Prevalence of active HCV infection among the blood donors of Khyber Pakhtunkwa and FATA region of Pakistan and evaluation of the screening tests for anti-HCV

Hepatitis C is a fatal liver disease caused by the hepatitis C virus. In this study, blood donors, from various districts of the KPK province and the federally administered tribal area (FATA) of Pakistan were tested for anti-HCV antibodies and HCV RNA by ICT (Immuno-chromatographic test), ELISA and RT-PCR. Out of the 7148 blood donors, 224 (3.13%) were positive for anti-HCV antibodies by ICT, 135 (1.89%) by ELISA while 118 (1.65%) blood donors had active HCV infection as detected by RT-PCR. We suggest that ELISA should be used for anti-HCV screening in public sector hospitals and health care units

A Context-aware and Intelligent Framework for the Secure Mission Critical Systems

Recent technological advancements in pervasive systems have shown the poten-tial to address challenges in the military domain. Research developments in mili-tary-based mission-critical systems have refined a lot as in autopilot, sensing true target behavior, battle damage conditions, acquiring and manipulating command control information. However, the application of pervasive systems in the military domain is still evolving. In this paper, an intelligent framework has been pro-posed for mission-critical systems to incorporate advanced heterogeneous com-munication protocols; service-oriented layered structure and context-aware infor-mation manipulation. The proposed framework addresses the limitation of “time-space” constraints in Mission-critical systems that have been improved signifi-cantly. This improvement is courtesy to enhancing situation-aware tactical capa-bilities such as localization, decision significance, strategic span, strategic inten-tions, resource coordination and profiling concerning the situation. A comprehen-sive use case model has been presented for a typical battle-field scenario followed by a comparison of the proposed framework with existing techniques. It is evi-dent from experiments and analyses that the proposed framework provides more effective and seamless interaction with contextual resources to improve tactical capabilities. This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: A Context-aware and Intelligent Framework for the Secure Mission Critical Systems, which has been published in final form in Transactions on Emerging Telecommunications Technologies. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Use of Self-Archived Version

FANET: Smart city mobility off to a flying start with self‐organized drone‐based networks

Due to recent advancements in smart city traffic and transport monitoring industry 4.0 applications. Flying Ad-Hoc Networks (FANETs) ability to cover geographically large areas, makes it a suitable technology to address the challenges faced during remote areas traffic monitoring. The implementation of drone based FANETs have several advantages in remote traffic monitoring, including free air-to-air drone assisted communication zone and smart surveillance and security. The drone-based FANETs can be deployed within minutes without requiring physical infrastructure, making it suitable for mission critical applications in several areas of interests. Here a drone-based FANETs application for smart city remote traffic monitoring is presented while addressing several challenges including coverage of larger geographical area and data communication links between FANETs nodes. A FANET-inspired enhanced ACO algorithm that easily coped with drone assisted technology of FANETs is proposed to cover the large areas. Simulation results are presented to compare the proposed technique against different network lifetime and number of received packets. The presented results show that the proposed technique perform better compared to other state-of-the-art techniques

Minimization of total harmonic distortions of cascaded H-bridge multilevel inverter by utilizing bio inspired AI algorithm

Minimizing total harmonic distortion (THD) with less system complexity and computation time is a stringent constraint for many power systems. The multilevel inverter can have low THD when switching angles are selected at the fundamental frequency. For low-order harmonic minimization, selective harmonic elimination (SHE) is the most adopted and proficient technique but it involves the non-linear transcendental equations which are very difficult to solve analytically and numerically. This paper proposes a genetic algorithm (GA)-based optimization technique to minimize the THD of cascaded H-bridge multilevel inverter. The GA is the finest approach for solving such complex equations by obtaining optimized switching angles. The switching angles are calculated by the genetic algorithm by solving the nonlinear transcendental equations. This paper has modeled and simulated a five-level inverter in MATLAB Simulink. The THD comparison is carried out between step modulation method and optimization method. The results reveal that THD has been reduced from 17.88 to 16.74% while third and fifth harmonics have been reduced from 3.24%, 3.7% to 0.84% and 3.3%, respectively. The optimization method along with LC filter significantly improves the power quality providing a complete sinusoidal signal for varying load

Duplex PCR assay for the detection of avian adeno virus and chicken anemia virus prevalent in Pakistan

Avian Adeno viruses and Chicken Anemia Viruses cause serious economic losses to the poultry industry of Pakistan each year. Timely and efficient diagnosis of the viruses is needed in order to practice prevention and control strategies. In the first part of this study, we investigated broilers, breeder and Layer stocks for morbidity and mortality rates due to AAV and CAV infections and any co-infections by examining signs and symptoms typical of their infestation or post mortem examination. In the second part of the study, we developed a duplex PCR assay for the detection of AAV and CAV which is capable to simultaneously detect both the viral types prevalent in Pakistan with high sensitivity and 100% specificity

