A review on analysis of ferrocement panels

Ferrocement is a highly versatile form of reinforced concrete made up of wire mesh, sand, water, and cement, which possesses unique qualities of strength and serviceability. It displays a series of advantages compared to reinforced concrete. Now a days ferrocement is widely used in engineering application due to high performance regards to the resistance to extension, resistance to impact, ductility. Numerous studies were conducted to understand the behaviour of ferrocement panels. This paper presents the review of studies conducted about the behaviour of ferrocement panel under static, dynamic, cyclic loading. Keywords- Ferrocement, cyclic loading, flexural behaviour, precast ferrocement wall, dynamic analysis, static analysi

Management of Cardiopulmonary Complications of Cirrhosis

Advanced portal hypertension accompanying end-stage liver disease results in an altered milieu due to inadequate detoxification of blood from splanchnic circulation by the failing liver. The portosystemic shunts with hepatic dysfunction result in an increased absorption and impaired neutralisation of the gastrointestinal bacteria and endotoxins leads to altered homeostasis with multiorgan dysfunction. The important cardiopulmonary complications are cirrhotic cardiomyopathy, hepatopulmonary syndrome, portopulmonary hypertension, and right-sided hydrothorax

Probabilistic XGBoost Threshold Classification with Autoencoder for Credit Card Fraud Detection

Due to the imbalanced data of outnumbered legitimate transactions than the fraudulent transaction, the detection of fraud is a challenging task to find an effective solution. In this study, autoencoder with probabilistic threshold shifting of XGBoost (AE-XGB) for credit card fraud detection is designed. Initially, AE-XGB employs autoencoder the prevalent dimensionality reduction technique to extract data features from latent space representation. Then the reconstructed lower dimensional features utilize eXtreame Gradient Boost (XGBoost), an ensemble boosting algorithm with probabilistic threshold to classify the data as fraudulent or legitimate. In addition to AE-XGB, other existing ensemble algorithms such as Adaptive Boosting (AdaBoost), Gradient Boosting Machine (GBM), Random Forest, Categorical Boosting (CatBoost), LightGBM and XGBoost are compared with optimal and default threshold. To validate the methodology, we used IEEE-CIS fraud detection dataset for our experiment. Class imbalance and high dimensionality characteristics of dataset reduce the performance of model hence the data is preprocessed and trained. To evaluate the performance of the model, evaluation indicators such as precision, recall, f1-score, g-mean and Mathews Correlation Coefficient (MCC) are accomplished. The findings revealed that the performance of the proposed AE-XGB model is effective in handling imbalanced data and able to detect fraudulent transactions with 90.4% of recall and 90.5% of f1-score from incoming new transactions

Humoral Immune Response in Tuberculous Pleuritis

Tuberculous pleuritis is a good human model to understand the local and protective immune response against tuberculosis, due to the self-limitedness of the disease. Although the cellular immune response has been well characterised in tuberculous pleurisy, much less is known about the humoral immune response operating at the site of infection. To understand the humoral immune response, B cells were enumerated in peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMC) and pleural fluid mononuclear cells (PFMC) of tuberculous (TP) and non-tuberculous pleuritis patients (NTP). The levels of IgG, IgA and IgM antibodies for PPD, culture filtrate (CF) and sonicate antigens (Son Ag) were assessed in plasma (BL) and pleural fluid (PF) and a western blot was carried out with the CF antigen. The percentage of CD19+B-cells was similar in PBMC and PFMC of TP patients but was significantly lower in PFMCs of NTP patients. The IgG levels for PPD and CF antigens were higher in PF of TP than NTP patients. The antigen recognition patterns did not differ in plasma and pleural fluid of the same patient in both groups pointing out the passive diffusion of the plasma to the pleura. The antigens 25, 31, 33, 70, 110, 124 and 132 kDa were recognized exclusively by the TP patients. Thus our study showed that the local humoral response in TP did not differ from the systemic response. However, the humoral response differed in TP patients when compared to NTP patients

In vitro cytokine response to tuberculosis

The outcome of any infectious disease is mainly dependent upon the interplay of the cytokines. These cytokines are grouped into two: Type land Type 2 cytokines secreted by Th1 and Th2 cells that contribute to the pro-inflammatory and anti-inflammatory responses respectively

A transform of complementary aspects with applications to entropic uncertainty relations

Even though mutually unbiased bases and entropic uncertainty relations play an important role in quantum cryptographic protocols they remain ill understood. Here, we construct special sets of up to 2n+1 mutually unbiased bases (MUBs) in dimension d=2^n which have particularly beautiful symmetry properties derived from the Clifford algebra. More precisely, we show that there exists a unitary transformation that cyclically permutes such bases. This unitary can be understood as a generalization of the Fourier transform, which exchanges two MUBs, to multiple complementary aspects. We proceed to prove a lower bound for min-entropic entropic uncertainty relations for any set of MUBs, and show that symmetry plays a central role in obtaining tight bounds. For example, we obtain for the first time a tight bound for four MUBs in dimension d=4, which is attained by an eigenstate of our complementarity transform. Finally, we discuss the relation to other symmetries obtained by transformations in discrete phase space, and note that the extrema of discrete Wigner functions are directly related to min-entropic uncertainty relations for MUBs.Comment: 16 pages, 2 figures, v2: published version, clarified ref [30

Subregional Hippocampal Thickness Abnormalities in Older Adults with a History of Heavy Cannabis Use.

