Functions and Mechanisms of Pro-Lysyl Oxidase Processing in Cancers and Eye Pathologies with a Focus on Diabetic Retinopathy

Lysyl oxidases are multifunctional proteins derived from five lysyl oxidase paralogues (LOX) and lysyl oxidase-like 1 through lysyl oxidase-like 4 (LOXL1–LOXL4). All participate in the biosynthesis of and maturation of connective tissues by catalyzing the oxidative deamination of lysine residues in collagens and elastin, which ultimately results in the development of cross-links required to function. In addition, the five LOX genes have been linked to fibrosis and cancer when overexpressed, while tumor suppression by the propeptide derived from pro-LOX has been documented. Similarly, in diabetic retinopathy, LOX overexpression, activity, and elevated LOX propeptide have been documented. The proteolytic processing of pro-forms of the respective proteins is beginning to draw attention as the resultant peptides appear to exhibit their own biological activities. In this review we focus on the LOX paralogue, and what is known regarding its extracellular biosynthetic processing and the still incomplete knowledge regarding the activities and mechanisms of the released lysyl oxidase propeptide (LOX-PP). In addition, a summary of the roles of both LOX and LOX-PP in diabetic retinopathy, and brief mentions of the roles for LOX and closely related LOXL1 in glaucoma, and keratoconus, respectively, are included.     

A Generalized Saturation Throughput Analysis for IEEE 802.11e Contention-Based MAC

The main service differentiation mechanism introduced by the IEEE 802.11e standard is described in terms of prioritized contention access. Analyzing the performance and service differentiation ability of each of the priority features of the 802.11e standard is an important task, and considerable research effort has recently been dedicated to this subject. In this article, we present a generalized and comprehensive analysis of the prioritized access scheme of the 802.11e standard. Our model corrects and extends the existing models and considers all priority features of the 802.11e Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol. We consider an arbitrary number of priority levels, and provide a detailed parametric analysis of the MAC behavior for the main priority parameters of inter frame spacing, contention window size, and transmission opportunity. We validate the accuracy of our analysis with simulation experiments.

An Integrated Framework to Evaluate Resilient-Sustainable Urban Drainage Management Plans Using a Combined-adaptive MCDM Technique

Due to the inevitability of urban flood in presence of the rainfalls exceeding design capacity of urban drainage system, resilience approach has been recently considered instead of the conventional urban drainage management. However, acceptance of resilience approach necessitates considering sustainability in the selection of urban drainage projects due to the various aspect of flood impacts. This paper presents a new integrated framework to show how urban drainage plans are resilient and sustainable. The framework consists of several indicators including technical, economic, social, environmental and planning aspects. On the other hand, the selection of suientropy of the probability distribution p _i . In fact, entropy reduces the effect of plan among available suggested plans is complicated in presence of multiplicity of the indicators. A new combined-adaptive multi criteria decision making technique including combination of Adaptive analytical hierarchical process, Entropy and TOPSIS is here introduced to facilitate the decision making process as well as dealing with uncertainties due to the subjective experts’ preferences. Moreover, presented framework are applied on a part of urban drainage system of Tehran, Capital City. Four urban drainage plans are designed and suggested to be evaluated along with existing system in terms of their sustainability and resilience. The results shows the presented framework provide comprehensive information regarding the behavior of the urban drainage plans against urban floods as well as their sustainability for urban managers. In addition, presented framework facilitates and accelerate the complicated process of decision making. Therefore, it can be employed as comprehensive decision support tool for resilient and sustainable urban drainage management.     

Dynamic framework to mining Internet of Things for multimedia services

The rapid and unprecedented technological advancements are currently dominated by two technologies. At one hand, we witness the rise of the Internet of Things (IoT) as the next evolution of the Internet. At the other hand, we witness a vast spread of social networks that connects people together socially and opens the door for people to share and express ideas, thoughts, and information. IoT is overpopulated by a vast number of objects, millions of multimedia services, and interactions. Therefore, the search of the right object that can provide the specific multimedia service is considered as an important issue. The merge of these two technologies resulted in new paradigm called Social IoT (SIoT). The main idea in SIoT is that every object can mine IoT in search for certain multimedia service. We investigate the issue of friends' management in SIoT and propose a framework to manage friends' requests. The proposed framework employs several mechanisms to better manage friends' relationships. The proposed framework consists of friend selection, friendship removal, and an update module. It proposes a weight-based algorithm and Naïve Bayes Classifier-based algorithm for the selection component. Moreover, a random service allocation model is proposed to construct service-specific network model. This model is then used in the simulation setup to examine the performance of different friends' management algorithms. The performance of the proposed framework is evaluated using simulation under different scenarios. The obtained simulation results show improvement over other strategies in terms of average degree of connections, average path length, local cluster coefficients, and throughput.     

