Far infrared spectrum of CD3OH methanol from 40–220 CM−1

The Fourier transform far-infrared (FTFIR) spectrum of CD₃OH has been obtained from 40–220 cm^?1 at a resolution of 0.002 cm^?1, and partially analyzed. Numerousb-type branches have been assigned in the spectrum, ranging over torsional states fromn=0 to 3. The branches have been fitted toJ(J+1) power-series energy expansions in order to obtainJ-independent branch origins. These in turn have been fitted to the torsion-rotation Hamiltonian, and improved molecular constants have been obtained for the ground vibrational state.     

Isolation and characterization of a lectin with antifungal activity from Egyptian Pisum sativum seeds

A plant lectin isolated in its pure state from the Egyptian seeds of Pisum sativum (PSL) produced two bands in SDS–PAGE (5.53 and 19.3 kDa; i.e. α and β chain) but one peak by gel filtration chromatography on Sephadex G-100, corresponding to 50 kDa, i.e., a dimeric structure of two monomers, each consisting of one α and one β subunit. PSL is a glycoprotein bound with glucose (2 mol/mol of protein) and stabilized by 2 atoms of each of Ca²⁺ and Mn²⁺ per molecule of protein. It highly agglutinated human, rabbit and rat erythrocytes but weakly agglutinated chicken erythrocytes, while no agglutination occurred with sheep erythrocytes. Hemagglutination was markedly affected by acidic pH, but was heat stable below 60 °C for 30 min. Among the various tested sugars, PSL agglutination was most inhibited by mannose. PSL is rich in hydroxyl amino acids while totally lacking sulfur amino acids. PSL inhibited the growth of Aspergillus flavus, Trichoderma viride and Fusarium oxysporum.     

Controlled-Release Frusemide Microcapsules: Preformulation Studies

Microencapsulation of plain frusemide or its solid-dispersion with PEG 6000 was achieved by phase-separation coacervation. Formulations showed reasonable in-vitro dissolution behaviour were assessed for their absorption rates by LD₅₀ testing in mice. Toxicity studies showed close agreement between the increase in lethal dose and the decrease in dissolution rate and revealed that the formulation containing frusemide as fused mixture with PEG 6000 and microencapsulated with polystyrene, in frusemide-PEG 6000-polystyrene weight ratio of 2:2:1, was the formula of choice for prolonging the absorption, hence, the action of frusemide.     

A statistical framework for breast tumor classification from ultrasonic images

Segmentation and classification of ultrasonic breast images is extremely critical for medical diagnosis. Over the last years, various techniques have already been presented for this objective. In this paper, a proposed framework is presented to segment a given ultrasonic image with breast tumor and classify the tumor as being benign or malignant. The proposed framework depends on an active contour segmentation model to determine the tumor region, and then extract it from the ultrasonic image. After that, the Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) is used to extract features from the segmented images. Then, the dimensions of the resulting features are reduced by applying feature reduction approaches, namely, the Principal Component Analysis (PCA), the Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) and both of them together. The obtained features are submitted to a statistical classifier and the strategy of voting is used to classify the tumor. In the simulation work, 160 benign and malignant breast tumor images collected from Sirindhorn International Institute of Technology (SIIT) website are used. The average processing time for a 256 × 256 image on a laptop with Core i5, 2.3 GHz processor and 8GB RAM is 1.8 s. From the simulation results, it is found that the utilization of the PCA approach provides the best accuracy of 99.23% among the three feature reduction approaches applied. Finally, the proposed framework is compared with the Support Vector Machine (SVM) classification to evaluate its performance in terms of accuracy, sensitivity, precision, and specificity. It is noticed that the proposed framework is efficient and rapid, and it can be applied for ultrasonic breast image segmentation and classification, and thus it can assist the specialists to segment and decide whether a tumor is benign or malignant.

     

An optimized FP-growth algorithm for discovery of association rules

The Journal of Supercomputing - Association rule mining (ARM) is a data mining technique to discover interesting associations between datasets. The frequent pattern-growth (FP-growth) is an...     

Towards Improving Predictive Statistical Learning Model Accuracy by Enhancing Learning Technique

The accuracy of the statistical learning model depends on the learning technique used which in turn depends on the dataset’s values. In most research studies, the existence of missing values (MVs) is a vital problem. In addition, any dataset with MVs cannot be used for further analysis or with any data driven tool especially when the percentage of MVs are high. In this paper, the authors propose a novel algorithm for dealing with MVs depending on the feature selection (FS) of similarity classifier with fuzzy entropy measure. The proposed algorithm imputes MVs in cumulative order. The candidate feature to be manipulated is selected using similarity classifier with Parkash’s fuzzy entropy measure. The predictive model to predict MVs within the candidate feature is the Bayesian Ridge Regression (BRR) technique. Furthermore, any imputed features will be incorporated within the BRR equation to impute the MVs in the next chosen incomplete feature. The proposed algorithm was compared against some practical state-of-the-art imputation methods by conducting an experiment on four medical datasets which were gathered from several databases repository with MVs generated from the three missingness mechanisms. The evaluation metrics of mean absolute error (MAE), root mean square error (RMSE) and coefficient of determination (R² score) were used to measure the performance. The results exhibited that performance vary depending on the size of the dataset, amount of MVs and the missingness mechanism type. Moreover, compared to other methods, the results showed that the proposed method gives better accuracy and less error in most cases.     

Large-scale channel characterization at 28 GHz on a university campus in the United Arab Emirates

Telecommunication Systems - Millimeter wave (mm-wave) communication is one of the key enabling technologies for meeting the requirements of the fifth generation (5G) wireless communication systems....     

A New CMOS Programmable Balanced Output Transconductor and Application to a Mixed Mode Universal Filter Suitable for VLSI

A new CMOS programmable balanced output transconductor (BOTA) is introduced. The BOTA is a useful block for continuous-time analog signal processing. A new CMOS realization based on MOS transistors operating in the saturation region is given. Application of the BOTA in realizing a mixed mode universal filter using six BOTAs and two grounded capacitors is also introduced. The filter's gain can be adjusted simply by varying the amplitude of a transconductance through its control voltage without affecting ₀ and Q of the filter. Also, the Q of the filter can be adjusted by a single transconductor independent of ₀. PSpice simulation results for the BOTA circuit and for the universal filter are also given.     

Development of a post-flood road maintenance strategy: case study Queensland,Australia

Currently, no road authority takes into account flooding in road deterioration (RD) models; as a result, post-flood rehabilitation treatments may be sub-optimal. This paper proposes a new approach to the development of a post-flood maintenance strategy. The recently developed roughness and rutting-based RD models with flooding, by the current authors, are used as input to predict pavement deterioration after a flood (i.e. assuming a flood in year 1). The HDM-4 model has been used to get the post-flood maintenance strategy with constrained and unconstrained budget, where post-flood rehabilitation starts from year 2. The road groups in state road network of Queensland, Australia, are used as the case study. The unconstrained budget solution aims to keep the network in an excellent condition at a cost of $49.7bn with the possible strongest treatments. The constrained budget strategy uses agency cost and pavement performance as constraints in optimisation and provides a reasonable solution. This strategy requires about $26.1bn in life cycle, which is close to the main road authority of Queensland’s post-flood rehabilitation programme. The paper discusses two other strategies on maximise economic benefits and budget optimisation. It is expected that a road authority would properly investigate its flood-damaged roads before implementation. The paper shows pavement performances with the post-flood strategy. The need for a RD model to predict deterioration after a flood and for post-flood treatment selection is also highlighted.