24 research outputs found

    Overview on Blood Transfusion-Transmitted Diseases

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    As it is important for the Blood transfusion to be extremely safe, some measures have to be taken long safeguarded the blood supply from the major transfusion transmissible diseases (TTIs).  The risk of transfusion-transmitted infection (TTI) rises with the number of donors exposed, and the effects of TTI are frequently more severe in immune compromised people. TTIs (hepatitis B virus [HBV], HIV, and hepatitis C virus [HCV]) are examples of typical transfusion-transmitted infectious agents. As a result of the gradual application of nucleic acid-amplification technology (NAT) screening for HIV, HCV, and HBV, the residual risk of infected window-period donations has been minimized. Nonetheless, infections emerge far more frequently than is commonly acknowledged, needing ongoing surveillance and individual assessment of transfusion-associated risk. Although there is a constant need to monitor present dangers owing to established TTI, the ongoing issues in blood safety are mostly related to surveillance for developing agents, as well as the creation of quick reaction systems when such agents are detected

    Abstracts from the 3rd International Genomic Medicine Conference (3rd IGMC 2015)

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    Strategy to combat obesity and to promote physical activity in Arab countries

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    Abdulrahman O Musaiger1, Hazzaa M Al Hazzaa2, Aayed Al-Qahtani3, Jalila Elati4, Jasem Ramadan5, Nebal A AboulElla6, Najat Mokhtar7, Hashem A Kilani81Arab Center for Nutrition, Bahrain; 2,3King Saud University, Saudi Arabia, 4National Institute of Nutrition, Tunisia; 5University of Kuwait, Kuwait; 6National Nutrition Institute, Egypt; 7Ibn Tofail University, Morocco; 8Sultan Qaboos University, OmanAbstract: Obesity has become a major public health problem in the Arab countries, creating a health and economic burden on these countries’ government services. There is an urgent need to develop a strategy for prevention and control of obesity. The third Arab Conference on Obesity and Physical Activity was held in Bahrain in January 2010, and proposed the Strategy to Combat Obesity and Promote Physical Activity in Arab Countries. This strategy provides useful guidelines for each Arab country to prepare its own strategy or plan of action to prevent and control obesity. The strategy focused on expected outcomes, objectives, indicators to measure the objectives, and action needs for 9 target areas: child-care centers for preschool children, schools, primary health care, secondary care, food companies, food preparation institutes, media, public benefit organizations, and the workplace. Follow-up and future developments of this strategy were also included.Keywords: obesity, physical activity, strategy, Arab countrie

    NLP-Based Application for Analyzing Private and Public Banks Stocks Reaction to News Events in the Indian Stock Exchange

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    This is an effort to analyze the reaction of stock prices of Indian public and private banks listed in NSE and BSE to the announcement of seven best case news events. Several recent studies have analyzed the correlation between stock prices and news announcements; however, there is no evidence on how private and public sector Indian bank stocks react to important news events independently. We examine these features by concentrating on a sample of banking and government news events. We classify these news events to create a group of negative and a group of positive tone of announcements (sentiments). The statistical results show that the negative banking news announcements had a one-month impact on private banks, with statistically significant negative mean CARs. However, with highly statistically substantial negative mean CARs, the influence of the negative banking news announcements on public banks was observed for two months after the news was published. Furthermore, the influence of the positive banking news on private banks persisted a month after the news was published. Positive banking news events had an influence on public banks for five days after they were published. The study concludes that public bank stocks react more to negative news announcements than positive news announcements in the same manner as the sentimental polarity of the news announcements as compared to private bank stocks. First, we retrieved the news articles published in prominent online financial news portals between 2017 and 2020, and the seven major news events were extracted and classified using multi-class text classification. The Random Forest classifier produced a significant accuracy of 94% with pre-trained embeddings of DistilBERT, a neural network model, which outperformed the traditional feature representation technique, TF-IDF. The training data for the classifier were balanced using the SMOTE sampling technique

    An Efficient Method for Document Correction Based on Checkerboard Calibration Pattern

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    Portable digital devices such as PDAs and camera phones are the easiest and most widely used methods to preserve and collect information. Capturing a document image using this method always has warping issues, especially when capturing pages from a book and rolled-up documents. In this article, we propose an effective method to correct the warping of the captured document image. The proposed method uses a checkerboard calibration pattern to calculate the world and image points. A radial distortion algorithm is used to handle the warping problem based on the computed image and world points. The proposed method obtained an error rate of 3% using a document de-warping dataset (CBDAR 2007). The proposed method achieved a high level of quality compared with other previous methods. Our method fixes the problem of warping in document images acquired with different levels of complexity, such as poor lighting, low quality, and different layouts

    Energy-Aware Live VM Migration Using Ballooning in Cloud Data Center

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    The demand for digitization has inspired organizations to move towards cloud computing, which has increased the challenge for cloud service providers to provide quality service. One of the challenges is energy consumption, which can shoot up the cost of using computing resources and has raised the carbon footprint in the atmosphere; therefore, it is an issue that it is imperative to address. Virtualization, bin-packing, and live VM migration techniques are the key resolvers that have been found to be efficacious in presenting sound solutions. Thus, in this paper, a new live VM migration algorithm, live migration with efficient ballooning (LMEB), is proposed; LMEB focuses on decreasing the size of the data that need to be shifted from the source to the destination server so that the total energy consumption of migration can be reduced. A simulation was performed with a specific configuration of virtual machines and servers, and the results proved that the proposed algorithm could trim down energy usage by 18%, migration time by 20%, and downtime by 20% in comparison with the existing approach of live migration with ballooning (LMB)

