Comparative lyophilized platelet-rich plasma wafer and powder for wound-healing enhancement: formulation,in vitro and in vivo studies

Platelet-rich plasma (PRP) accelerates wound healing, as it is an excellent source of growth factors. PRP was separated from whole human blood by centrifugation. PRP powder and wafers were prepared by lyophilization, with the wafers prepared using sodium carboxymethylcellulose (Na CMC). The PRP wafers showed porous structures, as indicated by scanning electron microscopy (SEM) images, and the ability of the wafer to absorb exudates and thus promote wound healing was tested with the hydration capacity test. The platelet count was tested and indicated that the presence of PRP in the wafers had no effect on the platelet count. An antimicrobial activity test was carried out, showing that PRP had antibacterial activity against Gram-negative bacteria. Compared with lyophilized PRP powder and PRP-free wafers, PRP wafers showed the highest percent of wound size reduction on induced wounds in rats. Histopathological examination of rat skin showed that the PRP wafers achieved the shortest healing time, followed by the lyophilized PRP powder and finally the PRP-free wafers. The present study revealed that PRP can be formulated as a wafer, which is a promising pharmaceutical delivery system that can be used for enhanced wound-healing activity and improved the ease of application compared to lyophilized PRP powder.     

Thermal and morphological behavior of irradiated composite materials based on injection‐moulded recycled polyethylene terephthalate

The effect of gamma irradiation and short glass fiber (SGF) on the thermal and morphological behavior of the recycled poly (ethylene terephthalate) (rPET) in the presence of reactive additive (epoxy resin, 2 wt %) has been investigated. Characterization of the resulted composites to evaluate the effect of incorporation the SGF and irradiation by means of differential scanning calorimetry, X‐ray diffraction, thermal gravimetric analysis, and scanning electron microscopy (SEM). The results show that the SGF and epoxy resin behave as nucleating agents for the crystallization of rPET. A noticeable increase in the rPET thermal stability in the presence of both SGF and epoxy resin has been observed. Furthermore, the rPET melting temperature (T_m) slightly decrease in the presence of the SGF and remains nearly constant with the incorporation of the epoxy resin. On the other hand, the rPET crystallinity percent (X%) decreases in the presence of SGF and gamma irradiation. The SEM showed that a layer of epoxy resin was coated onto the SGF in the rPET matrix. This coating layer raises the interfacial shear strength between the fiber and polymer matrix and also increases with gamma irradiation. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci 2008     

Highly Stable Nonionic Fatliquors Based on Ethoxylated Overused Vegetable Oils

Overused vegetable oils, which are considered to be a waste and available in huge quantities after frying processes, were directly ethoxylated using a conventional cheap catalyst in order to obtain an economically valuable ethoxylated product to replace the imported intermediate derivatives and at the same time the environment will be rid of one of its pollutants. Therefore, this work was devoted to exploring its application as a fatliquoring agent in the leather industry. Overused sunflower and olein oils were directly ethoxylated using ethylene oxide gas in the presence of 3% KOH catalyst at 180 °C for 20 h. The prepared products were applied as nonionic fatliquors. The fatliquoring process is the operation in which a fatty matter is introduced into the leather fibers. The results obtained showed that the prepared ethoxylated overused oils were effective fatliquors with high HLB values giving stable oil in water emulsion as well as high stability against acid, alkali and different metallic salts. The fatliquored leather had improved mechanical properties such as tensile strength and elongation at break. In addition, a significant enhancement of the texture of the treated leather by the two prepared fatliquors as indicated from the scanning electron microscope images was observed. Also the results indicated that ethoxylated overused sunflower oil gave better results than those of ethoxylated overused olein oil.     

A novel deep learning framework for copy-moveforgery detection in images

Multimedia Tools and Applications - In this era of technology, digital images turn out to be ubiquitous in a contemporary society and they can be generated and manipulated by a wide variety of...     

A novel chaotic salp swarm algorithm for global optimization and feature selection

Salp Swarm Algorithm (SSA) is one of the most recently proposed algorithms driven by the simulation behavior of salps. However, similar to most of the meta-heuristic algorithms, it suffered from stagnation in local optima and low convergence rate. Recently, chaos theory has been successfully applied to solve these problems. In this paper, a novel hybrid solution based on SSA and chaos theory is proposed. The proposed Chaotic Salp Swarm Algorithm (CSSA) is applied on 14 unimodal and multimodal benchmark optimization problems and 20 benchmark datasets. Ten different chaotic maps are employed to enhance the convergence rate and resulting precision. Simulation results showed that the proposed CSSA is a promising algorithm. Also, the results reveal the capability of CSSA in finding an optimal feature subset, which maximizes the classification accuracy, while minimizing the number of selected features. Moreover, the results showed that logistic chaotic map is the optimal map of the used ten, which can significantly boost the performance of original SSA.     