A joint correlation noise estimation and decoding algorithm for distributed video coding

Multimedia Tools and Applications - Distributed video coding is relatively a novel video coding paradigm that enables a lower complex video encoding compared to conventional video coding schemes,...     

Accelerating compute-intensive image segmentation algorithms using GPUs

Image segmentation is an important process that facilitates image analysis such as in object detection. Because of its importance, many different algorithms were proposed in the last decade to enhance image segmentation techniques. Clustering algorithms are among the most popular in image segmentation. The proposed algorithms differ in their accuracy and computational efficiency. This paper studies the most famous and new clustering algorithms and provides an analysis on their feasibility for parallel implementation. We have studied four algorithms which are: fuzzy C-mean, type-2 fuzzy C-mean, interval type-2 fuzzy C-mean, and modified interval type-2 fuzzy C-mean. We have implemented them in a sequential (CPU only) and a parallel hybrid CPU–GPU version. Speedup gains of 6\(\times \) to 20\(\times \) were achieved in the parallel implementation over the sequential implementation. We detail in this paper our discoveries on the portions of the algorithms that are highly parallel so as to help the image processing community, especially if these algorithms are to be used in real-time processing where efficient computation is critical.     

A game theoretic-based distributed detection method for VM-to-hypervisor attacks in cloud environment

Cloud computing is a pool of scalable virtual resources serving a large number of users who pay fees depending on the extent of utilized service. From payment perspective, cloud is like electricity and water as people who use more of this shared pool should pay larger fees. Cloud computing involves a diverse set of technologies including networking, virtualization and transaction scheduling. Thus, it is vulnerable to a wide range of security threats. Some of the most important security issues threatening the cloud computing systems originate from virtualization technology, as it constitutes the main body and basis of these systems. The most important virtualization-based security threats include VM side channel, VM escape and rootkit attacks. The previous works on the subject of virtualization security rely on hardware approaches such as the use of firewalls, which are expensive, the use of schedulers to control the side channels along with noise injection, which impose high overhead, or the use of agents to collect information and send them back to a central intrusion detection system, which itself can become the target of attacker. In the method presented in this paper, a group of mobile agents act as the sensors of invalid actions in the cloud environment. They start a noncooperative game with the suspected attacker and then calculate the Nash equilibrium value and utility so as to differentiate an attack from legitimate requests and determine the severity of attack and its point of origin. The simulation results show that this method can detect the attacks with 86% accuracy. The use of mobile agents and their trainability feature has led to reduced system overhead and accelerated detection process.     

A GDQ approach to thermally nonlinear generalized thermoelasticity of disks

Generalized thermoelasticity response of an annular disk subjected to thermal shock on its inner surface is analyzed in this research. The Lord–Shulman theory, which accounts for one relaxation time in the conventional Fourier law, is used to avoid the infinite speed of thermal wave propagation. Unlike the other available works in which the first law of thermodynamics is linearized, the nonlinearity arising from the temperature change is taken into consideration. The first law of thermodynamics in this case becomes nonlinear and the analysis under such formulation is called thermally nonlinear. Two coupled equations, i.e., the radial displacement wave equation and temperature wave propagation equation are obtained. These equations and the associated boundary conditions are discreted through the generalized differential quadrature method. Solution of the time-dependent system of equations is obtained using the Newmark time marching scheme and the successive Picard method. Numerical results are provided for both thermally linear and thermally nonlinear temperature and radial displacement wave propagations. Parametric studies reveal that at higher temperature levels, thermally nonlinear first law of thermodynamics should be considered instead of thermally linear one. Furthermore, the higher the coupling parameter and/or relaxation time, the higher the divergence of thermally nonlinear-/linear-based results.     

Mechanism of the reversibility of asphaltene precipitation in crude oil

Asphaltene precipitation and deposition occur in petroleum reservoirs as a change in pressure, temperature and liquid phase composition and reduce the oil recovery considerably. In addition to these, asphaltene precipitates may deposit in the pore spaces of reservoir rock and form plugging, which is referred to as a type of formation damage, i.e. permeability reduction. In all cases above, it is of great importance to know under which conditions the asphaltenes precipitate and to what extent precipitated asphaltenes can be re-dissolved. In other words, to what extent the process of asphaltene precipitation is reversible with respect to change in thermodynamic conditions. In present work, a series of experiments was designed and carried out to quantitatively distinguish the reversibility of asphaltene precipitation upon the change in pressure, temperature and liquid composition. Experiments were conducted in non-porous media. Generally it was observed that the asphaltene precipitation is a partial reversible process for oil under study upon temperature change with hysteresis. However, the precipitation of asphaltene as a function of mixture composition and pressure is nearly reversible with a little hysteresis.