COMPARATIVE PRODUCTIVE PERFORMANCE OF BEETAL GOATS IN ANNUAL AND ACCELERATED SYSTEM

ABSTRACT Fifty adult Beetal goats were divided into two groups viz. accelerated kidding and annual kidding having 25 animals each. Each group was further divided into 5 sub-groups, 5 animals in each and considered as replicate. The accelerated kidding group produced three crops where as the annual breeding group produced two crops. Birth weight of kids produced in three different seasons of March-April, 2010; October-November, 2010 and June-July, 2011 were as 2.85±0.13, 3.32±0.40 and 3.29±0.31 kg as compared to kid crop produced in annual kidding system showing birth weight as 3.09±0.16 kg and 3.08±0.16 kg, respectively. The average body weight at 3 months of age of first, second and third kid crop in accelerated kidding system was noticed as 12.72±2.29, 11.31±0.98 and 11.44±1.60 kg, respectively as compared to 11.82 and 11.81 kg in annual kidding system. In order to minimize the gap of animal protein in human food, strategies like accelerated kidding may be adopted which might satisfy nutritional demands. The growth rate at 3 months age of two kid crops of annual and three kid crops of accelerated systems were observed as 97.00±2

Foliar applied proline and acetic acid improves growth and yield of wheat under salinity stress by improving photosynthetic pigments, physiological traits, antioxidant activities and nutrient uptake

Salinity stress (SS) is serious abiotic stress and a major limiting factor for crop productivity and global food security. In this context, the application of osmolytes is considered as an environmental friend approach to improve plant growth under SS. Thus, the present study was conducted to determine the impact of foliar applied proline (Pro) and acetic acid (AA) on growth, yield, physiological traits, photosynthetic pigments, ionic homeostasis and antioxidant activities of wheat under SS. The study contained SS levels 0, 6 and 12 dS m-1 and foliar spray of Pro and AA; water spray, Pro (75 mM), AA (15 mM) and AA (30 mM). The study was conducted in a completely randomized design with the factorial arrangement. Salinity stress significantly reduced wheat growth and yield, by decreasing relative water contents (-49.07%), photosynthetic pigments, free amino acids (FAA: -44.79%), total soluble proteins (TSP: -15.94%) and increasing the electrolyte leakage (EL: +27.28%), hydrogen peroxide (H2O2: +51.86%), and malondialdehyde (MDA: +36.91%) accumulation. The foliar spray of Pro and AA markedly improved the wheat growth and productivity through enhanced photosynthetic pigments, RWC, FAA, TSP, antioxidant activities (catalase: CAT, ascorbate peroxide: APX: peroxidase: POD), K+ and Ca2+ uptake and decreasing EL, MDA and H2O2 accumulation and restricted entry of toxic ions (Na+ and Cl-1).  Therefore, foliar application of AA and Pro effectively improves the growth and yield of wheat under SS by strengthening the antioxidant defense system, and maintaining ionic homeostasis and physiological performance

Tweet coupling: a social media methodology for clustering scientific publications

This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by Springer in Scientometrics on 18/05/2020, available online: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03499-1 The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version.© 2020, Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest, Hungary. We argue that classic citation-based scientific document clustering approaches, like co-citation or Bibliographic Coupling, lack to leverage the social-usage of the scientific literature originate through online information dissemination platforms, such as Twitter. In this paper, we present the methodology Tweet Coupling, which measures the similarity between two or more scientific documents if one or more Twitter users mention them in the tweet(s). We evaluate our proposal on an altmetric dataset, which consists of 3081 scientific documents and 8299 unique Twitter users. By employing the clustering approaches of Bibliographic Coupling and Tweet Coupling, we find the relationship between the bibliographic and tweet coupled scientific documents. Further, using VOSviewer, we empirically show that Tweet Coupling appears to be a better clustering methodology to generate cohesive clusters since it groups similar documents from the subfields of the selected field, in contrast to the Bibliographic Coupling approach that groups cross-disciplinary documents in the same cluster.The authors (Saeed-Ul Hassan & Mudassir Shabbir) were funded by the CIPL (National Center in Big Data and Cloud Computing (NCBC) grant, received from the Planning Commission of Pakistan, through Higher Education Commission (HEC) of Pakistan. This work was partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology under the projects TIN2017-89517-P and TIN2017-83445-P. Eugenio Martínez Cámara was supported by the Spanish Government Programme Juan de la Cierva Incorporación (IJC2018-036092-I).Published versio

Synthesis and characterization of cellulose/hydroxyapatite based dental restorative composites

The aim of this study was anin-situsynthesis of hydroxyapatite (HA) on cellulose fibers to be used as a new reinforcing agent for dental restorations. The microwave irradiation method was used for synthesis and the materials were characterized with analytical techniques. The prepared dental resin composites were mechanically tested by a universal testing machine and electrodynamic fatigue testing system. FTIR, XRD, SEM/EDS analysis confirmed the successful synthesis of HA on cellulose fibers. The Alamar blue biocompatibility assay showed more than 90% cell viability for the prepared cellulose/HA. The mechanical properties of resin composites improved with cellulose content from 30 wt.% to 50 wt.% in the polymer matrix. Substantially, increasing the cellulose/HA content from 40% to 50% improved the mechanical properties. The results suggested that HA could be successfully synthesized on cellulose fibers using microwave irradiation and contributed to improving the mechanical properties of dental resin composites