Multi-Factor Triage Algorithm (MUFTA): Quantitative and Qualitative Ethical Factors on Triage Decisions During COVID-19

Background: This study shows how multiple ethical criteria evaluations result in patient screening and ranking. Furthermore, as Omicron outbreaks increase, hospital emergency departments will become overburdened with critically ill patients. It is a one-of-a-kind global triage algorithm for infectious decreases of COVID-19 and Omicron. The algorithm is qualitative and quantitative, and adaptable to various bio-ethical and social factors. The measurement of the evaluation process eliminates any inconsistencies, which is an advantage of a decision-making algorithm. The proposed algorithm is unique because there are no similar algorithms in the literature that provide triage guidelines based on social ethics, bioethics, and human dignity. Objective: It's simple to evaluate a patient's potential benefits when ethical triage judgments are structured and transparent. Furthermore, decisions made primarily based on economic considerations in stressful situations overlook the socioeconomic realities of the underprivileged. This triage algorithm eliminates the need for ad hoc triage evaluations and facilitates criteria for inclusion, such as human dignity. It also takes into account patient comorbidities and social, ethical issues. Method: Healthcare professionals use predefined ethical criteria to assign relative rankings among patients based on treatment response and social circumstances. It is a Delphi method for evaluating patient illnesses with the help of medical professionals. For example, the admission to the intensive care unit and providing a ventilator depend entirely on hierarchical multidimensional triage scoring results. This algorithm can evaluate triage scores quickly. It is robust, accurate, and quick in assessment, evaluation, and reevaluation during an emergency. A team of three experts can implement this algorithm. Result: The Consistency Scores (CR) show how well clinical and non-clinical ethical criteria may be used to make triage judgments. As a result, all specialists have reported allogeneic reactions in the triage assessment. Furthermore, this system enables decision-makers to identify cognitive biases that may influence their decisions. A Group Consciousness Ratio (GCR) of over 85% indicates that the decision-making process is transparent. Patients with a high level of social dependency, a reasonable probability of recovery, a favorable weighted average comorbidity score, and those who are less fortunate are all considered in the overall triage decision. Conclusions: This algorithm differentiates patients who need ICU (Incentive Care Unit) care and do not immediately require critical resources. As a result, patients queue up on a waiting list when the ICU demand spikes due to the increased incidence of COVID-19 infection or its variants. This situation presents a dilemma for the triage policy. Therefore, a national emergency policy requires monetary and technical assistance to expand healthcare facilities. However, the clarity of this triage policymaking is at odds with decision-makers interested in manipulating results. It is challenging to deal with consistency issues in the Delphi process in group decision-making without professional moderators and valid evaluation metrics. Therefore, transparency, consistency, and strong judgment are essential elements of the presented algorithm. Doi: 10.28991/esj-2022-SPER-07 Full Text: PD

Analytics on malicious android applications

The widespread of mobile applications has led to increase smartphone malware. Detecting malware requires extracting features to determine the malware apps from non-malware apps. To understand malware apps' features, we need a better understanding of the requested permissions in manifest file of apk file. In this paper, we present our framework based on extracting apk's permissions with the aims to detect the malware upon granted permissions in mobile app. The permissions keywords are extracted from the manifest file of apk file using VirusTotal website. These collected applications and their permissions keywords will go through pre-data analytics process before being trained to various machine learning classifiers. We collected around 30 apps from Google play as non-malware apps and 30 malicious apps from different sources such as PROGuard, Contagio Mobile blog and the Drebin dataset. The permissions keywords of the collected apk are extracted and saved to build final dataset that contains 50 samples of benign and malignant applications with the final collections of permissions keywords. Finally, the dataset is fed to machine learning. By utilizing several classifiers such as NaiveBayes, sequential minimal optimization (SMO), Decision Table, ZeroR and Decision trees (J48 and Random Forests, the results show that sequential minimal optimization (SMO) classifier achieved high performance in the detection rate of the classifier with an acceptable accuracy of 76 %

Temporal changes in chemical properties of acid soil profiles treated with magnesium limestone and gypsum

Effects of ground magnesium limestone (GML) and gypsum on the properties of Ultisols at two sites, involving a corn groundnut rotation, were studied over 24 months. GML or gypsum was incorporated into the soils of the Bungor and Rengam Series (Typic Paleudults), at the rates of 0, 0.5, 1.0, 2.0, 4.0, and 8.0 t ha-1 to depths of 15 cm (GML and gypsum) and 30 cm (GML). Increases in soil pH and exchangeable Ca and Mg arising from GML application were confined mainly to the zone of incorporation. However, there was a decrease of exchangeable Al at deeper depths. After 15 months, there was a tendency for the pH and exchangeable Ca and Mg on the zone of incorporation to decrease and for the exchangeable Al to increase, effects being the least at the high rates of GML application. There was no significant change in pH or exchangeable Al as a result of gypsum application, but there were increases in exchangeable Ca and extractable SO4²- in both the zone of incorporation and the subsoil. With time, the exchangeable Ca and extractable SO4²- in the sub-soils were found to increase, but their concentration in the zone of incorporation decreased. The pH of the soil solution of the control treatment was about 4.0, while Al and Mn concentrations were 150 and 50 µM, respectively. At the GML rate of 2.0 t ha-1 or less, Al in the soil solution was found to exist in the inorganic monomeric form. Meanwhile, the GML application at the rates > 4 t ha-1 could have resulted in complexation of some of Al. In particular, Al3+ was the dominant Al species at low pH and liming resulted in a decrease of Al3+ species and increase of hydroxyl-Al monomers. GML needed to raise the pH of the soil solution to about 5 was 2.0 t ha-1; this consequently decreased Al and Mn concentrations to a low level. The application of gypsum resulted in a decrease and an increase of Al3+ and AlSO4+ activities, respectively

