Detecting and Mitigating Selfish Primary Users in Cognitive Radio

Wireless Personal Communications - In today’s world, Cloud computing based health cloud is an effective platform for enhancing e-health productivity, i.e., healthcare professionals can...     

Application of Proteomics in Pancreatic Ductal Adenocarcinoma Biomarker Investigations: A Review

Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC), a highly aggressive malignancy with a poor prognosis is usually detected at the advanced stage of the disease. The only US Food and Drug Administration-approved biomarker that is available for PDAC, CA 19-9, is most useful in monitoring treatment response among PDAC patients rather than for early detection. Moreover, when CA 19-9 is solely used for diagnostic purposes, it has only a recorded sensitivity of 79% and specificity of 82% in symptomatic individuals. Therefore, there is an urgent need to identify reliable biomarkers for diagnosis (specifically for the early diagnosis), ascertain prognosis as well as to monitor treatment response and tumour recurrence of PDAC. In recent years, proteomic technologies are growing exponentially at an accelerated rate for a wide range of applications in cancer research. In this review, we discussed the current status of biomarker research for PDAC using various proteomic technologies. This review will explore the potential perspective for understanding and identifying the unique alterations in protein expressions that could prove beneficial in discovering new robust biomarkers to detect PDAC at an early stage, ascertain prognosis of patients with the disease in addition to monitoring treatment response and tumour recurrence of patients.     

Identification of Proteins of Altered Abundance in Oil Palm Infected with Ganoderma boninense

Basal stem rot is a common disease that affects oil palm, causing loss of yield and finally killing the trees. The disease, caused by fungus Ganoderma boninense, devastates thousands of hectares of oil palm plantings in Southeast Asia every year. In the present study, root proteins of healthy oil palm seedlings, and those infected with G. boninense, were analyzed by 2-dimensional gel electrophoresis (2-DE). When the 2-DE profiles were analyzed for proteins, which exhibit consistent significant change of abundance upon infection with G. boninense, 21 passed our screening criteria. Subsequent analyses by mass spectrometry and database search identified caffeoyl-CoA O-methyltransferase, caffeic acid O-methyltransferase, enolase, fructokinase, cysteine synthase, malate dehydrogenase, and ATP synthase as among proteins of which abundances were markedly altered.     

Chaos blended cellular automata on fractals: the effective way of reconfigurable hardware assisted medical image privacy

In more recent times data continues to be generated at a very unprecedented scale. This is a result of the pervasive nature of modern-day digitisation. As such, it is absolutely critical that this data only be accessed by the trusted parties concerned in an effort to maintain the privacy of individuals. One particular type data that could severely compromise the identity and privacy of an individual is ‘medical data’. With a focus on medical images, this work proposes a novel ‘fractalized’ chaos-cellular automata encryption scheme, implemented on Cyclone IV EP2C35F672C6 FPGA, resulting in a hardware-based concurrent security solution. The scheme entails three stages of diffusion, which arise from different mechanisms. In tandem with the diffusion process is the “On the Fly” process of confusion governed by a Linear feedback Shift Register (LFSR), all of which in implemented by applying the nature of fractals. The security architecture occupies 16,351 Logic Elements (LEs) with 230 registers on the target FPGA with the power dissipation of 133.39 mW. Further, the encryption achieves near zero correlation with the average entropy of 15.17156 that ensures the statistical properties. In addition, the security framework requires 12.13 ms to encrypt a 256?×?256?×?16 DICOM image which results in the throughput of 86.44 Mbps. The proposed encryption resists the brute force attack and chosen plain text attack by achieving a very large span of keyspace.

     

Nanoparticles and Apparent Activation Energy of Portland Cement

Although chemically inert nanosize mineral fillers have been shown to modify early cement hydration kinetics, with the effects dependent upon usage rate, particle size, and dispersibility, the effects of such fillers on the “apparent activation energy” (E_a) of cement has not been previously examined. Here, cement E_a was calculated from isothermal calorimetry performed at different temperatures with two different types of fillers (i.e., titanium dioxide and limestone) using a linear method as well as a modified ASTM C1074 method. The use of both types of nanoparticles increased the rate of cement hydration as well as accelerated the reaction rate, due to heterogeneous nucleation effect, as previously demonstrated. E_a increased in the presence of nanosized fillers, demonstrating an increased temperature sensitivity of the filler‐cement composites relative to ordinary cement. These results show that chemically inert nanoparticles behave fundamentally differently compared with supplementary cementitious materials such as fly ash and silica fume which instead decrease temperature sensitivity. The increased temperature sensitivity could thus be used to modify and optimize the reaction mechanism and kinetics of cement hydration, especially to increase the rate of cement hydration, to decrease setting time, and to achieve faster strength gain accounting for higher or lower temperatures during curing.     

Assessment of binary and ternary blends of metakaolin and Class C fly ash for alkali-silica reaction mitigation in concrete

The potential for binary and ternary blends of metakaolin, with two differing particle size distributions, and Class C fly ash to mitigate alkali-silica reactions (ASR) with a highly reactive fine aggregate were evaluated using accelerated mortar bar test (AMBT) and concrete prism test (CPT) methods. Binary blends of metakaolin or Class C fly ash reduced expansion by 55–90% and 25–37% compared to the control, respectively. When incorporating metakaolin with a lower mean particle size, binary blends showed a greater reduction in expansion compared with Class C fly ash. Ternary blends of metakaolin and Class C fly ash resulted in a marginally higher expansion than binary blends incorporating the same amount of metakaolin. Correlation between AMBT and CPT results was good at high levels of expansion but poor for those compositions producing expansions near the acceptable limits corresponding to increased addition rates of metakaolin and/or Class C fly ash.