Recovery of business intelligence systems: Towards guaranteed continuity of patient centric healthcare systems through a matrix-based recovery approach

With the intensive use of the internet, patient centric healthcare systems shifted away from paper-based records towards a computerized format. Electronic patient centric healthcare databases contain information about patients that should be kept available for further reference. Healthcare databases contain potential data that makes them a goal for attackers. Hacking into these systems and publishing their contents online exposes them to a challenge that affects their continuity. Any denial of this service will not be tolerated since we cannot know when we need to retrieve a patient’s record. Denial of service affects the continuity of the healthcare system which in turn threatens patients’ lives, decreases the efficiency of the healthcare system and increases the operating costs of the attacked healthcare organization. Although there are many defensive security methods that have been devised, nonetheless malicious transactions may find a way to penetrate the secured safeguard and then modify critical data of healthcare databases. When a malicious transaction modifies a patient record in a database, the damage may spread to other records through valid transactions. Therefore, recovery techniques are required. The efficiency of the data recovery algorithm is substantial for e-healthcare systems. A patient cannot wait too long for his/her medical history to be recovered so that the correct medication be prescribed. Nevertheless, in order to have fast data recovery, an efficient damage assessment process should precede the recovery stage. The damage assessment must be performed as the intrusion detection system detects the malicious activity. The execution time of the recovery process is a crucial factor for measuring the performance because it is directly proportional to the denial of service time of any healthcare system. This paper presents a high performance damage assessment and recovery algorithm for e-healthcare systems. The algorithm provides fast damage assessment after an attack by a malicious transaction to keep the availability of the e-healthcare database. Reducing the execution time of recovery is the key target of our algorithm. The proposed algorithm outperforms the existing algorithm. It is about six times faster than the most recent proposed algorithm. In the worst case, the proposed algorithm takes 8.81?ms to discover the damaged part of the database; however, the fastest recent algorithm requires 50.91?ms. In the best case, the proposed algorithm requires 0.43?ms, which is 86 times faster than the fastest recent work. This is a significant reduction of execution time compared with other available approaches. Saving the damage assessment time means shorter denial of service periods, which in turn guarantees the continuity of the patient centric healthcare system.     

Relationships Between Textural Modifications,Lipid and Protein Oxidation and Sensory Attributes of Refrigerated Turkey Meat Sausage Treated with Bacteriocin BacTN635

In this study, bacteriocin “BacTN635” was used to maintain quality and extend shelf life of refrigerated turkey meat sausage. Connections between lipid and protein oxidations and instrumentally textural changes using Bayesian networks during storage of turkey meat sausage were also studied. BacTN635 slowed down metmyoglobin and carbonyl group accumulation and delayed the disappearance of sulphydryl proteins (P < 0.05) in turkey meat sausage. This bacteriocin led to a decrease in primary and secondary lipid oxidation (P < 0.05) and enhanced texture characteristics of sausage by reducing hardness (P < 0.05) and controlling the elasticity lose during refrigeration. We have also investigated the correlations between protein and lipid oxidation and instrumentally measured the parameters of turkey meat sausage treated by BacTN635. The developed model, based on Bayesian network techniques, can automatically learn emerging models in data to explain protein and lipid oxidation and texture modification relationships. Equally, sensorial parameters were used for constructing regression models to predict overall acceptability. In conclusion, BacTN635 could be a promising tool for extending the safety and quality of refrigerated turkey meat sausage. This bacteriocin could be a strong candidate for future applications in a wide range of meat products.     

Optimal business process deployment cost in cloud resources

Cloud computing is the fastest emerging technology that proposes several resources under various pricing strategies that are specified based on temporal constraints. The main aim of cloud computing is to enhance the performance level and minimize operating costs. Thus, organizations looking towards optimizing their spending on IT infrastructure find such pricing strategies very attractive, especially, to deploy their business process models. However, discovering the optimal deployment cost of a business process in cloud resources proposed under various pricing strategies becomes a highly challenging problem. So, the objective of the present paper is to present an approach that assists business process designers in finding an optimal assignment or scheduling based on the variety of pricing strategies. We use linear programming models with an objective function under a set of constraints. Besides, we propose an extension of the famous cloud simulator provided in the market, CloudSim, to simulate the cloud resources consumed to deploy a business process model. The experimental results show the feasibility, effectiveness, and performance of our approach.

