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In this study, the synchronized response in the chaotic cellular neural network for a grayscale visual stimulus was investigated in the viewpoint of neural coding. Simple gradation patterns were used as visual stimuli and the synchronized response was analyzed by the correlation of the spike firing times....

In this paper an efficient estimation procedure to estimate the current population mean in two-occasion successive sampling has been developed. An exponential regression type estimator of current population mean is proposed and corresponding optimum replacement strategy has been suggested. The superiority...

We give a hierarchy of many-parameter families of maps of the interval [0, 1] with an invariant measure and using the measure, we calculate Kolmogorov­Sinai entropy of these maps analytically. In contrary to the usual one-dimensional maps these maps do not possess period doubling or period-n-tupling...

The increment of the number of activities related to recycling and recovery of products are determined mostly, by the legal regulations, but also, by the needs of users. As a result, there is a large quantites of materials and products that have been returned from the market for a specific reason. This...

Since the turn of the millennium many African economies have been reintegrated into the world economy on a positive note and experienced substantial economic growth. This growth has primarily been concentrated in commodity exports. The central question facing African economies is how to use economic...

Purpose of review: Continuous wave near infrared spectroscopy (CW NIRS) provides non-invasive technology to measure relative changes in oxy- and deoxy-haemoglobin in a dynamic environment. This allows determination of local skeletal muscle O2 saturation, muscle oxygen consumption ( V˙O2 ) and blood...

This paper experimentally evaluates the parallel multi-dimensional indexing system indexing data by using several multi-dimensional indexes and retrieving required data from them in parallel. A constant number of data are indexed into a sub-index. The sub-index is inserted into an index in a computational...

Using a concept of strong necessary conditions we derive the Bogomolny decomposition for systems of two generalized elliptic and parabolic nonlinear partial differential equations (NPDE) of the second order. The generalization means that the equation coefficients depend on the field variables. According...

Background: Increased arterial stiffness caused by elevated Blood Pressure (BP) can be indicated by the Cardio-ankle Vascular Index (CAVI). However, the relationship between arterial stiffness and BP is complex. In addition, changes in BP may contribute to increased risk of cardiovascular disease associated...

Beside cold-start and sparsity, developing incremental algorithms emerge as interesting research to recommendation system in real-data environment. While hybrid system research is insufficient due to the complexity in combining various source of each single such as content-based or collaboration filtering,...

Aspect level sentiment analysis aims at identifying sentiment polarity towards specific aspect terms in a given sentence. Most methods based on deep learning integrate Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) and its variants with the attention mechanism to model the influence of different context words on sentiment...

Objective: Primary arterial hypertenion for teen has caused a lot of debate today, there is too much uncertainty about platelet functional changes in patients with PAH. The objective was to evaluate platelet activity in healthy and suffering from PAH groups of 17–18 year old boys. Materials and methods:...

Objective: Primary arterial hypertension (PAH) – a multifactorial disease. Its etiology, especially in children, still causes a lot of questions and diagnostic tests are not common in clinical practice. Even less is known of the variation in platelet activity in adolescents with PAH, this study was the...

Background: A negative aortic-brachial stiffness gradient (ab-SG), whereby aortic pulse wave velocity (aPWV)≥brachial PWV (bPWV) predicts mortality independent of aPWV in dialysis patients. Patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) have increased risk of renal damage and exhibit haemodynamic abnormalities...

Office central blood pressure (cBP) have been shown to better predict cardiovascular events than standard peripheral pressure. With Vasotens software and BPLab monitor (OOO Petr Telegin, Russia) is now possible to estimate central pressure over 24h. However to date, no data have shown that 24h monitoring...

Gamma mixture models have wide applications in hydrology, finance and reliability. Parameter estimation in this class of models is a challenging task owing to the complexity associated with the model structure. In this paper, a novel approach is proposed to estimate the parameters of Gamma mixture models...

