Fabrication of biopolymer based nanocomposite wound dressing: evaluation of wound healing properties and wound microbial load

The aim of this study is to introduce natural‐based polymers, chitosan and starch, to design a remedial nanocomposite, comprising of cerium oxide nanoparticles and silver nanoparticles, to investigate their effects in accelerating wound healing and in wound microbial load. Cerium oxide nanoparticles synthesized in starch solution added to the colloidal dispersion of synthesized silver nanoparticles in chitosan to make a three‐component nanomaterial. Mice were anaesthetized and two parallel full‐thickness round wounds were excised under aseptic conditions with the help of sterile dermal biopsy punch. Furthermore, effects of silver‐chitosan and silver‐cerium‐chitosan nanocomposite had evaluated on rate of wound closure and collagen density and on microbial load of wound in full‐thickness model. Results showed that both silver chitosan and silver‐cerium‐chitosan had significant impact on acceleration of wound closure and collagen content and on reduction of wound microbial load in comparison with control group, which was, received no treatments. However, the silver‐cerium‐chitosan nanocomposite is more potent than silver‐chitosan group and control group in wound closure. The wound healing effects of silver‐cerium‐chitosan nanocomposite are due to unique features of its three components and this nanocomposite promises impressive remedies for clinical application.Inspec keywords: wounds, nanocomposites, nanomedicine, nanoparticles, proteins, cerium, silver, polymers, colloids, patient treatmentOther keywords: biopolymer‐based nanocomposite wound dressing, wound healing properties, wound microbial load, natural‐based polymers, chitosan, remedial nanocomposite, cerium oxide nanoparticles, nanoceria, silver nanoparticles, starch solution, three‐component nanomaterial, synthesised silver nanoparticles, ketamine intraperitoneal injection, silver‐cerium‐chitosan nanocomposite, wound closure, collagen density, wound healing effects, wound care, aseptic conditions, sterile dermal biopsy punch, Ag‐Ce     

Biosynthesis of SeNPs by Mycobacterium bovis and their enhancing effect on the immune response against HBs antigens: an in vivo study

Conventional hepatitis B vaccine contains alum but is less effective to induce Th1 response. Selenium nanoparticles and Bacillus Calmette–Guerin were reported as immune modulators. In this study, SeNPs were extracted from Mycobacterium bovis and characterised. SeNPs were mixed with HBs‐Ag and administered to the mice to investigate he immune response pattern. With an addition of Se ions at a sub‐inhibitory concentration to the Sauton medium broth after 24 h, SeNPs were extracted from M. bovis and characterised by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, dynamic light scattering, atomic forcemicroscopy, energy dispersive X‐ray spectrum, transmission electron microscopy, and thermogravimetric analysis. Furthermore, female inbred BALB/c mice were injected subcutaneously on the first, 14th, 28th day with 100 and 200 µg doses of that SeNPs supplemented with HBs‐Ag vaccine. Later, the total antibody, isotypes of Immunoglobulin G1, Interlukin 4, and interferon‐γ were measured by enzye‐linked immunosorbent assay. The size of the SeNPs was <150 nm. Level of total antibody and immunoglobulin G2a increased significantly in the group that received 200 µg/ml nano selenium extracted from M. bovis. SeNPs in dose of 200 µg coated with organic materials of M. bovis could induce an influential immune response in relation to the conventional HBs‐Ag vaccine.Inspec keywords: selenium, nanoparticles, nanofabrication, microorganisms, Fourier transform spectra, infrared spectra, light scattering, atomic force microscopy, X‐ray chemical analysis, transmission electron microscopy, thermal analysis, nanomedicineOther keywords: biosynthesis, selenium nanoparticles, Mycobacterium bovis, enhnced immune response, HBs antigens, Bacillus Calmette‐Guerin, immune modulators, biogenic SeNPs, immune response pattern, Sauton medium broth, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, dynamic light scattering, atomic force microscopy, energy dispersive X‐ray spectrum, transmission electron microscopy, thermogravimetric analysis, female inbred BALB/c mice, antibody, IgG1 isotype, IgG2a isotype, IL₄ isotype, interferon‐γ, enzyme‐linked immunosorbent assay, bacterium, time 24 h, time 14 day, time 28 day, Se     

Tracking and Analysis of Pedestrian’s Behavior in Public Places

Crowd management becomes a global concern due to increased population in urban areas. Better management of pedestrians leads to improved use of public places. Behavior of pedestrian’s is a major factor of crowd management in public places. There are multiple applications available in this area but the challenge is open due to complexity of crowd and depends on the environment. In this paper, we have proposed a new method for pedestrian’s behavior detection. Kalman filter has been used to detect pedestrian’s using movement based approach. Next, we have performed occlusion detection and removal using region shrinking method to isolate occluded humans. Human verification is performed on each human silhouette and wavelet analysis and particle gradient motion are extracted for each silhouettes. Gray Wolf Optimizer (GWO) has been utilized to optimize feature set and then behavior classification has been performed using the Extreme Gradient (XG) Boost classifier. Performance has been evaluated using pedestrian’s data from avenue and UBI-Fight datasets, where both have different environment. The mean achieved accuracies are 91.3% and 85.14% over the Avenue and UBI-Fight datasets, respectively. These results are more accurate as compared to other existing methods.     