    DPb-MOPSO: A Dynamic Pareto bi-level Multi-objective Particle Swarm Optimization Algorithm

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    Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) system based on the distributed architecture over multiple sub-swarms is very efficient for static multi-objective optimization but has not been considered for solving dynamic multi-objective problems (DMOPs). Tracking the most effective solutions over time and ensuring good exploitation and exploration are the main challenges of solving DMOP. This study proposes a Dynamic Pareto bi-level Multi-Objective Particle Swarm Optimization (DPb-MOPSO) algorithm including two parallel optimization levels. At the first level, all solutions are managed in a single search space. When a dynamic change is successfully detected in the objective values, the Pareto ranking operator is used to enable multiple sub-swarm’ subdivisions and processing which drives the second level of enhanced exploitation. A dynamic handling strategy based on random detectors is used to track the changes in the objective function due to time-varying parameters. A response strategy consisting in reevaluating all unimproved solutions and replacing them with newly generated ones is also implemented. The DPb-MOPSO system is tested on DMOPs with different types of time-varying Pareto Optimal Set (POS) and Pareto Optimal Front (POF). Inverted generational distance (IGD), mean inverted generational distance (MIGD), hypervolume difference (HVD), Robust IGD (RIGD), and Robust General Distance (RGD) metrics are used to assess the DPb-MOPSO performance. Quantitative results are analyzed using Friedman’s analysis of variance, and the Wilcoxon sum ranks test, while the stability is analyzed using Lyapunov’s theorem. The DPb-MOPSO is more robust than several dynamic multi-objective evolutionary algorithms in solving 21 complex problems over a range of changes in both the POS and POF. On IGD and HVD, DPb-MOPSO can solve 8/13 and 8/13 of the 13 UDF and ZJZ functions with moderate changes. DPb-MOPSO can resolve 7/8 FDA and DMOP benchmarks with severe changes to the MIGD, and 6/8 with moderate changes. DPb-MOPSO assumes 7/8, 6/8, and 5/8 for solving FDA, and dMOP functions on IGD and 6/8, 5/8, and 5/8 on HVD metrics considering severe, moderate, and slight environmental changes respectively. Also, it is the winner for solving 8 DMOPs based on RIGD, and RGD metrics

    Chemical Composition of Tagetes patula Flowers Essential Oil and Hepato-Therapeutic Effect against Carbon Tetrachloride-Induced Toxicity (In-Vivo)

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    The liver is a crucial organ among body organs due to its wide functions, in particular, detoxification and metabolism. Exposure to detrimental chemicals or viral infections may provoke liver dysfunction and ultimately induce liver tissue damage. Finding natural substances for liver disease treatment to overcome the conventional treatments’ side effects has attracted the attention of researchers worldwide. Our current work was conducted to investigate the hepato-therapeutic activities of essential oil (EO) isolated from Tagetes patula flowers. EO was extracted using the hydro-distillation (HD) technique and its chemical composition was identified by GC/MS. Then, the hepatic treatment potential of extracted EO was evaluated in vivo against CCL4 in rats. HD of T. patula flowers yielded highly chemical constituents of EO along with significant antioxidant potential. A coherent molecular network was fashioned via the Global Natural Products Social Molecular Networking (GNPS) to visualize the essential components and revealed that the sesquiterpene (E)-β-caryophyllene was the most predominant volatile constituent which accounted for 24.1%. The treatment of CCL4 led to significant induced oxidative stress markers malonaldehyde, total protein, and non-protein sulfhydryl, as well as elevated serum aminotransferase, gamma-glutamyl transferase, alkaline phosphatase, and bilirubin. In addition, it disrupted the level of lipid profile. The post-treatment using T. patula EO succeeded in relieving all toxic effects of CCl4 and recuperating the histopathological signs induced by CCL4. Silymarin was used as a standard hepatoprotective agent. The obtained results demonstrated that the extracted EO exerted high protective activities against the toxicity of CCL4. Moreover, the T. patula flowers EO can be used as a natural remedy to relieve many contemporary liver diseases related to oxidative stress

    Perceptions of Parents towards COVID-19 Vaccination in Children, Aseer Region, Southwestern Saudi Arabia

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    Vaccines are an important part of the COVID-19 pandemic response plan. This cross-sectional study aims to assess the attitude and perception levels of parents toward COVID-19 vaccines for children aged 0–18 years in the Aseer region of Saudi Arabia. Data were analyzed using SPSS version 16.0. Out of a total of 1463 parents, 30.6% assumed that COVID-19 vaccination may be more dangerous for children than adults. Nearly 36.5% parents don’t have any concern about children’s vaccination. About 12.8% of children have not received the vaccination, 55% of parents have some sort of hesitation and 32.2% of parents did not hesitate before vaccinating their children against COVID-19. Only 15.4% of parents expect that the COVID-19 vaccine affects their child’s genes. About 23.4% parents strongly agreed and 35.1% agreed about the importance of getting their children vaccinated. About 22.1% of parents strongly agreed and 33.3% agreed regarding their willingness to get their children vaccinated to prevent Coronavirus disease. More than 80% of parents recommended rushing to receive the COVID-19 vaccine. Health professionals and policymakers should implement and support strategies to ensure children are vaccinated for COVID-19. They also need to educate parents and families regarding childhood vaccination
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