This study aimed to explore challenges underlying seniors’ adoption of assistive robots. A systematic literature review involved three stages: the first two stages focused on identifying and selecting relevant papers, followed by extracting and analyzing data from selected papers. Analysis revealed several...

Mining frequent itemsets over transaction data streams is critical for many applications, such as wireless sensor networks, analysis of retail market data, and stock market predication. The sliding window method is an important way of mining frequent itemsets over data streams. The speed of the sliding...

Bi-level decision-making techniques aim to deal with decentralized management problems that feature interactive decision entities distributed throughout a bi-level hierarchy. A challenge in handling bi-level decision problems is that various uncertainties naturally appear in decision-making process....

Although Internet addiction and fatigue are issues of concern among university students, the association between these phenomena has not been examined. In a unique contribution to the literature, this study examined if Internet addiction differentially influenced mental and physical fatigue in a sample...

We present the use of complex Lie symmetries in variational problems by defining a complex Lagrangian and considering its Euler-Lagrange ordinary differential equation. This Lagrangian results in two real “Lagrangians” for the corresponding system of partial differential equations, which satisfy Euler-Lagrange...

The objective of this research is to establish whether greater deployment of resource alignments leads to more satisfactory alliance. Two research questions are proposed: (1) do organizations which use supplementarity alignment more likely to be satisfied with their alliance activities compared with...

In order to develop highly reliable software in a cost-effective manner, it is necessary to manage software reliability at the early test phases. Most of developers at those phases perform a test and debug activities together. In this paper, we propose a new reliability estimation model to manage the...

Propolis is a lipophilic sticky substance collected by bees that has been used by humans for centuries. Owing to its healing, antioxidant, and other medicinal properties, its chemical composition has been widely studied. Most pharmacological properties of propolis have been attributed to its phenols...

The purpose of this study is to simulate the blood flow in a 2D axisymmetric model for the aorta assisted with a type of cardiac assist device in which the balloon part is surrounding the ascending aorta and can pump the blood flow by its inflation/deflation. The blood flow and von Mises stress in the...

Purpose: To evaluate whether the acute effects of aerobic or isometric exercise on arterial stiffness parameters differ between boys and men. Methods: Fourteen boys (10 ± 2 years, BMI 17.8 ± 1.9 kg/m2) and nine men (26 ± 3 years, BMI 24.4 ± 3.3 kg/m2) completed maximal aerobic and isometric exercise...

Introduction: p38 mitogen-activated protein kinases (MAPK) are key signalling molecules in cellular responses to external stresses, regulate pro-inflammatory cytokine expression and are implicated in the inflammatory pathogenesis of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) and atherosclerosis. The...

Antenna parameter optimization using S-shaped metamaterial embedded in antenna substrate at high frequency (THz) is elucidated in this paper. Upon incorporation of proposed metamaterials’ array inside the antenna substrate, bandwidth of antenna increases by 770 GHz and directivity by about 11%. Results...

The African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank) was established in 1993 as a crisis management institution on the heels of the Latin American debt crisis of the 1980s. It has since grown into Africa’s foremost regional integration bank, and is playing a critical role in supporting the implementation of...

Central blood pressure is increasingly considered to be more predictive of cardiovascular events than peripheral pressure. Central systolic pressure (cSBP) can be estimated from the late systolic shoulder (pSBP2) of the radial pulse waveform. The Omron HEM-9000AI utilizes this technique to non-invasively...

Multiple splenic artery aneurysms in a patient with idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura: A case report, brief literature review and discussion.

The role of ventricular–arterial hemodynamic interaction in the occurrence of arterial dissection and rupture in vascular Ehlers–Danlos syndrome (vEDS) is unknown. We recently introduced an ultrasound-based method to extract, from common carotid artery (CCA) diameter waveforms, central arterial properties...

Automatic image semantic annotation is of great importance for image retrieval, therefore, this paper aims to recommend tags for social images according to user preferences. With the rapid development of the image-sharing community, such as Flickr, the image resources of the social network with rich...

