Heart surgery waiting time: Assessing the effectiveness of an action

Background: Waiting time is an index assessing patient satisfaction, managerial effectiveness and horizontal equity in providing health care. Although heart surgery centers establishment is attractive for politicians. They are always faced with the question of to what extent they solve patient’s problems. Objectives: The objective of this study was to evaluate factors influencing waiting time in patients of heart surgery centers, and to make recommendations for health-care policy-makers for reducing waiting time and increasing the quality of services from this perspective. Patients and Methods: This cross-sectional study was performed in 2013. After searching articles on PubMed, Elsevier, Google Scholar, Ovid, Magiran, IranMedex, and SID, a list of several criteria, which relate to waiting time, was provided. Afterwards, the data on waiting time were collected by a researcher-structured checklist from 156 hospitalized patients. The data were analyzed by SPSS 16. The Kolmogorov Smirnov and Shapiro tests were used for determination of normality. Due to the non-normal distribution, non-parametric tests, such as Kruskal-Wallis and Mann-Whitney were chosen for reporting significance. Parametric tests also used reporting medians. Results: Among the studied variables, just economic status had a significant relation with waiting time (P = 0.37). Fifty percent of participants had diabetes, whereas this estimate was 43.58% for high blood pressure. As the cause of delay, 28.2% of patients reported financial problems, 18.6% personal problem and 13.5% a delay in providing equipment by the hospital. Conclusions: It seems the studied hospital should review its waiting time arrangements and detach them, as far as possible, from subjective and personal (specialists) decisions. On the other hand, ministries of health and insurance companies should consider more financial support. It is also recommend that hospitals should arrange preoperational psychiatric consultation for increasing patients’ emotionally readiness. © 2015, Iranian Red Crescent Medical Journal

Association of the human astrocyte elevated gene-1 promoter variants with susceptibility to hepatocellular carcinoma

Central role of astrocyte elevated gene-1 (AEG-1) in regulating diverse aspects of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) pathogenesis and association of its overexpression with HCC progression has been demonstrated. The positive regulatory regions of AEG-1 promoter contain several putative transcription factor binding sites critical for basal promoter activity. In this study, the aim was to explore the association of AEG-1 promoter variant with HCC. In this study, the human AEG-1 promoter including the region -538 to -42 was explored in 53 HCC patients and 108 healthy controls. The polymerase chain reaction-sequencing method was used for investigating AEG-1 promoter polymorphisms. A novel mutation in AEG-1 promoter in human HCC patients at a potential AP-2 binding site was explored. An A>C mutation was observed in -483 of AEG-1 promoter in 4 out of 53 HCC patients but not in 108 control individuals. Sequencing data showed genetic variations in 11 HCC patients and 3 healthy controls. Among them, one novel SNP was found in activator protein-1 (AP2), a transcription factor binding site (-483 A to C) that may be associated with the susceptibility to HCC (P = 0.012) but no associations were found for other observed variations. This mutation could be tumor-specific. AEG-1 promoter variant -483 A>C may be associated with the susceptibility to HCC in Iranian population. To our knowledge, this is the first study that has reported this association with the susceptibility to HCC. Therefore, further studies need to be conducted in larger sample sizes and other populations to validate these findings. © 2014 Springer Science+Business Media New York

Assessing of channel roughness and temperature variations on wastewater quality parameters using numerical modeling

Nowadays, problems and barriers to supply adequate water and addressenvironmental issues have caused wastewater treatment (WWT) to be considered a high priority. In light of high costs of WWT, using natural capacities to reduce pollution could be potentially economically significant. In this paper, the impact of varying temperature and channel roughness has been investigated on the wastewater quality parameters using theQUAL2K (Q2K) Numerical Model. The results show, as temperature increases, the reduction rate of Biochemical Oxygen Demand (BOD) is more than the Chemical Oxygen Demand (COD). Also, organic nitrogen (ON), organic phosphorus (P), coliforms, total organic carbon (C), total suspended solids (TSS) and total nitrogen (TN) decrease; but nitrate concentration (NO3) increases. This numerical assessment indicates that the purification rate is greater as temperature rises above 30°C. The results show that by increasing channel roughness, BOD, COD, Particle Organic Matter (POM), organic nitrogen, phosphorus and coliforms havedescending trends while inorganic phosphorus and ammonium concentrations have ascending trends. According to the obtained results, nitrate (NO3) has a decreasing trend when the Manning Roughness Coefficient (N) is higher than 0.04 along the channel, but is reducedwhen “N” is less than 0.04. © JASE

