Nanotheranostics and its role in diagnosis,treatment and prevention of COVID-19

Microbe-related, especially viral-related pandemics have currently paralyzed the world and such pathogenesis is expected to rise in the upcoming years. Although tremendous efforts are being made to develop antiviral drugs, very limited progress has been made in this direction. The nanotheranostic approach can be a highly potential rescue to combat this pandemic. Nanoparticles (NPs) due to their high specificity and biofunctionalization ability could be utilized efficiently for prophylaxis, diagnosis and treatment against microbial infections. In this context, titanium oxide, silver, gold NPs, etc. have already been utilized against deadly viruses like influenza, Ebola, HIV, and HBV. The discovery of sophisticated nanovaccines is under investigation and of prime importance to induce reproducible and strong immune responses against difficult pathogens. This review focuses on highlighting the role of various nano-domain materials such as metallic NPs, magnetic NPs, and quantum dots in the biomedical applications to combat the deadly microbial infections. Further, it also discusses the nanovaccines those are already available for various microbial diseases or are in clinical trials. Finally, it gives a perspective on the various nanotechnologies presently employed for efficient diagnosis and therapy against disease causing microbial infections, and how advancement in this field can benefit the health sector remarkably.     

Polymers from renewable resources,part 7. Synthesis and properties of polyamideimide from rosin-maleic anhydride adduct

A polyamideimide was synthesized from a rosin-maleic anhydride adduct in three different ways. The rosin maleic anhydride adduct was condensed with hexamethylenediamine to obtain an amino acid. This amino acid was polymerized either by melt condensation technique or by reacting with thionyl chloride at ambient temperatures to produce a polyamideimide. Polyamideimide from rosin may also be prepared by reacting acid chloride of rosin-maleic anhydride with hexamethylenediamine. The polymer was characterized by IR and elemental analysis. The polymer was found to be soluble only in highly polar solvents such as dimethyl formamide, dimethyl sulfoxide, m-cresol etc. The thermal stability of the polymer has been studied.     

Prediction of fibre strength at the critical length: a simulation theory and experimental verification for bimodally distributed carbon fibre strengths

A computer simulation model of fragment distribution with respect to the fibre strength in a single-filament composite test is developed using the bimodal Weibull statistics. The predictions of the theory are examined with experimental results for AU carbon fibres coated by zirconium-n-propoxide or a zircoaluminate complex. Weibull analysis reveals a bimodal distribution of fibre strengths, in which the fractions of low- and high-strength populations vary with gauge length. It is seen that the simulation results are in good agreement with experimental data if the best fit model of strength distribution is applied. Thus, the use of a bimodal distribution term in the simulation theory yields a predicted strength at the critical length which is in good agreement with the results of extrapolation of experimental data, while the unimodal distribution term leads to overestimation of the strength.     

Secret sharing approach for securing cloud-based pre-classification volume ray-casting

With the evolution in cloud computing, cloud-based volume rendering, which outsources data rendering tasks to cloud datacenters, is attracting interest. Although this new rendering technique has many advantages, allowing third-party access to potentially sensitive volume data raises security and privacy concerns. In this paper, we address these concerns for cloud-based pre-classification volume ray-casting by using Shamir’s (k, n) secret sharing and its variant (l, k, n) ramp secret sharing, which are homomorphic to addition and scalar multiplication operations, to hide color information of volume data/images in datacenters. To address the incompatibility issue of the modular prime operation used in secret sharing technique with the floating point operations of ray-casting, we consider excluding modular prime operation from secret sharing or converting the floating number operations of ray-casting to fixed point operations – the earlier technique degrades security and the later degrades image quality. Both these techniques, however, result in significant data overhead. To lessen the overhead at the cost of high security, we propose a modified ramp secret sharing scheme that uses the three color components in one secret sharing polynomial and replaces the shares in floating point with smaller integers.     