Royal Crown Shaped Polarization Insensitive Perfect Metamaterial Absorber for C-, X-, and Ku-Band Applications

This study proposed a new royal crown-shaped polarisation insensitive double negative triple band microwave range electromagnetic metamaterial absorber (MA). The primary purpose of this study is to utilise the exotic characteristics of this perfect metamaterial absorber (PMA) for microwave wireless communications. The fundamental unit cell of the proposed MA consists of two pentagonal-shaped resonators and two inverse C-shaped metallic components surrounded by a split ring resonator (SRR). The bottom thin copper deposit and upper metallic resonator surface are disjoined by an FR-4 dielectric substrate with 1.6 mm thickness. The CST MW studio, a high-frequency electromagnetic simulator has been deployed for numerical simulation of the unit cell in the frequency range of 4 to 14 GHz. In the TE mode, the offered MA structure demonstrated three different absorption peaks at 6.85 GHz (C-band), 8.87 GHz (X-band), and 12.03 GHz (Ku-band), with 96.82%, 99.24%, and 99.43% absorptivity, respectively. The electric field, magnetic field, and surface current distribution were analysed using Maxwell’s-Curl equations, whereas the angle sensitivity was investigated to comprehend the absorption mechanism of the proposed absorber. The numerical results were verified using the Ansys HFSS (high-frequency structure simulator) and ADS (advanced design system) for equivalent circuit models. Moreover, the proposed MA is polarisation and incident angle independent. Hence, the application of this MA can be extended to a great extent, including airborne radar applications, defence, and stealth-coating technology.     

Enhancing level set brain tumor segmentation using fuzzy shape prior information and deep learning

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) brain tumor segmentation is a crucial task for clinical treatment. However, it is challenging owing to variations in type, size, and location of tumors. In addition, anatomical variation in individuals, intensity non-uniformity, and noises adversely affect brain tumor segmentation. To address these challenges, an automatic region-based brain tumor segmentation approach is presented in this paper which combines fuzzy shape prior term and deep learning. We define a new energy function in which an Adaptively Regularized Kernel-Based Fuzzy C-Means (ARKFCM) Clustering algorithm is utilized for inferring the shape of the tumor to be embedded into the level set method. In this way, some shortcomings of traditional level set methods such as contour leakage and shrinkage have been eliminated. Moreover, a fully automated method is achieved by using U-Net to obtain the initial contour, reducing sensitivity to initial contour selection. The proposed method is validated on the BraTS 2017 benchmark dataset for brain tumor segmentation. Average values of Dice, Jaccard, Sensitivity and specificity are 0.93 ± 0.03, 0.86 ± 0.06, 0.95 ± 0.04, and 0.99 ± 0.003, respectively. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method outperforms the other state-of-the-art methods in brain tumor segmentation.     

Microfluidic inverse phase ELISA via manipulation of magnetic beads

We report a new technique for conducting immuno-diagnostics on a microfluidic platform. Rather than handling fluid reagents against a stationary solid phase, the platform manipulates analyte-coated magnetic beads through stationary plugs of fluid reagents to detect an antigenic analyte. These isolated but accessible plugs are pre-encapsulated in a microchannel by capillary force. We call this platform microfluidic inverse phase enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (μIPELISA). μIPELISA has distinctive advantages in the family of microfluidic immunoassay. In particular, it avoids pumping and valving fluid reagents during assaying, thus leading to a lab-on-a-chip format that is free of instrumentation for fluid actuation and control. We use μIPELISA to detect digoxigenin-labeled DNA segments amplified from E. coli O157:H7 by polymerase chain reaction (PCR), and compare its detection capability with that of microplate ELISA. For 0.259 ng μl⁻¹ of digoxigenin-labeled amplicon, μIPELISA is as responsive as the microplate ELISA. Also, we simultaneously conduct μIPELISA in two parallel microchannels.     

A new set of sufficient conditions based on coupling parameters for synchronization of Hopfield like Chaotic Neural Networks

In this paper, we consider a Hopfield like Chaotic Neural Networks which have both self-coupling and non-invertible activation functions. We show that the interactions between neurons can be used as a means of chaos generation or suppression to neuron’s outputs when more adaptability or stability is required. Furthermore, a new set of sufficient conditions based on coupling weights is proposed so that the synchronization of all neuron’s outputs with each other is guaranteed, when all neuron’s have identical activation functions. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed approach is evaluated by performing simulations on three illustrative examples.     

Controlled gates for multi-level quantum computation

Multi-level (ML) quantum logic can potentially reduce the number of inputs/outputs or quantum cells in a quantum circuit which is a limitation in current quantum technology. In this paper we propose theorems about ML-quantum and reversible logic circuits. New efficient implementations for some basic controlled ML-quantum logic gates, such as three-qudit controlled NOT, Cycle, and Self Shift gates are proposed. We also propose lemmas about r-level quantum arrays and the number of required gates for an arbitrary n-qudit ML gate. An equivalent definition of quantum cost (QC) of binary quantum gates for ML-quantum gates is introduced and QC of controlled quantum gates is calculated.     

Analysis of frequency‐selective impedance loading of transmission lines for dual‐band couplers

This article proposes an analytical design methodology for dual‐band hybrid couplers and baluns structures for any arbitrary frequency ratio using a stub‐loaded transmission line. An analysis of changing the impedance behavior of the stub, is carried out for the two bands of operation, which along with a dispersive analysis, emphasizes certain conditions where the existing methodology is not applicable. In addition, an extra degree of freedom has been included to increase the solutions for a given frequency ratio, thus providing greater flexibility and feasibility of the proposed structure. The design methodology is experimentally validated with the design and fabrication of dual‐band branch‐line and rat‐race couplers for various commercial frequency bands. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J RF and Microwave CAE , 2011.