A Hybrid Reconfigurability Structure and Improved Gain Characteristics for a Novel 5G Monopole Antenna for Future Mobile Communication

Wireless Personal Communications - Mobile edge computation (MEC) is a potential technology to reduce the energy consumption and task execution delay for tackling computation-intensive tasks on...     

The Influence of Polyunsaturated Fatty Acids on the Phospholipase D Isoforms Trafficking and Activity in Mast Cells

The impact of polyunsaturated fatty acid (PUFA) supplementation on phospholipase D (PLD) trafficking and activity in mast cells was investigated. The enrichment of mast cells with different PUFA including α-linolenic acid (LNA), eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA), docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), linoleic acid (LA) or arachidonic acid (AA) revealed a PUFA-mediated modulation of the mastoparan-stimulated PLD trafficking and activity. All PUFA examined, except AA, prevented the migration of the PLD1 to the plasma membrane. For PLD2 no PUFA effects on trafficking could be observed. Moreover, PUFA supplementation resulted in an increase of mastoparan-stimulated total PLD activity, which correlated with the number of double bonds of the supplemented fatty acids. To investigate, which PLD isoform was affected by PUFA, stimulated mast cells were supplemented with DHA or AA in the presence of specific PLD-isoform inhibitors. It was found that both DHA and AA diminished the inhibition of PLD activity in the presence of a PLD1 inhibitor. By contrast, only AA diminished the inhibition of PLD activity in the presence of a PLD2 inhibitor. Thus, PUFA modulate the trafficking and activity of PLD isoforms in mast cells differently. This may, in part, account for the immunomodulatory effect of unsaturated fatty acids and contributes to our understanding of the modulation of mast cell activity by PUFA.     

Determination of Ethopabate Residues in Chicken Muscles, Liver, and Eggs after Aqueous SDS Extraction by Micellar Liquid Chromatography with Fluorescence Detection with Application to Baby Food

A simple and sensitive liquid chromatographic method was optimized and validated for the analysis of ethopabate residues in chicken muscles, liver, and eggs. Aqueous sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS) solution was used for extraction. Analytical separation was performed in less than 8 min using a C18 column (150?×?4.6 mm internal diameter, 5 μm particle size) with fluorescence detection at 271/364 nm. A micellar solution composed of 0.1 M SDS, 10 % 1-propanol, and 0.3 % triethylamine in 0.02 M phosphoric acid adjusted to pH?4 was used as the mobile phase. The method was fully validated in accordance with International Conference on Harmonization guidelines. The micellar method was successfully applied to quantitatively determine ethopabate residues in spiked chicken muscles, liver, and eggs. It was also extended to the determination of ethopabate residues in chicken-based baby food. The recoveries obtained were in the 93.81–115.67 % range. The limit of detection was found to be 1.6 ng/g. High extraction efficiency for ethopabate was obtained without matrix interference and in the subsequent chromatographic determination. No organic solvent was used during the pretreatment step.     

Mucoadhesive dosage form of lidocaine hydrochloride: I. Mucoadhesive and physicochemical characterization

The aim of this study was to characterize a buccal mucoadhesive film using lidocaine and its hydrochloride salt (LDHCL) as a model drug. Buccal films were developed using carbopol 971P as a mucoadhesive polymer, and glycerol as a plasticizer. Scanning Electron Microscope, Differential Scanning Calorimetry, X-ray powder diffraction, and Fourier Transform Infra Red techniques were used to characterize the mucoadhesive films. Bioadhesive properties were evaluated using the Universal Instron Instrument with chicken pouch as a model tissue.

LDHCL and its base were present in carbopol 971P films in a molecular dispersion state without exerting any effect on the glass transition of these films. The mucoadhesive force between the chicken pouches and the film containing glycerol did not change by time during the tested period (1-20 min), while increased with increasing the amount of glycerol (10-40% w/w of polymer content). Furthermore, a linear increase in the mucoadhesive force was accompanied by the increase in the film thickness, while a linear decrease followed by plateau was obtained when loading the patch with LDHCL at concentration above 1 mg/cm².

Loading carbopol film with lidocaine base, in a concentration up to 6 mg/cm² decreased linearly the mucoadhesive properties, which could be attributed to salt formation between the acidic carboxylic moiety of carbopol and basic lidocaine.     

A Gen-Fuzzy Based Strategy (GFBS) for Web Service Classification

Service oriented computing makes great growth in developing web services. A web service is a software application with a standardized way of providing interoperability between disparate applications. Web service repository has a main challenging task in how it can help end user and another web service to group and retrieve their service with high performance. With increased number of both unrestricted and distributed services in web that belong to different domains, web services classification become necessary. This paper proposes a new classification strategy for web services called Gen-Fuzzy Based Strategy. The proposed strategy consists of two stages, which are; (i) Outlier Rejection Stage (ORS) and (ii) Classification Stage. In ORS, a proposed fuzzy system has been presented. It used four parameters which are; Distance to Class Center, Cooling Force, Class Belonging Degree and Domain Belonging Degree. In CS, a proposed Distance Based Ensemble Classifiers (DBEC) has been presented. The aim of DBEC is to train each individual classifier independently by using bagging technique. A collective decision is made by their aggregation in several ways. Experimental results have shown the effectiveness of DBEC in terms of accuracy, precision and recall.