     

Primary repair of colorectal injuries in childhood

A retrospective survey of 44 children with colorectal perforating injuries secondary to shrapnel and high velocity bullets is presented. Seven patients had the injury limited to the colon or rectum. All patients were operated upon within 7 hr from the their colonic wounds and 20 underwent a colostomy. Five of the patients repaired primarily had their injuries to the left side of the colon or rectum. None of the patients undergoing primary repair suffered from an anastomotic leak. The mortality rate after primary repair was 16.6% and after colostomy 10%. The mortality was significantly different in the group of patients who had additional injuries where a colostomy procedure was associated with a lower mortality rate (11% versus 21%). Shock on admission and during operation affected survival adversely in all patients. The average hospital stay of survivors was 24 days with "primary repair" and 36 days with "colostomy."     

Determinants of e-consumer productivity in product retrieval on a commercial website: An experimental approach

This article investigates what determines e-consumer productivity, in the specific case of product retrieval, on a commercial website. With a 2 × 2 × 2 factorial design on 292 participants, an online experiment reveals that productivity in product retrieval (measured in terms of effectiveness, efficiency, and time) relates to website design (e.g., abstraction level of labels, animation), user characteristics (e.g., Internet experience, product category familiarity, cognitive absorption), and situational characteristics (e.g., task nature). The results also confirm interactive effects among the type of strategy used, the nature of the task, and the website design. These findings have notable implications for both research and practice.     

Fault-tolerant scheduling on parallel systems with non-memoryless failure distributions

As large parallel systems increase in size and complexity, failures are inevitable and exhibit complex space and time dynamics. Most often, in real systems, failure rates are increasing or decreasing over time. Considering non-memoryless failure distributions, we study a bi-objective scheduling problem of optimizing application makespan and reliability. In particular, we determine whether one can optimize both makespan and reliability simultaneously, or whether one metric must be degraded in order to improve the other. We also devise scheduling algorithms for achieving (approximately) optimal makespan or reliability. When failure rates decrease, we prove that makespan and reliability are opposing metrics. In contrast, when failure rates increase, we prove that one can optimize both makespan and reliability simultaneously. Moreover, we show that the largest processing time (LPT) list scheduling algorithm achieves good performance when processors are of uniform speed. The implications of our findings are the accelerated completion and improved reliability of parallel jobs executed across large distributed systems. Finally, we conduct simulations to investigate the impact of failures on the performance, which is done using an actual application of biological sequence comparison.     

Optimized design of a digital I/Q demodulator suitable for adaptive pre-distortion of 3rd generation base station PAs

This article presents an optimized design of a high-speed digital I/Q demodulator intended for the implementation of the feedback path of an adaptive base band digital pre-distorter (DPD). Indeed, the optimization of the DPD linearization capability, in terms of correction bandwidth and nonlinearity effects minimization, is directly related to the accuracy and speed of the I/Q demodulator. In this work, a digital I/Q demodulator is designed, optimized and implemented in a Xilinx FPGA device. This allowed for high-speed processing of about 200 MHz with a substantial reduction in the FPGA used gates.     

Microstructure characterization and tensile properties of direct squeeze cast and gravity die cast 2017A wrought Al alloy

Squeeze casting is a pressurized solidification process wherein finished components can be produced in a single process from molten metal to solid utilizing re-useable die tools. This one activates different physical processes which have metallurgical repercussions on the cast material structure. Desirable features of both casting and forging are combined in this hybrid method. 2017A aluminium alloy, conventionally used for wrought products, has been successfully cast using direct squeeze casting. Squeeze casting with an applied pressure removes the defects observed in gravity die cast samples. Tensile properties and microstructures are investigated. The results show that the finer microstructure was achieved through the squeeze casting. Furthermore, higher pressures improved the fracture properties and decreased the percentage of porosity of the cast alloy. The ultimate tensile strength, the yield strength and the elongation of the squeezed cast samples improved when the squeeze pressure increased.     

Extraction of Uranium(VI) and Plutonium(IV) with Tetra-Alkylcarbamides

ABSTRACT

The use of tetra-alkylcarbamides as novel extractants for the separation of uranium(VI) and plutonium(IV) by solvent extraction from spent nuclear fuels is investigated in this study. Batch extraction experiments show that tetra-alkylcarbamides strongly extract U(VI) with high distribution ratios. Plutonium(IV) can be co-extracted with U(VI) at high nitric acid concentration, while high U(VI)/Pu(IV) selectivities can be reached at lower acidity. Loading capacity experiments with high uranium concentrations show that alkyl chains longer than butyl are necessary to avoid third phase formation. Nevertheless, the viscosity of uranium-loaded solvents gets too high with alkyl chains longer than pentyl. Overall, this study shows that with TPU extractant (with four pentyl chains), an efficient co-extraction of uranium and plutonium can be reached (D_U,Pu > 1) for a concentration of nitric acid higher than 4 mol?L^?1, while the partition between uranium(VI) and plutonium(IV) could be operated even at 2 mol?L^?1 nitric acid without redox chemistry.