Cooperative Answering of Fuzzy Queries

The majority of existing information systems deals with crisp data through crisp database systems.Traditional Database Management Systems(DBMS) have not taken into account imprecision so one can say there is some sort of lack of flexibility.The reason is that queries retrieve only elements which precisely match to the given Boolean query.That is,an element belongs to the result if the query is true for this element;otherwise,no answers are returned to the user.The aim of this paper is to present a cooper...     

Urinary fistula after transplantation: eleven cases

OBJECTIVES: To specify the anatomical features of urinary fistulas and to evaluate the results of percutaneous and surgical treatment of post-transplantation urinary fistulas. PATIENTS AND METHODS: 11 urinary fistulas were observed after 160 renal transplantations, corresponding to an incidence of this complication of 6.8%. Urinary fistulas were treated percutaneously in three cases and surgically in eight cases. THE FOLLOWING COMPLICATIONS WERE OBSERVED DURING SURGICAL TREATMENT: extensive necrosis of the urethra in four cases, rupture of the sutures in two cases, a punctate pelvic fistula in one case. RESULTS: The incidence of fistula was 5.8% for Leadbetter reimplantation and 8.1% for Lich-Gregoir extravesical reimplantation. We obtained one success in three patients treated percutaneously and one death and seven successes out of eight patients treated surgically. We performed ureteropelvic anastomosis with the native ureter in the case of extensive necrosis of the ureter (4 cases), a new reimplantation in three cases and suture of the pelvic fistula in one case. CONCLUSION: More than one half of post-transplantation urinary fistulas observed in our department are secondary to ischaemic necrosis of the ureter. We emphasize the value of preservation of the ureteric blood supply during organ harvesting. Post-transplantation urinary fistulas must be treated surgically, as soon as possible, to avoid infectious complications.     

Wood particle/high‐density polyethylene composites: Thermal sensitivity and nucleating ability of wood particles

The thermal sensitivity, nucleating ability, and nonisothermal crystallization of high‐density polyethylene (HDPE) with different wood fillers during wood/HDPE melt processing were investigated with thermogravimetric analysis and differential scanning calorimetry. The results showed that the wood degraded at a lower temperature than HDPE. The thermal decomposition behavior was similar across wood species. The most remarkable dissimilarities were observed between wood and bark in the decomposition rate around a processing temperature of 300°C and in the peak temperature location for cellulose degradation. The higher degradation rate for bark was explained by the devolatilization of extractives and the degradation of lignin, which were present in higher amounts in pine bark. The nucleating ability for various wood fillers was evaluated with the crystalline weight fraction, crystal conversion, crystallization half‐time, and crystallization temperature of the HDPE matrix. The nucleation activity improved with the addition of wood particles to the HDPE matrix. However, no effect of wood species on the crystal conversion was found. For composites based on semicrystalline matrix polymers, the crystal conversion may be an important factor in determining the stiffness and fracture behavior. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci, 2009     

[Dye molecules/copper(II)/macroporous glutaraldehyde‐chitosan] microspheres complex: Surface characterization,kinetic, and thermodynamic investigations

Chitosan microspheres loaded Cu(II) were prepared using a precipitation method and heterogeneously crosslinked with glutaraldehyde. The abilities of the binary [Cu(II)/Glut‐chitosan] system for binding two acid dyes, that is, Acid blue 25 (AB25) and Calmagite (Calma) were investigated. Sorption experiments were performed using a batch process at 25°C and indicate pH dependence. Evidence for the modification of the raw chitosan polymer was provided by Fourier transform infra red spectral study, thermogravimetry, differential thermogravimetry, differential scanning calorimetry, and scanning electron microscopy analysis. Data gleaned from the thermal analyses, showed that the modification of the polymer decreases the thermal stability of the prepared materials with respect to that of the native one. The effecting factors during dye adsorption have been also studied. Thermodynamic and kinetic experiments were undertaken to assess the capacity and the rate of dyes removal on the surface of [Cu(II)/Glut‐chitosan]. Experimental data were mathematically described using various kinetic models. The pseudo second‐order equation was shown to fit the adsorption kinetics. The interpretation of the equilibrium sorption data complies well with the Freundlich adsorption model. Thermodynamic results indicate that the adsorption follows an exothermic process. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci, 2012     