     

Decision tree classifiers for automated medical diagnosis

Decision support systems help physicians and also play an important role in medical decision-making. They are based on different models, and the best of them are providing an explanation together with an accurate, reliable and quick response. This paper presents a decision support tool for the detection of breast cancer based on three types of decision tree classifiers. They are single decision tree (SDT), boosted decision tree (BDT) and decision tree forest (DTF). Decision tree classification provides a rapid and effective method of categorizing data sets. Decision-making is performed in two stages: training the classifiers with features from Wisconsin breast cancer data set, and then testing. The performance of the proposed structure is evaluated in terms of accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, confusion matrix and receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves. The results showed that the overall accuracies of SDT and BDT in the training phase achieved 97.07 % with 429 correct classifications and 98.83 % with 437 correct classifications, respectively. BDT performed better than SDT for all performance indices than SDT. Value of ROC and Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC) for BDT in the training phase achieved 0.99971 and 0.9746, respectively, which was superior to SDT classifier. During validation phase, DTF achieved 97.51 %, which was superior to SDT (95.75 %) and BDT (97.07 %) classifiers. Value of ROC and MCC for DTF achieved 0.99382 and 0.9462, respectively. BDT showed the best performance in terms of sensitivity, and SDT was the best only considering speed.     

Pectin grafted poly(N‐vinylpyrrolidone): Optimization and in vitro controllable theophylline drug release

The present article describes preparation, optimization, and characterization of pectin grafted polyvinylpyrrolidone hydrogels followed by controllable theophylline drug release. The gels were prepared in the presence of N,N′–methylenebisacrylamide (MBAA) crosslinker and ceric ammonium nitrate (CAN) initiator under N₂ atmosphere. Optimum conditions, in terms of percent of grafting (%G), were determined as follows: Pectin = 1.0 g, [NVP] = 2.81 mM, [MBAA] = 0.65 mM, [CAN] = 0.073 mM, polymerization temperature = 30°C and time = 4.0 hrs. Hydrogels were characterized by FTIR, TGA, DSC, XRD, and SEM. In vitro controllable release of theophylline model drug was studied using different N‐vinylpyrrolidone monomer to MBAA crosslinker ratio (i.e., [NVP]/[MBAA] ratios) and different polymerization temperatures at two pH values, namely 5.5 and 7.4. The optimum conditions for colon‐targeted vehicles that could provide the least theophylline release at pH 5.5, and the most theophylline release at pH 7.4, were as follows: [NVP]/[MBAA] = 4.33, polymerization temperature = 10°C and %G = 62.2. Such promising hydrogel characteristics may play the key role in many future drug release implementations. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci, 2010     

Broadband dielectric spectroscopy on the molecular dynamics in different generations of hyperbranched polyester

Dielectric spectroscopy (10^?2 Hz to 10⁶ Hz) was employed to investigate the molecular dynamics of hyperbranched polyesters where the number of the generation is systematically varied from 2 to 5. As a first result, the dielectric properties depends strongly on the generation of the hyperbranched polymers. For higher generations (3 to 5) at temperatures below T_g two relaxation processes are observed, a γ‐process at lower temperatures and a β‐process at higher ones. The apparent activation energies are around 100 kJ/mol which seems to be too high for truly localized processes. For the Generation 2, only the γ‐process is observed. For all investigated polymers the dielectric α‐relaxation could not be observed because of strong conductivity effects. Therefore, the conductivity is systematically analyzed which obeys the peculiarities found to be characteristic for semiconducting disordered materials. Especially, the Barton/Nakajima/Namikawa relationship is found to be valid. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci, 2009     

Compiling C for the EARTH multithreaded architecture

Multithreaded architectures provide an opportunity for efficiently executing programs with irregular parallelism and/or irregular locality. This paper presents a strategy that makes use of the multithreaded execution model without exposing multithreading to the programmer. Our approach is to design simple extensions to C, and to provide compiler support that automatically translates high-level C programs into lower-level threaded programs. In this paper we present EARTH-C our extended C language which contains simple constructs for specifying control parallelism, data locality, shared variables and atomic operations. Based on EARTH-C, we describe compiler techniques that are used for translating to lower-level Threaded-C programs for the EARTH multithreaded architecture. We demonstrate our approach with six benchmark programs. We show that even naive EARTH-C programs can lead to reasonable performance, and that more advanced EARTH-C programs can give performance very close to hand-coded threated-C programs. This work supported, in part, by NSERC and FCAR.