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Introduction: All applicants for work and/or residence in Abu Dhabi are screened for tuberculosis at the time of issuing or renewing their residence visa. The purpose of this study is to assess the prevalence of TB among visa applicants and the likelihood of testing positive among different subgroups. Methods:...

Approximately 17.3 million people died from cardiovascular disease (CVD) in 2008, and approximately 80% came from low- and middle-income countries. However, previous studies document poor research productivity related to CVD prevention and treatment in these countries between 1991 and 1996. The World...

In developing countries, public health professionals and scientists need targeted training and practical skills to respond to global emerging infectious disease threats. The Certificate in Emerging Infectious Disease Research was developed in 2008 to aid such professionals to respond to complex emerging...

Sepsis remains an unmet medical need, and sustained attempts by intensivists have indeed yielded an incremental improvement in outcomes. However, despite many attempts to introduce novel therapeutic molecules, there has been no step change in survival rates. Precision (or personalised) medicine (PM)...

The primary goal of the authors’ research related to the generation of narratives and haikus is to complete a mutual transformation mechanism between a narrative and a haiku. In this work, the authors propose a framework for transforming a narrative into haiku. The paper shows a basic method of generating...

Storing sensitive data in a centralized way can lead to significant loss, should the central node or networks links be defective as is the case in numerous countries, especially developing countries. Consequently, this paper proposes to deal with this problem by diluting sensitive data into an ecosystem...

On February 2020, the Diamond Princess Cruise, which left Japan, was obliged to stay at sea for 14 days-quarantine after it was found that a Hong Kong passenger had been diagnosed SARS-COV2 pneumonia after disembarking. As a result shocked the world, an outbreak of infection occurred on board; the number...

A new method of approaching sentiment classification is proposed where the likelihood of word embeddings to produce useful information from limited Twitter data is studied. The novelty of this work is in determining how short corpuses (taken from Twitter data) are polarized to multiple axes with respect...

Speech processing is quickly shifting toward affective computing, that requires handling emotions and modeling expressive speech synthesis and recognition. The latter task has been so far achieved by supervised classifiers. This implies a prior labeling and data preprocessing, with a cost that increases...

With the rapid development of high-throughput sequencing technology, massive microbial data has been accumulated. The understanding of the microbial data could help us to find the relationships between microbes and diseases. However, due to the high dimensionality, sparseness, and complexity of the data,...

This paper presents the synthesis of Barium Oxide Nanoparticles (BaO-NPs) on a large-scale by a simple and cost-effective co-precipitation method. The as-synthesized BaO-NPs were characterized in aspects of their structural, morphological, compositional, and optical properties. X-ray diffraction was...

In this study, we quantitatively assessed the effect of China’s zero-tariff treatment on export diversification in beneficiary countries in Africa. We assessed its overall effect and its effect on particular industries and regions. The results showed that, overall, zero-tariff treatment significantly...

Central pulse pressure (cPP) is increasingly investigated as possible independent predictor of cardiovascular risk and carotid pulse pressure (carPP) can be used as a surrogate marker of cPP. Despite its importance, carPP measurement remains challenging in clinical practice. The aim of this study was...

Background: Uptake of 18F-sodium fluoride (18F-NaF) in the aortic wall may reflect metabolically active areas of calcification, an important predictor of cardiovascular morbidity and mortality when detected by computed tomography (CT). The aim of this project was to determine if 18F-NaF uptake in the...

Introduction: Fully automated cuff-based devices have been developed for the assessment of arterial stiffness via pulse wave velocity (PWV) measurement, such as the VaSera device (Fukuda Denshi). To date, measurements were confined to the heart-to-ankle segment, yielding PWV and stiffness indices that...

Background and aim: The degree of systolic pressure amplification (SPamp) from aorta to brachial artery depends on a number of variables including age, gender, heart rate and arterial stiffness. It is admitted that central systolic blood pressure (cSBP) cannot be predicted with sufficient accuracy from...

This paper addresses a robust adaptive control problem of non-square nonlinear systems with unmeasurable states. The systems are assumed to be multi-input/multi-output subject to dynamical uncertainties and external disturbances. The approach is studied for two cases, i.e., underactuated and over-actuated...

Explicit formulas are given for the multi-peakon-antipeakon solutions of the Camassa­ Holm equation, and a detailed analysis is made of both short-term and long-term aspects of the interaction between a single peakon and single anti-peakon.

We study the differential forms over the frame bundle of the based loop space. They are stochastics in the sense that we put over this frame bundle a probability measure. In order to understand the curvatures phenomena which appear when we look at the Lie bracket of two horizontal vector fields, we impose...

We describe experiments that have been conducted to investigate the velocity field in a solitary water wave. The horizontal and vertical velocity components were measured. The experimental results show that the horizontal velocity component is monotonically increasing with the distance to the wave crest...

Objective: Given the importance of knowing the effects of blood flow restriction (BFR) plus exercise training (BFR training) on the cardiovascular system, present study conducted to determine the effect of combination of BFR with low intensity endurance exercise on aorta of old rats. Methods: Animal...

Background: Computed tomography angiography (CTA) is a standard tool for investigation of the abdominal aorta diseases. Currently, there are only a few published scientific articles devoted to the study of the infrarenal aortic size without pathology. The aim of the current work was to examine the indicators...

The routine assessment and monitoring of hypertension may benefit from the evaluation of arterial pulse pressure (PP) at more central locations (e.g. the aorta) rather solely at the brachial artery. Pulse Wave Ultrasound Manometry (PWUM) was previously developed by our group to provide direct, noninvasive...

Purpose: With the advances in the new image techniques and 3D modeling, angiography computed tomography (A-CT) has became a very useful image for studying vessels. Renal artery (RA) variations are common, and have a clinical relevance in pre-operative planning. There are several descriptive studies made...

