Model (BIM) database is used for tackling the interoperability issues allowing different users to access and share the data. To securely and efficiently store data on RFID tags in ifcXML format, multi-level encryption together with role-based access control is applied on the data stored on RFID tags. Each user is assigned a certain role and can only access the part of data for which he has authorization according to a predefined role and the Access Control Policy. To explore the technical feasibility of the proposed approach, a case study considering both facilities management and emergency management has been implemented and tested at Concordia University.     

A theory for the free shrinkage of steel fibre reinforced cement matrices

The paper presents a theoretical model to predict the free shrinkage of cement matrices reinforced with randomly oriented discrete steel fibres. The model is based on the consideration that the equivalent aligned length of a random fibre is responsible for restraining the shrinkage of a thick matrix cylinder of diameter equal to the fibre spacing, through the fibre-matrix interfacial bond strength. The validity of the model is established by means of extensive experimental data for different types of steel fibres in cement, mortar or concrete matrices. The theoretical model is also used to determine the values of coefficient of friction,, and the average bond strength,, of the fibre-matrix interface. It is shown that is a basic property of the matrix and fibre interface, which is affected by the surface roughness and mechanical deformation of the fibres., however, is greatly influenced by the shrinkage of the matrix and volume fraction of fibres. Finally, an empirical expression is derived to determine the shrinkage of steel fibre reinforced cement matrices based on the shrinkage of unreinforced matrices and fibre properties.     

Development of a Demand Driven Hydro-climatic Model for Drought Planning

In recent years, droughts with increasing severity and frequency have been experienced around the world due to climate change effects. Water planning and management during droughts needs to deal with water demand variability, uncertainties in streamflow prediction, conflicts over water resources allocation, and the absence of necessary emergency schemes in drought situations. Reservoirs could play an important role in drought mitigation; therefore, development of an algorithm for operation of reservoirs in drought periods could help to mitigate the drought impacts by reducing the expected water shortages. For this purpose, the probable drought’s characteristics and their variations in response to factors such as climate change should be incorporated. This study aims at developing a contingency planning scheme for operation of reservoirs in drought periods using hedging rules with the objective of decreasing the maximum water deficit. The case study for evaluation of the performance of the proposed algorithm is the Sattarkhan reservoir in the Aharchay watershed, located in the northwestern part of Iran. The trend evaluations of the hydro-climatic variables show that the climate change has already affected streamflow in the region and has increased water scarcity and drought severity. To incorporate the climate change study in reservoir planning; streamflow should be simulated under climate change impacts. For this purpose, the climatic variables including temperature and precipitation in the future under climate change impacts are simulated using downscaled GCM (General Circulation Model) outputs to derive scenarios for possible future drought events. Then a hydrological model is developed to simulate the river streamflow, based on the downscaled data. The results show that the proposed methodology leads to less water deficit and decreases the drought damages in the study area.     

Accurate measurement of total attenuation coefficient of thin tissue with optical coherence tomography

Noninvasive accurate measurements of tissue optical properties are needed for many diagnostic and therapeutic applications. Optical coherence tomography (OCT) recently proposed for high-resolution imaging in tissue can potentially be applied for accurate, noninvasive, and high-resolution measurement of tissue total attenuation coefficient. However, confocal function (dependence of OCT sensitivity on the distance of probed site from the focal plane of the objective lens) and multiple scattering substantially limit the accuracy of the measurement with the OCT technique. We studied the influence of the confocal function and multiple scattering on the accuracy of the measurement and proposed methods that provide measurement of the total attenuation coefficient with a significantly reduced systematic error. Experiments were performed in tissue phantoms and porcine and human skin in vitro and in vivo. Our data indicate that the tissue total attenuation coefficient can noninvasively be measured in vivo with the accuracy of 5%-10% in the range from 0.5 to 17 mm/sup -1/ and about 20% in the range up to 40 mm/sup -1/. These results suggest that the proper correction of the OCT-based measurement for the confocal function and multiple scattering provides absolute values of tissue total attenuation coefficient with high accuracy and resolution that may not be achievable by other optical techniques in vivo.