Infrared Spectroscopy-Based Chemometric Analysis for Lard Differentiation in Meat Samples

One of the most pressing concerns for the consumer market is the detection of adulteration in meat products due to their preciousness. The rapid and accurate identification mechanism for lard adulteration in meat products is highly necessary, for developing a mechanism trusted by consumers and that can be used to make a definitive diagnosis. Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FTIR) is used in this work to identify lard adulteration in cow, lamb, and chicken samples. A simplified extraction method was implied to obtain the lipids from pure and adulterated meat. Adulterated samples were obtained by mixing lard with chicken, lamb, and beef with different concentrations (10%–50% v/v). Principal component analysis (PCA) and partial least square (PLS) were used to develop a calibration model at 800–3500 cm⁻¹. Three-dimension PCA was successfully used by dividing the spectrum in three regions to classify lard meat adulteration in chicken, lamb, and beef samples. The corresponding FTIR peaks for the lard have been observed at 1159.6, 1743.4, 2853.1, and 2922.5 cm⁻¹, which differentiate chicken, lamb, and beef samples. The wavenumbers offer the highest determination coefficient R² value of 0.846 and lowest root mean square error of calibration (RMSEC) and root mean square error prediction (RMSEP) with an accuracy of 84.6%. Even the tiniest fat adulteration up to 10% can be reliably discovered using this methodology.     

Effectiveness of Deep Learning Models for Brain Tumor Classification and Segmentation

A brain tumor is a mass or growth of abnormal cells in the brain. In children and adults, brain tumor is considered one of the leading causes of death. There are several types of brain tumors, including benign (non-cancerous) and malignant (cancerous) tumors. Diagnosing brain tumors as early as possible is essential, as this can improve the chances of successful treatment and survival. Considering this problem, we bring forth a hybrid intelligent deep learning technique that uses several pre-trained models (Resnet50, Vgg16, Vgg19, U-Net) and their integration for computer-aided detection and localization systems in brain tumors. These pre-trained and integrated deep learning models have been used on the publicly available dataset from The Cancer Genome Atlas. The dataset consists of 120 patients. The pre-trained models have been used to classify tumor or no tumor images, while integrated models are applied to segment the tumor region correctly. We have evaluated their performance in terms of loss, accuracy, intersection over union, Jaccard distance, dice coefficient, and dice coefficient loss. From pre-trained models, the U-Net model achieves higher performance than other models by obtaining 95% accuracy. In contrast, U-Net with ResNet-50 outperforms all other models from integrated pre-trained models and correctly classified and segmented the tumor region.     

Correction on link relative based approach to CUSUM chart

Link relative-based approach was used in an article (see reference 1) to enhance the performance of the cumulative sum (CUSUM) control chart. This technique involves the use of firstly, the link relative variable to convert the process observations in a relative to the mean form and secondly, optimal constants to define a new variable which is used as the plotting statistic of the link relative CUSUM chart. In this article, it is proven through simulation study that the optimal constants with fixed values, as reported in the aforementioned article, give different results. Instead, if the regression technique is used, then the same results will be obtained.     

Cytotoxicity and antineoplastic activities of alkylamines and their borane derivatives

The alkylamines and their related boron derivatives demonstrated potent cytotoxicity against the growth of murine and human tissue cultured cells. These agents did not necessarily require the boron atom to possess potent cytotoxic action in certain tumor lines. Their ability to suppress tumor cell growth was based on their inhibition of DNA and protein syntheses. DNA synthesis was reduced because purine synthesis was blocked at the enzyme site of IMP dehydrogenase by the agents. In addition ribonucleotide reductase and nucleoside kinase activities were reduced by the agents which would account for the reduced d[NTP] pools. The DNA template or molecule may be a target of the drugs with regard to binding of the drug to nucleoside bases or intercalaction of the drug between DNA base pairs. Only some Of the agents caused DNA fragmentation with reduced DNA viscosity. These effects would contribute to overall cell death afforded by the agents.     

Coordinated controller tuning of a boiler turbine unit with new binary particle swarm optimization algorithm

Coordinated controller tuning of the boiler turbine unit is a challenging task due to the nonlinear and coupling characteristics of the system. In this paper, a new variant of binary particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm, called probability based binary PSO (PBPSO), is presented to tune the parameters of a coordinated controller. The simulation results show that PBPSO can effectively optimize the control parameters and achieves better control performance than those based on standard discrete binary PSO, modified binary PSO, and standard continuous PSO.     