Increased arterial stiffness, as measured by pulse wave velocity, is increasingly recognised as an important predictor of future cardiovascular events. At present, the mechanisms leading to stiffening of large arteries and the processes underlying the association between arterial stiffness and cardiovascular...

Experimental results of a biomimetic silicon synaptic circuit capable of generating both excitatory and inhibitory postsynaptic currents are presented. The generated synaptic current takes into account its first-order dependence on the instantaneous value of the postsynaptic membrane potential, with...

Background: Arterial compliance is pressure-dependent due to the nonhomogeneous composition of the arterial wall. Wall distending pressure varies within each cardiac cycle, thus arterial compliance is dynamic and time-varying within any given cycle. As compliance is a component of the pulsatile load...

Arteriosclertic lesions leading to increased stiffnes of the walls. The goal of the research was to estimate changes in the mechanical properties of femoral artery in swine with experimentally induced arteriosclerotic changes by western type diet. Methods: 32 white female pigs (40 kg), were divided...

During aging, systolic blood pressure (Ps) continuously increases over time, whereas diastolic pressure (Pd) first increases and then slightly decreases after middle-age. These pressure changes are usually explained by changes of the arterial system alone (increase in arterial stiffness and vascular...

Background: The relative content and loading of collagen and elastin in the arterial wall determine in vivo longitudinal pre-stretch. Assessment of arterial distensibility at varying longitudinal pre-stretch could improve characterisation of arterial collagen-elastin matrix properties. We introduce a...

Many physiological indexes and algorithms based on pulse wave analysis have been suggested in order to better understand the physiology of arterial hemodynamics (e.g. pulse wave velocity, transfer functions for central blood pressure derivation). Because these tools are most often computed from hemodynamic...

Several sub-disciplines of engineering are driven by the researchers’ aim of providing positive change to the society through their engineering. These researchers are challenged by the traditional research method of experimental research with a waterfall model which demands clearly defined project definition...

This paper proposes a reaching movement model for the generation of desired trajectories within a myoelectric prosthesis training system. First, an experiment was performed to observe reaching movements with a non-impaired subject and a myoelectric prosthesis user. Reaching movements made by the prosthesis...

In certain types of Internet applications, multicasting with Quality of Service (QoS) optimizations are required on both the end-to-end delay from the source to the destinations, as well as the difference in the end-to-end delay between the destinations. Examples of these applications include video-conferencing,...

The usage of well-tried software design patterns and application frameworks is often encountered in Mission and Safety Critical Applications development due to the high stakes involved in the case of failures. To increase reliability, some frameworks attempt to separate the implementation of business...

Error recovery in robotic tasks is explored to enable robots to be used for complicated tasks. The authors’ error recovery processes make use of the concepts of both task stratification and error classification. In this paper, the reusability of planning in error recovery is verified by using the typical...

A simple and general approach for calculating the elliptic finite-gap solutions of the Korteweg-de Vries (KdV) equation is proposed. Our approach is based on the use of the finite-gap equations and the general representation of these solutions in the form of rational functions of the elliptic Weierstrass...

We apply singularity analysis to a caricature of the simplified multistrain model of Castillo-Chavez and Feng (J Math Biol 35 (1997) 629–656) for the transmission of tuberculosis and the coupled two-stream vector-based model of Feng and Velasco- Hern ?andez (J Math Biol 35 (1997) 523–544) to identify...

We consider a lattice driven diffusive system withUq(su(2)) invariance in the bulk. Within the matrix product states approach the stationary probability distribution is expressed as a matrix product state with respect to a quadratic algebra. Boundary processes amount to the appearance of parameter dependent...

The contribution of information and communications technology (ICT) to economic and productivity growth has traditionally been difficult to calculate because of the complex relationship between them, but this relationships is now better understood with ICT now accepted as a transforming and revolutionary...

In recent years, hospitals around the world have started to invest more heavily in business-to-business (B2B) electronic commerce (e-commerce) in an attempt to control their escalating operating costs as well as to maximize their revenue. However, relatively little research has been conducted to examine...

Since the global financial crisis in 2008, the Chinese government has invested 4000 billion to maintain the economic growth. And the investment made the inflation became more seriously. However, the investment has led to high inflation rate. To fight inflation, it is important to understand the effects...

With growing concerns about international spread of disease and expanding use of early disease detection surveillance methods, the field of syndromic surveillance has received increased attention over the last decade. The purpose of this article is to clarify the various meanings that have been assigned...

Although evidence suggests sport and recreation are powerful contributors to worldwide public health, sizable gender differences persist. It is unknown whether country characteristics moderate gender differences across countries. The primary purpose of this study was to examine if countries’ levels of...

Introduction: Current guidelines for management of thoracic aortic disease base clinical decision-making primarily on the aortic size. The risk of serious complications in genetically-triggered aortic disease is influenced by many other factors, currently not taken into account by the guidelines. Methods:...

Objective: To describe the nature, incidence, and therapeutic consequence of hepatic arterial changes seen following transcatheter arterial chemoembolization (TACE) for hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). Methods: In this retrospective study, 46 patients with HCC underwent ≥ 2 TACE treatment sessions between...

Atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease is the current leading cause of death in industrialized countries. The vast majority of acute cardiovascular events (50–70%) are ascribed to thrombosis following rupture of a vulnerable plaque. Therefore there is an urgent need to discern vulnerable, unstable plaques...

Objectives: The aim of this study was to compare the diagnostic accuracy of Transthoracic Echocardiography (TTE) in assessing Bicuspid Aortic Valve (BAV) morphology. Methods: Case notes of 408 patients (>18 years old) undergoing elective Aortic Valve (AV) surgery over a 2-year period were retrospectively...