All-optical image recognition and processing with plasmonic metasurfaces

We engage effective nonlinearity of the coherent wave interaction on a thin metamaterial absorber to demonstrate all-optical image recognition and logical functions that in principle can be performed at THz frame rates and quantum-limited intensities

Phase-change chalcogenide glass metamaterial

Combining metamaterials with functional media brings a new dimension to their performance. Here we demonstrate substantial resonance frequency tuning in a photonic metamaterial hybridized with an electrically/optically switchable chalcogenide glass. The transition between amorphous and crystalline forms brings about a 10% shift in the near-infrared resonance wavelength of an asymmetric split-ring array, providing transmission modulation functionality with a contrast ratio of 4:1 in a device of sub-wavelength thickness.Comment: 3 pages, 3 figure

Synthesis of Positron Emission Tomography (PET) Images via Multi-channel Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs)

Positron emission tomography (PET) image synthesis plays an important role, which can be used to boost the training data for computer aided diagnosis systems. However, existing image synthesis methods have problems in synthesizing the low resolution PET images. To address these limitations, we propose multi-channel generative adversarial networks (M-GAN) based PET image synthesis method. Different to the existing methods which rely on using low-level features, the proposed M-GAN is capable to represent the features in a high-level of semantic based on the adversarial learning concept. In addition, M-GAN enables to take the input from the annotation (label) to synthesize the high uptake regions e.g., tumors and from the computed tomography (CT) images to constrain the appearance consistency and output the synthetic PET images directly. Our results on 50 lung cancer PET-CT studies indicate that our method was much closer to the real PET images when compared with the existing methods.Comment: 9 pages, 2 figure

Synthesis and characterization of nickel molybdate nano-powders in the presence of carboxymethyl cellulose as a new capping agent and its application on electrochemical determination of ethanol

Nickel molybdate (NiMoO4) nanopowders were prepared by a new method in low temperature. For the first time, we used carboxymethyl cellulose as a new capping agent in synthesis procedure. The formed nickel molybdate products have been characterized by means of UV�vis diffuse reflectance spectroscopy, X-ray diffraction (XRD), field emission scanning electron microscopy (FESEM), and energy dispersive X-ray microanalysis (EDX). Glassy carbon electrode modified with NiMoO4 nanopowders was prepared and used for oxidation of ethanol and methanol. The study of the different scan rates indicates a diffusional process for oxidation of ethanol. The detection limit obtained for ethanol was also 3.8 mM. © 2019 by CEE (Center of Excellence in Electrochemistry)

T2 Mapping from Super-Resolution-Reconstructed Clinical Fast Spin Echo Magnetic Resonance Acquisitions

Relaxometry studies in preterm and at-term newborns have provided insight into brain microstructure, thus opening new avenues for studying normal brain development and supporting diagnosis in equivocal neurological situations. However, such quantitative techniques require long acquisition times and therefore cannot be straightforwardly translated to in utero brain developmental studies. In clinical fetal brain magnetic resonance imaging routine, 2D low-resolution T2-weighted fast spin echo sequences are used to minimize the effects of unpredictable fetal motion during acquisition. As super-resolution techniques make it possible to reconstruct a 3D high-resolution volume of the fetal brain from clinical low-resolution images, their combination with quantitative acquisition schemes could provide fast and accurate T2 measurements. In this context, the present work demonstrates the feasibility of using super-resolution reconstruction from conventional T2-weighted fast spin echo sequences for 3D isotropic T2 mapping. A quantitative magnetic resonance phantom was imaged using a clinical T2-weighted fast spin echo sequence at variable echo time to allow for super-resolution reconstruction at every echo time and subsequent T2 mapping of samples whose relaxometric properties are close to those of fetal brain tissue. We demonstrate that this approach is highly repeatable, accurate and robust when using six echo times (total acquisition time under 9 minutes) as compared to gold-standard single-echo spin echo sequences (several hours for one single 2D slice)