Computerised approaches for the detection of diabetic retinopathy using retinal fundus images: a survey

Eye-related disease such as diabetic retinopathy (DR) is a medical ailment in which the retina of the human eye is smashed because of damage to the tiny retinal blood vessels in the retina. Ophthalmologists identify DR based on various features such as the blood vessels, textures and pathologies. With the rapid development of methods of analysis of biomedical images and advanced computing techniques, image processing-based software for the detection of eye disease has been widely used as an important tool by ophthalmologists. In particular, computer vision-based methods are growing rapidly in the field of medical images analysis and are appropriate to advance ophthalmology. These tools depend entirely on visual analysis to identify abnormalities in Retinal Fundus images. During the past two decades, exciting improvement in the development of DR detection computerised systems has been observed. This paper reviews the development of analysing retinal images for the detection of DR in three aspects: automatic algorithms (classification or pixel to pixel methods), detection methods of pathologies from retinal fundus images, and extraction of blood vessels of retinal fundus image algorithms for the detection of DR. The paper presents a detailed explanation of each problem with respect to retinal images. The current techniques that are used to analyse retinal images and DR detection issues are also discussed in detail and recommendations are made for some future directions.     

A modified discrete antlion optimizer for the ring star problem with secondary sub-depots

Neural Computing and Applications - This paper introduces a new problem in the field of combinatorial optimization. This problem can be named as the ring star problem with secondary sub-depots...     

A compact reconfigurable aperture coupled fed antenna for intelligent transportation system application

This article presents a novel reconfigurable aperture coupled fed antenna with a defected ground plane for an intelligent transportation system (ITS). The antenna design with aperture coupled feed line. The defected ground plane allows variation in reactance of the proposed antenna around the center frequency and coupling of energy. This antenna is multiband and works at resonant frequencies of 2.45, 5.9, and 24 GHz allowing measurable reconfigurability with the help of PIN diode. From the measurement, one can infer that the bandwidth is 0.8, 1, and 8.5 GHz, and gain obtained are 11.7, 4.04, and 4.4 dBi at 2.45, 5.9, and 24 GHz frequencies, respectively. It is circularly polarized with a broadside radiation pattern. The advantage of this design is that it covers all the three bands allocated by the Federal Communications Commission for ITS and vehicular communication applications. It is an electrically small, low profile antenna and has a simple structure thus gives large bandwidth.     

Multi-objective solid transportation problems with budget constraint in uncertain environment

This paper investigates multi-objective solid transportation problems (MOSTP) under various uncertain environments. The unit transportation penalties/costs are taken as random, fuzzy and hybrid variables respectively, in three different uncertain multi-objective solid transportation models and in each case, the supplies, demands and conveyance capacities are fuzzy. Also, apart from source, demand and capacity constraints, an extra constraint on the total budget at each destination is imposed. Chance-constrained programming technique has been used for the first two models to obtain crisp equivalent forms, whereas expected value model is formulated for the last. We provide an another approach using the interval approximation of fuzzy numbers for the first model to obtain its crisp form and compare numerically two approaches for this model. Fuzzy programming technique and a gradient based optimisation - generalised reduced gradient (GRG) method are applied to beget the optimal solutions. Three numerical examples are provided to illustrate the models and programming.     

A fuzzy MCDM method and an application to solid transportation problem with mode preference

In this paper we propose a computationally efficient fuzzy multi-criteria decision making (FMCDM) method. For this purpose we define a ranking function based on credibility measure to rank a fuzzy number over another fuzzy number. A comparative result of our proposed ranking method with the other well known methods is provided. The proposed FMCDM method is successfully applied to find most preferred transportation mode among available modes with respect to some evaluation criteria for a solid transportation problem (STP). Here the evaluation ratings of the alternatives and criteria weights are presented in terms of linguistic variables. The importance weights of the available transportation modes as obtained by this method are then assigned to the STP. Numerical example is provided to illustrate the proposed method and problem.