Study on pharyngeal and uvular consonants in foreign accented Arabic for ASR

This paper investigates the unique pharyngeal and uvular consonants of Arabic from the point of view of automatic speech recognition (ASR). Comparisons of the recognition error rates for these phonemes are analyzed in five experiments that involve different combinations of native and non-native Arabic speakers. The most three confusing consonants for every investigated consonant are discussed. All experiments use the Hidden Markov Model Toolkit (HTK) and the Language Data Consortium (LDC) WestPoint Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) database. Results confirm that these Arabic distinct consonants are a major source of difficulty for Arabic ASR. While the recognition rate for certain of these unique consonants such as // can drop below 35% when uttered by non-native speakers, there is advantage to include non-native speakers in ASR. Besides, regional differences in pronunciation of MSA by native Arabic speakers require the attention of Arabic ASR research.     

MTPSO algorithm for solving planar graph coloring problem

In this paper, we proposed a modified turbulent particle swarm optimization (named MTPSO) model for solving planar graph coloring problem based on particle swarm optimization. The proposed model is consisting of the walking one strategy, assessment strategy and turbulent strategy. The proposed MTPSO model can solve the planar graph coloring problem using four-colors more efficiently and accurately. Compared to the results shown in Cui et al. (2008), not only the experimental results of the proposed model can get smaller average iterations but can get higher correction coloring rate when the number of nodes is greater than 30.     

Learning from demonstration in robots: Experimental comparison of neural architectures

Robots have played an important role in the automation of computer aided manufacturing. The classical robot control implementation involves an expensive key step of model-based programming. An intuitive way to reduce this expensive exercise is to replace programming with machine learning of robot actions from demonstration where a (learner) robot learns an action by observing a demonstrator robot performing the same. To achieve this learning from demonstration (LFD) different machine learning techniques such as Artificial Neural Networks (ANN), Genetic Algorithms, Hidden Markov Models, Support Vector Machines, etc. can be used. This piece of work focuses exclusively on ANNs. Since ANNs have many standard architectural variations divided into two basic computational categories namely the recurrent networks and feed-forward networks, representative networks from each have been selected for study, i.e. Feed Forward Multilayer Perceptron (FF) network for feed-forward networks category and Elman (EL), and Nonlinear Autoregressive Exogenous Model (NARX) networks for the recurrent networks category. The main objective of this work is to identify the most suitable neural architecture for application of LFD in learning different robot actions. The sensor and actuator streams of demonstrated action are used as training data for ANN learning. Consequently, the learning capability is measured by comparing the error between demonstrator and corresponding learner streams. To achieve fairness in comparison three steps have been taken. First, Dynamic Time Warping is used to measure the error between demonstrator and learner streams, which gives resilience against translation in time. Second, comparison statistics are drawn between the best, instead of weight-equal, configurations of competing architectures so that learning capability of any architecture is not forced handicap. Third, each configuration's error is calculated as the average of ten trials of all possible learning sequences with random weight initialization so that the error value is independent of a particular sequence of learning or a particular set of initial weights. Six experiments are conducted to get a performance pattern of each architecture. In each experiment, a total of nine different robot actions were tested. Error statistics thus obtained have shown that NARX architecture is most suitable for this learning problem whereas Elman architecture has shown the worst suitability. Interestingly the computationally lesser MLP gives much lower and slightly higher error statistics compared to the computationally superior Elman and NARX neural architectures, respectively.     

Iterative methods for solving extended general mixed variational inequalities

In this paper, we introduce and consider a new class of mixed variational inequalities involving four operators, which are called extended general mixed variational inequalities. Using the resolvent operator technique, we establish the equivalence between the extended general mixed variational inequalities and fixed point problems as well as resolvent equations. We use this alternative equivalent formulation to suggest and analyze some iterative methods for solving general mixed variational inequalities. We study the convergence criteria for the suggested iterative methods under suitable conditions. Our methods of proof are very simple as compared with other techniques. The results proved in this paper may be viewed as refinements and important generalizations of the previous known results.