Community pharmacists are the most accessible healthcare professionals. Recently, the increasing trend of tramadol and gabapentinoids prescription has become a global problem, with a high risk of misuse and abuse. This study mainly assessed the knowledge and practice of Lebanese pharmacists regarding...

Background: Interleukin-6 (IL-6) was considered to be with the severity and mortality in COVID-19 patients, which implies a potential therapeutic target for treatment. We aimed to evaluate the safety and initial efficacy of Tocilizumab treatment for COVID-19 patients. Methods: In the retrospective study,...

We are concerned with the probability that all the eigenvalues of a unitary ensemble with the weight function w(x,t)=xαe−x−tx, x ∈ [0, ∞), α > −1, t ≥ 0, are greater than s. This probability is expressed as the quotient of Dn(s, t) and its value at s = 0, where Dn(s, t) denotes the determinant of...

Test suite reusability measurement is important to obtain the value of reusability as the degree of effectiveness of reused test suite. The measurement in this experiment considers not only the frequency of the successful test suite to examine different objects but also the code coverage as the criteria...

Background: Little is known about gender differences among patients undergoing percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) for chronic total occlusion (CTO). Methods: A total of 242 patients underwent 255 procedures PCI of CTO in our center between January 2011 and January 2015. Demographic data, procedural...

The recognized reference method for endothelial function assessment is brachial artery diameter echo-tracking during flow mediated dilation (FMD) induced by reactive hyperaemia (RH). From the Mons-Korteweg equation, FMD should also reduce upper limb pulse wave velocity (PWV). The aim of our study was...

Objectives: The transfemoral approach is commonly used for carotid artery stenting (CAS) however in cases of severe peripheral vascular disease or unfavorable aortic arch anatomy, the transradial access remains a viable alternative. We report a series of patients with aorto-iliac disease or unsuccessful...

Objectives: Transradial vertebral artery (VA) angioplasty might be a viable alternative to the transfemoral approach in cases of peripheral artery disease or anatomical variations of the aortic arch. The purpose of our study was to evaluate the safety and efficacy of transradial stenting of symptomatic...

The estimation methods for Twitter user’s attributes typically require a vast amount of labeled data. Therefore, an efficient way is to tag the unlabeled data and add it to the set. We applied the self-training SVM as a semi-supervised method for age estimation and introduced Plat scaling as the unlabeled...

The identification of the Shandong loess provenance adjacent to the floodplain of the Yellow River external the Loess Plateau is very important for revealing the path of dust accumulation and paleoenvironment, which has aroused widespread concern. In this study, the clay-size(

Realizations of four dimensional Lie algebras as vector fields in the plane are explcitly constructed. Fourth order ordinary differential equations which admit such Lie symmetry algebras are derived. The route to their integration is described.

The Lie point symmetries associated with a number of (2 + 1)-dimensional generalizations of soliton equations are investigated. These include the Niznik ­ Novikov ­ Veselov equation and the breaking soliton equation, which are symmetric and asymmetric generalizations respectively of the KDV equation,...

Assessment of strategic R&D projects is in essence a multiple-attribute decision analysis (MADA) prob- lem. In such problems, qualitative information with subjective judgments of ambiguity is often provided by people together with quantitative data that may be imprecise or incomplete. A few approaches...

Sub-Saharan Africa is the region where firms face the greatest hurdles when it comes to cross-border trading. This paper examines how these firms, relative to their counterparts in the developing world, would respond to changes in the trade environment as a result of trade facilitation reforms. Using...

Kazakhstan is one of the countries with higher-than-average smoking prevalence and tobacco-related mortality. Intention to quit is a key step toward smoking cessation, yet has not been studied in Kazakhstan. This study explored prevalence and correlates of intention to quit among smokers in Kazakhstan....

Facing the availability of the new generation of quadrivalent meningococcal conjugate vaccines (Menveo®, Menactra® and others pending for license) and their recent implementation in Saudi Arabia, experts from 11 countries of the Middle East region met at a “Meningococcal Leadership Forum” (MLF), which...