A high-precision, low cost system for evaluating finger-tapping tasks

Finger-tapping test is extensively employed to assess motor asymmetry in brain damaged patients and also to study the relationship between handedness and performance in normal subjects. The aim of this study was to develop a computer based finger-tapping system that could provide quantitative measures of finger-tapping performance. The system is designed to be used in a standard personel computer without the need of any other hardware. The software is written in Borland Delphi® 6.0 for Microsoft® Windows 98® and higher operating systems. Beginning with the Pentium® processor, it could be possible to access a time-stamp counter. The time-stamp counter is a 64-bit machine specific register that is incremented by every clock cycle, and keeps an accurate count of every cycle that occurs on the processor. By using a computer with 1 GHz processor speed it is possible to reach a high precision time resolution of 1 µs in finger-tapping tests. Our future prospects for the system are to improve it with various tools such as synchronized recording of electromyography, tapping force monitoring, monitoring of finger angle, and the response to different stimulus parameters by adding appropriate hardware and procedure. Copyright © 2006 Informa Healthcare

From citizen journalism to alternative media: The case of 140journos

[No abstract available

A questionnaire survey among Turkish physicians about sleep disorders.

We aimed to assess the knowledge of Turkish physicians about sleep disorders and the attitude of the physicians towards sleep medicine. We prepared a 24-item-questionnaire, 7 of the questions were about the attitudes of the physicians and 17 of them were about the knowledge of the physicians. We applied the questionnaire in all university and educational hospitals in Ankara, which is the capital city and the second largest city of Turkey. Two-hundred-fifteen medical doctors from 5 different specialties accepted to answer the questionnaire, and 168 (78%) of them completed the questionnaire. 47% of the physicians rated themselves as they had little knowledge about sleep disorders, and 45% as they had enough knowledge about sleep disorders, however, the overall score was not high. They answered only 45.3% of the questions correctly. In the light of this survey, we concluded that medical education on sleep disorders should be extended both in length and in content to improve the quality of sleep disorders medicine in Turkey

Effect of rapid-eye-movement sleep deprivation on rat hypothalamic prostaglandins

In this study, we investigated thyroid hormones, thyroid stimulating hormone (TSH), prostaglandin D2 (PGD2) and prostaglandin E2 (PGE2) levels in rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep-deprived rats compared with controls. The aim of the present study was to detect the effect of REM sleep deprivation (RSD) especially on hypothalamic prostaglandin levels. Twenty-seven male rats were randomly assigned in three groups as dry cage control, yoked control, and RSD. RSD rats were sleep deprived for 10 consecutive days. At the end of 10th day all rats were sacrificed for measurement. Our results indicated that total triiodothyronine (T3) and thyroxine (T4) decreased in the RSD group while there was no change in TSH. We also measured hypothalamic PGD2 and PGE2 levels, but we could not find any significant change between groups. © 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

A decision support system for fund raising management based on the Choquet integral methodology

The employment of a decision support system for optimizing fund raising strategies is crucial to the management of non-profit organizations. Commonly considered methodologies utilize the organization’s donor database in order to gather and analyse information. However, many organizations, especially small- and medium-sized ones, do not own or efficiently manage a database, and consequently, the usual methods are inapplicable. In this paper, a decision support system is developed that is able to identify the most promising fund raising strategies on the basis of the organization’s profile. The profile factors of a non-profit organization are analysed and hierarchically organized in a decision tree in order to effectively employ the Choquet integral methodology, which is recommended in these kinds of multi-criteria decision problems. The results obtained in the real operational context show the effectiveness of the proposed system

Normal ile Ral/Ronktis Patolojilerini Iferen Solunum Seslerinin Siniflandinlmasi

28th Signal Processing and Communications Applications Conference, SIU 2020 --5 October 2020 through 7 October 2020 -- -- 1664132-s2.0-85100300725In the diagnosis of chest diseases, the success of classification with computerized decision assistance systems during auscultation and diagnosis by the specialist is increasing day by day. In this study, 100 respiratory sounds (50 normal and 50 abnormal) sampled at 4kHz, collected by electronic stethoscope for 15 seconds in accordance with routine clinical protocols, were used and no further patient data were used. These sounds were classified by using Support Vector Machines (SVM) and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) methods by applying normalization, spectrogram image with STFT, preprocessing such as MFCC and extraction of spectral features. The training set was determined as 80 and the test set as 20, and the success of classification after the study was 67% and 80%, respectively. It has been shown that CNN yields better results than SVM with clinical data with a success rate of 80% and also can be used to classify Ral and Rhonchi from pathological sounds and the highest success rate has been demonstrated by the use of the three layers CNN architecture. © 2020 IEEE

The protective effect of thymoquinone on ethanol-induced acute gastric damage in the rat

Previous studies have indicated a pivotal role of reactive oxygen species in the pathomechanism of gastric ulcer. Recent studies demonstrated that thymoquinone (TQ) had an antioxidant effect on injuries caused by various toxic agents in different experimental models. The present study was planned to test whether TQ, the main constituent of the volatile oil of Nigella sativa seeds, was capable to exert beneficial effects on acute gastric ulcer model in rats. We examined antiulcerative and antioxidant effects of TQ on ethanol (EtOH)-induced gastric lesions in rats. The data we collected showed that gastric ulcer caused by absolute EtOH induction resulted in an increase in lipid peroxidation, represented by malondialdehyde level as well as by superoxide dismutase level, an antioxidant enzyme, whereas it resulted in a decrease in glutathione content in rat stomach tissue. Thymoquinone (20 mg/kg) administration reduced the ulcer index and the malondialdehyde level, and reversed the glutathione depletion. However, it did not statistically change the high superoxide dismutase activity induced by EtOH. These results suggest that TQ could inhibit the development of EtOH-induced gastric ulcer, and gastroprotective action of TQ might be in part dependent on its antioxidant property. © 2005 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.Support from the Research Foundation of the Zonguldak Karaelmas University is appreciated. This study was presented at the fifth International Congress of Turkish Society of Toxicology, 2003, Antalya, Turkey