An effective vision technique for microchip lead inspection

A new effective method for the microchip lead inspection for the chip manufacturing industry has been developed in this work. In contrast to the gray scale pattern matching technique this approach employs selected parameters of binary blobs to perform fault detection and measurements. This leads to a significant reduction of image processing time. A special combination of gray level filtering techniques with gray morphological operations enhances the borders of the lead images. Newly developed threshold calibration technique significantly improves the measurement accuracy. A unique statistical analysis has been developed to identify all possible lead defects in the chips. This method is rotationally and scale invariant and able to detect defective leads for the chips with different specifications. The minimum required information about the microchip is the number of leads

Organic rankine cycle (ORC) system applications for solar energy: Recent technological advances

© 2019 by the authors. Organic Rankine Cycle (ORC) power generation systems may be used to utilize heat source with low pressure and low temperature such as solar energy. Many researchers have focused on different aspects ofORCpower generation systems, but none so far has focused on the patent landscape of ORC system applications. As such, the objective of this study is to identify published patents on ORC system applications, particularly for solar energy. Four (4) technologies were identified in ORC application for solar energy: parabolic dish, parabolic trough, solar tower, and linear Fresnel reflector. A methodical search and analysis of the patent landscape in ORC system applications for solar energy published between 2007-2018 was conducted using the Derwent Innovation patent database. From the approximately 51 million patents in the database from various countries and patent agencies, 3859 patents were initially identified to be related to ORC applications for solar energy. After further stringent selection processes, only 1100 patents were included in this review. From these 1100 patents, approximately 12% (130 patents) are associated with parabolic dishes, about 39% (428 patents) are associated with parabolic troughs, approximately 21% (237 patents) are associated with solar towers, and about 28% (305 patents) are associated with linear Fresnel reflectors. Published patents on solar tower technology are currently on an increasing trend, led by China. All of these patents were published in the past 11 years. From this study, further researches on ORC application are still ongoing, but ORC application for solar energy has the potential to advance; allowing the world to ease issues related to over-reliance on fossil fuel

Experimental investigation, techno-economic analysis and environmental impact of bioethanol production from banana stem

© 2019 by the authors. Banana stem is being considered as the second largest waste biomass in Malaysia. Therefore, the environmental challenge of managing this huge amount of biomass as well as converting the feedstock into value-added products has spurred the demand for diversified applications to be implemented as a realistic approach. In this study, banana stem waste was experimented for bioethanol generation via hydrolysis and fermentation methods with the presence of Saccharomyces cerevisiae (yeast) subsequently. Along with the experimental analysis, a realistic pilot scale application of electricity generation from the bioethanol has been designed by HOMER software to demonstrate techno-economic and environmental impact. During sulfuric acid and enzymatic hydrolysis, the highest glucose yield was 5.614 and 40.61 g/L, respectively. During fermentation, the maximum and minimum glucose yield was 62.23 g/L at 12 h and 0.69 g/L at 72 h, respectively. Subsequently, 99.8% pure bioethanol was recovered by a distillation process. Plant modeling simulated operating costs 65,980 US$/y, net production cost 869347 US$ and electricity cost 0.392 US$/kWh. The CO2 emission from bioethanol was 97,161 kg/y and SO2 emission was 513 kg/y which is much lower than diesel emission. The overall bioethanol production from banana stem and application of electricity generation presented the approach economically favorable and environmentally benign

Circular Microstrip Patch Antenna for UHF RFID Reader

This paper presents an analysis of Circular shape patch antenna for Ultra High-Frequency Identification (UHF) Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) Reader Applications. The fabricated antenna has lightweight, simple structure, low profile and easy for fabrication due to the used of FR-4 materials with loss tangent 0.019, the dielectric constant of 4.7 and thickness of 1.6 mm. It can be operated for UHF RFID system in Malaysia with the frequency assigned from 919 MHz to 923 MHz. The antenna simulation was analysed by using CST Studio Suite 2016. From the results, the antenna has the reflection coefficient (S11) less than -10dB together with the bandwidth of 90 MHz. Other results of antenna parameter such as voltage standing wave ratio (VSWR), circular polarized radiation pattern, return loss and gain were also discussed. The complete size of the proposed antenna is 120 mm x 120 mm x 1.6 mm. Thus, it is suitable for RFID portable reader applications

Temporal Changes in Urban Green Space based on Normalized Difference Vegetation Index

This study identifies land use changes in the metropolitan region of Klang-Langat Valley focusing on urban sprawl and green space. A technique called Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) is used to quantify temporal urban green space dynamics. All districts in the valley recorded a marked increase in urban area, but decreased in agriculture and forest areas. Result of vegetation index analysis showed that NDVI increases for water body, bare soil, and built-up area category for as much as 16.98% from 1998 to 2001, but during the same period vegetation experience a decrease of 22.25%

Effect of wall resistance on the total thermal resistance of a stacked microchannel heat sink

This paper reports on the different modeling approach of the total thermal resistance in a microchannel heat sink (MCHS); with wall resistance and the frequently used fin model, in comparison with experimental results. For a single stack MCHS, the wall model caused more than 10% difference but it can be extended to a stacked MCHS while the fin model could not, due to the adiabatic top condition. The wall resistance model is idealized, assuming a 100% efficient convective heat transfer while in the fin model 70% was the maximum. Meanwhile, stacking showed that at a constant flow rate, the thermal resistance could be reduced by 3% for a double stack, while increasing beyond that will decrease the thermal performance of the MCHS. The study showed the limits of models used and possible stacking of a MCHS for improved heat removal capability