Removal of phosphorus from aqueous solution by Posidonia oceanica fibers using continuous stirring tank reactor

The present study aims to develop a new potentially low-cost, sustainable treatment approach to soluble inorganic phosphorus removal from synthetic solutions and secondary wastewater effluents in which a plant waste (Posidonia oceanica fiber: POF) is used for further agronomic benefit. Dynamic flow tests using a continuous stirred tank reactor (CSTR) were carried out to study the effect of initial concentration of phosphorus, amount of adsorbent, feeding flow rate and anions competition. The experimental results showed that the removal efficiency of phosphorus from synthetic solutions is about 80% for 10 g L(-1) of POF. In addition, the variation of the initial concentration of phosphorus from 8 to 50 mg L(-1) increased the adsorption capacity from 0.99 to 3.03 mg g(-1). The use of secondary treated wastewater showed the presence of competition phenomenon between phosphorus and sulphate which could be overcoming with increasing the sorptive surface area and providing more adsorption sites when increasing the adsorbent dosage of POF. Compared with columns studies, this novel CSTR system showed more advantages for the removal of soluble phosphorus as a tertiary treatment of urban secondary effluents with more adsorption efficiency and capacity, in addition to the prospect use of saturated POF with nutriment as fertilizer and compost.     

Automated Deep Learning Driven Crop Classification on Hyperspectral Remote Sensing Images

Hyperspectral remote sensing/imaging spectroscopy is a novel approach to reaching a spectrum from all the places of a huge array of spatial places so that several spectral wavelengths are utilized for making coherent images. Hyperspectral remote sensing contains acquisition of digital images from several narrow, contiguous spectral bands throughout the visible, Thermal Infrared (TIR), Near Infrared (NIR), and Mid-Infrared (MIR) regions of the electromagnetic spectrum. In order to the application of agricultural regions, remote sensing approaches are studied and executed to their benefit of continuous and quantitative monitoring. Particularly, hyperspectral images (HSI) are considered the precise for agriculture as they can offer chemical and physical data on vegetation. With this motivation, this article presents a novel Hurricane Optimization Algorithm with Deep Transfer Learning Driven Crop Classification (HOADTL-CC) model on Hyperspectral Remote Sensing Images. The presented HOADTL-CC model focuses on the identification and categorization of crops on hyperspectral remote sensing images. To accomplish this, the presented HOADTL-CC model involves the design of HOA with capsule network (CapsNet) model for generating a set of useful feature vectors. Besides, Elman neural network (ENN) model is applied to allot proper class labels into the input HSI. Finally, glowworm swarm optimization (GSO) algorithm is exploited to fine tune the ENN parameters involved in this article. The experimental result scrutiny of the HOADTL-CC method can be tested with the help of benchmark dataset and the results are assessed under distinct aspects. Extensive comparative studies stated the enhanced performance of the HOADTL-CC model over recent approaches with maximum accuracy of 99.51%.     

Metaheuristics with Deep Learning Empowered Biomedical Atherosclerosis Disease Diagnosis and Classification

Atherosclerosis diagnosis is an inarticulate and complicated cognitive process. Researches on medical diagnosis necessitate maximum accuracy and performance to make optimal clinical decisions. Since the medical diagnostic outcomes need to be prompt and accurate, the recently developed artificial intelligence (AI) and deep learning (DL) models have received considerable attention among research communities. This study develops a novel Metaheuristics with Deep Learning Empowered Biomedical Atherosclerosis Disease Diagnosis and Classification (MDL-BADDC) model. The proposed MDL-BADDC technique encompasses several stages of operations such as pre-processing, feature selection, classification, and parameter tuning. Besides, the proposed MDL-BADDC technique designs a novel Quasi-Oppositional Barnacles Mating Optimizer (QOBMO) based feature selection technique. Moreover, the deep stacked autoencoder (DSAE) based classification model is designed for the detection and classification of atherosclerosis disease. Furthermore, the krill herd algorithm (KHA) based parameter tuning technique is applied to properly adjust the parameter values. In order to showcase the enhanced classification performance of the MDL-BADDC technique, a wide range of simulations take place on three benchmarks biomedical datasets. The comparative result analysis reported the better performance of the MDL-BADDC technique over the compared methods.     