Remote monitoring of cardiac activity using a flexible loop antenna

In this paper, a meandered loop antenna, useful for medical cardiac monitoring application, more specifically, for heart beating close scrutiny is designed and experimentally tested. The proposed antenna is operating at the MICS band displays a high flexibility which allowing it to be curved easily around the heart's wall. In both, Simulation and measured results the antenna shows a sensitive nature any change introduced in heart's model size and would certainly bring about a noticeable shift in the antenna's resonant frequency. Linking the frequency variations taking place in concord with the heart movement turns out to stand as an effective key that provides extremely valuable information about the heart's activities. A correspondence between the obtained frequency variation linking with the change in size of the heart. In addition to the frequency response evaluation, the antenna characteristically displays an omni‐directional radiation pattern, which necessarily fits it for in‐body operation.     

A Signature of Four Circulating microRNAs as Potential Biomarkers for Diagnosing Early-Stage Breast Cancer

Breast cancer (BC) is the most predominant type of cancer among women. The aim of this study is to find new biomarkers that can help in early detection of BC, especially for those who are too young to be screened using mammography as per guidelines. Using microRNA microarray, we previously showed dysregulation of 74 microRNAs in tumors from early BC patients as compared with normal adjacent tissues, which we were interested in studying in blood circulation. In this study, we investigated the expression of 12 microRNA (miR-21/miR-155/miR-23a/miR-130a/miR-145/miR-425-5p/miR-139-5p/miR-451/miR-195/miR-125b/miR-100, and miR-182) in the plasma of 41 newly diagnosed Lebanese BC patients with early invasive ductal carcinoma as compared with 32 healthy controls. Total RNA was extracted from plasma, and expression levels of miRNA of interest were measured using RT-qPCR followed by statistical analysis; miR-21, miR-155, miR-23a, miR-130a, miR-145, miR-425-5p, and miR-139-5p were significantly upregulated and miR-451 was significantly downregulated, in the plasma of BC patients as compared with healthy controls. The positively correlated miR-23a, miR-21, and miR-130a had a high diagnostic accuracy (86%). Importantly, the combination of miR-145/miR-425-5p/miR-139-5p/miR-130a scored the highest diagnostic accuracy of 95% with AUC = 0.97 (sensitivity 97% and specificity 91%). MicroRNAs are promising non-invasive diagnostic biomarkers for early-stage BC with the panel of miR-145/miR-425-5p/miR-139-5p/miR-130a having the highest diagnostic accuracy.     

Production of tailor-welded blanks by vertical compensation friction stir welding technique

An attempt was made for the first time to fabricate tailor-welded blanks (TWBs) through the feasibility of selective alloying in the solid state of vertical compensation friction stir welding (VCFSW) technique. The results revealed that the production of TWBs by VCFSW technique had higher homogeneity without any defects when compared to the production of TWBs by conventional FSW process at constant tool rotational speed 2000?rpm, traverse speed 20?mm?min^?1 and an inclination angle 2.5°. The maximum mechanical properties of the fabricated TWBs were obtained when the width of compensation strip 1.5?mm was used. The fracture surface of TWB at the width of compensation strip 1.5?mm showed ductile fracture mode.     

Breadth-first search strategies for trie-based syntactic pattern recognition

Dictionary-based syntactic pattern recognition of strings attempts to recognize a transmitted string X ^*, by processing its noisy version, Y, without sequentially comparing Y with every element X in the finite, (but possibly, large) dictionary, H. The best estimate X ⁺ of X ^*, is defined as that element of H which minimizes the generalized Levenshtein distance (GLD) D(X, Y) between X and Y, for all X ∈H. The non-sequential PR computation of X ⁺ involves a compact trie-based representation of H. In this paper, we show how we can optimize this computation by incorporating breadth first search schemes on the underlying graph structure. This heuristic emerges from the trie-based dynamic programming recursive equations, which can be effectively implemented using a new data structure called the linked list of prefixes that can be built separately or “on top of” the trie representation of H. The new scheme does not restrict the number of errors in Y to be merely a small constant, as is done in most of the available methods. The main contribution is that our new approach can be used for generalized GLDs and not merely for 0/1 costs. It is also applicable when all possible correct candidates need to be known, and not just the best match. These constitute the cases when the “cutoffs” cannot be used in the DFS trie-based technique (Shang and Merrettal in IEEE Trans Knowl Data Eng 8(4):540–547, 1996). The new technique is compared with the DFS trie-based technique (Risvik in United Patent 6377945 B1, 23 April 2002; Shang and Merrettal in IEEE Trans Knowl Data Eng 8(4):540–547, 1996) using three large and small benchmark dictionaries with different errors. In each case, we demonstrate marked improvements with regard to the operations needed up to 21%, while at the same time maintaining the same accuracy. Additionally, some further improvements can be obtained by introducing the knowledge of the maximum number or percentage of errors in Y.