Background and Aims: Legalization of cannabis (CB) for both medicinal and, in some states, recreational use, has given rise to increasing usage rates across the country. Of particular concern are indications that frequent CB use may be selectively harmful to the developing adolescent brain compared with adult-onset usage. However, the long-term effects of heavy, adolescent CB use on brain structure and cognitive performance in late-life remain unknown. A critical brain region is the hippocampus (HC), where there is a striking intersection between high concentrations of cannabinoid 1 (CB1) receptors and age-related pathology. Design: We investigated whether older adults (average age=66.6+7.2 years old) with a history of early life CB use show morphological differences in hippocampal subregions compared with older, nonusers. Methods: We performed high-resolution magnetic resonance imaging combined with computational techniques to assess cortical thickness of the medial temporal lobe, neuropsychological testing, and extensive drug use histories on 50 subjects (24 formerly heavy cannabis users [CB+ group] abstinent for an average of 28.7 years, 26 nonusers [CB- group]). We investigated group differences in hippocampal subregions, controlling for age, sex, and intelligence (as measured by the Wechsler Test of Adult Reading), years of education, and cigarette use. Results: The CB+ subjects exhibited thinner cortices in subfields cornu ammonis 1 [CA1; F(1,42)=9.96, p=0.0003], and CA2, 3, and the dentate gyrus [CA23DG; F(1,42)=23.17, p<0.0001], and in the entire HC averaged over all subregions [F(1,42)=8.49, p=0.006]. Conclusions: Negative effects of chronic adolescent CB use on hippocampal structure are maintained well into late life. Because hippocampal cortical loss underlies and exacerbates age-related cognitive decline, these findings have profound implications for aging adults with a history of early life usage. Clinical Trial Registration: ClinicalTrials.gov # NCT01874886

Role of TNF-a in host immune response in tuberculous pleuritis

Tumour Necrosis Factor (TNF)-a, a pro-inflammatory cytokine has a dual role in host immunity and immunopathology of tuberculosis and is considered to be pivotal for determining the clinical course of the disease, either beneficial or detrimental. The assessment of TNF-a in pleural tuberculosis will help us to understand its role in host defence mechanism against Mycobacterium tuberculosis (MTB) infection. In this study, TNF-a and IFN-g levels were measured in plasma and pleural fluid of both tuberculosis (TB) and non- TB patients and in the supernatants of blood and pleural fluid mononuclear cells (PBMCs and PFMCs) stimulated in vitro with PPD, culture filtrate and heatkilled (MTB). In addition, apoptosis induced by PPD and MTB was also studied. TNF-a and IFN-g were significantly elevated in pleural fluid than in plasma of pleural tuberculosis patients, suggesting the compartmentalization of Th1 cytokine-secreting cells at the site of disease. In vitro stimulation of PFMCs with PPD and MTB showed a significant increase in these cytokine levels and also enhanced apoptosis of these cells. This increase in TNF-a levels may contribute to the containment of infection by synergizing with IFN- g to activate infected macrophages or by the regulation of T-cell apoptosis

Physical Activity and Hippocampal Sub-Region Structure in Older Adults with Memory Complaints.

BackgroundPhysical activity (PA) plays a major role in maintaining cognition in older adults. PA has been shown to be correlated with total hippocampal volume, a memory-critical region within the medial temporal lobe (MTL). However, research on associations between PA and MTL sub-region integrity is limited.ObjectiveTo examine the relationship between PA, MTL thickness, and its sub-regions, and cognitive function in non-demented older adults with memory complaints.MethodsTwenty-nine subjects aged ≥60 years, with memory complaints were recruited for this cross-sectional study. PA was tracked for 7 days using accelerometers, and average number of steps/day determined. Subjects were categorized into two groups: those who walked ≤4000 steps/day (lower PA) and those with >4000 steps/day (higher PA). Subjects received neuropsychological testing and 3T MRI scans. Nonparametric ANCOVAs controlling for age examined differences between the two groups.ResultsTwenty-six subjects aged 72.7(8.1) years completed the study. The higher PA group (n = 13) had thicker fusiform gyrus (median difference = 0.11 mm, effect size (ES) = 1.43, p = 0.001) and parahippocampal cortex (median difference = 0.12 mm, ES = 0.93, p = 0.04) compared to the lower PA group. The higher PA group also exhibited superior performance in attention and information-processing speed (median difference = 0.90, ES = 1.61, p = 0.003) and executive functioning (median difference = 0.97, ES = 1.24, p = 0.05). Memory recall was not significantly different between the two groups.ConclusionOlder non-demented individuals complaining of memory loss who walked >4000 steps each day had thicker MTL sub-regions and better cognitive functioning than those who walked ≤4000 steps. Future studies should include longitudinal analyses and explore mechanisms mediating hippocampal related atrophy