Meetings scheduling solver enhancement with local consistency reinforcement

Meeting scheduling (MS) represents an important real-world group decision application that denotes one of the actual combinatorial problems. Solving this problem consists of scheduling all the meetings while satisfying all the constraints related to both the users and the meetings. However, given human nature, the solution is usually delineated by the encountering of conflicting preferences. Most of existing research efforts allow the relaxation of the users' preferences in order to reach an agreement between all the participants, which is not always possible. In addition, they do not deal with the achievement of any level of local consistency to enhance the efficiency of the solving process, and finally, they do not address the real difficulty of distributed systems, which is the complexity of message passing operations. Here we propose a new approach to facilitate and streamline the scheduling meetings process in any organization. This approach is based on the distributed reinforcement of arc consistency model, which takes into account the difficulties mentioned above. The present work focuses mainly on satisfying meetings hosts' preferences as much as possible, while taking into consideration all users' availability. The underlying selfish protocol is able to efficiently reach the best solution for the host of the meeting (according to the predefined criteria) whenever possible. This process is achieved with the minimal number of exchanged messages and while retaining as much of the privacy of the involved users as possible. An experimental comparative analysis divulges that our approach is scalable and worthwhile especially for strong constraints. Ahlem Ben Hassine received a B.S and M.S. degrees from the High Institute of Management of Tunis (ISG), in 1996 and 1999. She received her PhD degree in 2005 from the School of Knowledge Science at the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST). Her main research interests include artificial intelligence mainly for solving complex problems, constraint satisfaction problems, multi-agent systems, meeting scheduling problems. Takayuki Ito received a B.Eng., M.S., and PhD degrees from Nagoya Institute of Technology (NIT) in 1995, 1997 and 2000. He is an Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Engineering, NIT. His research interests include computational mechanism design, auction, agent-mediated electronic commerce, multi-agent negotiation, agent-based Tu Bao Ho received a B. Eng. degree from Hanoi University of Technology in 1978, M.S. and PhD. Degrees from University Paris 6, in 1984 and 1987, a Habilitation diploma in 1998 from University Paris Dauphine. He is currently a professor at School of Knowledge Science, Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST). His research interests include artificial intelligence, machine learning, knowledge based systems, knowledge discovery and data mining.     

Approximation properties of fuzzy systems for smooth functions and their first-order derivative

The problem of simultaneous approximations of a given function and its derivatives, has been addressed frequently in pure and applied mathematics. In pure mathematics, Bernstein polynomials get their importance from the fact that they provide simultaneous approximation of a function and its derivatives. In neural network theory, feedforward networks were shown to be universal approximators of an unknown function and its derivatives. In this paper, we consider fuzzy logic systems with the membership functions of each input variables are chosen as the translations and dilations of one appropriately fixed function. We prove, by a constructive proof based on discretization of the convolution operator, that under certain conditions made on the input variables membership functions, fuzzy logic systems of Sugeno type are universal approximators of a given function and its derivatives.     

Aspects of evolving urogenital tuberculosis. 60 cases

In the present study, the effects of thymosin alpha1 on lipid peroxidation were studied in an in vivo model of experimental hypercholesterolemia. In groups II-IV, rabbits were fed a high-cholesterol diet 2% (w/w) for 10 weeks. Thereafter, rabbits in group III were fed a normal diet for another 14 days and those in group IV were given a normal diet plus 25 microg/kg thymosin alpha1 intraperitoneally every other day for the same period. At the end of this period, plasma and erythrocyte lipid levels and susceptibility of erythrocytes to lipid peroxidation were determined in all groups. Hypercholesterolemic rabbits had high plasma and erythrocyte lipid peroxide (TBARS) levels compared to control animals fed a normal diet. Plasma and erythrocyte TBARS levels significantly decreased in the thymosin-alpha1-injected rabbits. In thymosin-alpha1-treated animals (group IV), most of the lipid plaques were replaced by fibrous tissue. These findings suggest that thymosin alpha1 may have some beneficial effects on the treatment of atherosclerosis by normalizing blood lipid levels and by substantially protecting endothelial cells against free radical injury.