Nutritional and antioxidant status of an institutionalized elderly group in Murcia (Spain)

The aging of the population is giving rise to a large number of studies aimed at improving the quality of life, considering diet as a major contributing factor in this life stage. The objectives of the present study were to evaluate the nutritional status of a group of institutionalized elderly in Murcia, Spain, and to relate the diet to anthropometric and biochemical indices, paying special attention to total antioxidant status. The dietary evaluation showed excessive intakes of proteins and lipids, and deficiencies in those of carbohydrates, dietary fiber, zinc, iodine and vitamins A, E and D. The high proportion of overweight observed were not significantly correlated to the energy intakes. Although total plasma antioxidant status was low (0.62 mM eq Trolox and 0.98 mM eq Fe(II)) compared with reference values, estimated oxidative risk in this group of elderly was low according to plasma levels of vitamins C, A & E.     

On the graphical analysis of the electronic structure of ferromagnetic clusters of medium size

In a previous work, a theoretical approach, suitable to describe systems having a large number of fermions, was proposed, and results for ferromagnetic surface clusters of medium size (100-1000 atoms) were presented. The aim of the present contribution is to complete this previous work. Several significant theoretical and technical details, omitted previously, are provided here. The obtained spin orbitals are analyzed, by studying their symmetry, energy, and d contribution properties.     

Comparative study of astrocytes in human and rabbit retinae

Immunohistochemical location of Glial Fibrillary Acidic Protein (GFAP) was used to compare the morphology of astrocytes in vascularized and partially vascularized retinae (human and rabbit, respectively). Astrocytes in human and rabbit retinae were found in the same regions as the blood vessels. These cells in partially vascularized retinae differed from those in vascularized retina in several respects. Firstly, there were six morphological types in rabbit retina and only two in human retina. Secondly, in rabbit retinae there were astrocytes only related to blood vessels called "perivascular astrocytes" which were absent in human retinae. Thirdly, the astrocytes were located in the nerve fiber layer and ganglion cell layer in both types of retinae, but in human retinae these cells could also be seen in the internal nuclear layer. These observations demonstrate that there are many differences between astrocytes in human and rabbit retina, suggesting that rabbit retina could be used with caution as an experimental model in comparative studies with human retina.     

Pre-processing of Retinal Images for Removal of Outliers

Wireless Personal Communications - Early diagnosis of diseases related with retina such as glaucoma is of utmost importance in current scenario as it is the second most prevailing cause of...     

Microarray Patches: Poking a Hole in the Challenges Faced When Delivering Poorly Soluble Drugs

Poorly soluble drugs constitute more than 60% of currently marketed pharmaceuticals with over two-thirds of promising new chemical entities failing to enter a clinical setting due to solubility issues. Although oral formulations have made some impact, alternative enhancement strategies for administration of such molecules are actively sought. Over the last decade, innovation on a global scale has enabled the expansion of the frontiers of microarray patches (MAPs) further than ever before. Initially designed to load low doses of hydrophilic and potent therapeutic agents, MAPs are now becoming a viable strategy for the immediate and long-acting delivery of poorly soluble drugs through the skin. This together with the advantages of transdermal administration over the oral and parenteral routes, make of MAPs an appealing platform for the development of products with increased patient compliance. Undoubtedly, MAPs will soon become a readily available therapeutic alternative, and experts from academia, industry and regulatory bodies are working together aiming to facilitate the progression of MAPs toward safe and effective clinical use. This review aims to highlight the ability of MAPs to deliver poorly soluble actives, discuss the mechanisms behind in-skin drug absorption, and evaluate the future direction of the field.     

Extended exploiting modification direction based steganography using hashed-weightage Array

Multimedia Tools and Applications - Steganography is the method of hiding secret message information in various cover media like text, image, audio, video and others without raising suspicion to...     

Convolutional neural networks for computer vision-based detection and recognition of dumpsters

Neural Computing and Applications - In this paper, we propose a twofold methodology for visual detection and recognition of different types of city dumpsters, with minimal human labeling of the...     

An Analysis of Edge Detection by Using the Jensen-Shannon Divergence

This work constitutes a theoretical study of the edge-detection method by means of the Jensen-Shannon divergence, as proposed by the authors. The overall aim is to establish formally the suitability of the procedure of edge detection in digital images, as a step prior to segmentation. In specific, an analysis is made not only of the properties of the divergence used, but also of the method's sensitivity to the spatial variation, as well as the detection-error risk associated with the operating conditions due to the randomness of the spatial configuration of the pixels. Although the paper deals with the procedure based on the Jensen-Shannon divergence, some problems are also related to other methods based on local detection with a sliding window, and part of the study is focused to noisy and textured images.     

Liver disorder detection using variable- neighbor weighted fuzzy K nearest neighbor approach

The human liver disorder is a genetic problem due to the habituality of alcohol or effect by the virus. It can lead to liver failure or liver cancer, if not been detected in initial stage. The aim of the proposed method is to detect the liver disorder in initial stage using liver function test dataset. The problem with many real-world datasets including liver disease diagnosis data is class imbalanced. The word imbalance refers to the conditions that the number of observations belongs to one class having more or less than the other class(es). Traditional K- Nearest Neighbor (KNN) or Fuzzy KNN classifier does not work well on the imbalanced dataset because they treat the neighbor equally. The weighted variant of Fuzzy KNN assign a large weight for the neighbor belongs to the minority class data and relatively small weight for the neighbor belongs to the majority class to resolve the issues with data imbalance. In this paper, Variable- Neighbor Weighted Fuzzy K Nearest Neighbor Approach (Variable-NWFKNN) is proposed, which is an improved variant of Fuzzy-NWKNN. The proposed Variable-NWFKNN method is implemented on three real-world imbalance liver function test datasets BUPA, ILPD from UCI and MPRLPD. The Variable-NWFKNN is compared with existing NWKNN and Fuzzy-NWKKNN methods and found accuracy 73.91% (BUPA Dataset), 77.59% (ILPD Dataset) and 87.01% (MPRLPD Dataset). Further, TL_RUS method is used for preprocessing and it improved the accuracy as 78.46% (BUPA Dataset), 78.46% (ILPD Dataset) and 95.79% (MPRLPD Dataset).