A Semantic Safety Check System for Emergency Management

There has been an exponential growth and availability of both structured and unstructured data that can be leveraged to provide better emergency management in case of natural disasters and humanitarian crises. This paper is an extension of a semantics-based web application for safety check, which uses of semantic web technologies to extract different kinds of relevant data about a natural disaster and alerts its users. The goal of this work is to design and develop a knowledge intensive application that identifies those people that may have been affected due to natural disasters or man-made disasters at any geographical location and notify them with safety instructions. This involves extraction of data from various sources for emergency alerts, weather alerts, and contacts data. The extracted data is integrated using a semantic data model and transformed into semantic data. Semantic reasoning is done through rules and queries. This system is built using front-end web development technologies and at the back-end using semantic web technologies such as RDF, OWL, SPARQL, Apache Jena, TDB, and Apache Fuseki server. We present the details of the overall approach, process of data collection and transformation and the system built. This extended version includes a detailed discussion of the semantic reasoning module, research challenges in building this software system, related work in this area, and future research directions including the incorporation of geospatial components and standards

Wave-Atom and Cycle-Spinning-Based Noise Reduction in Mammography Images

Image denoising is crucial in medical image processing. Digital mammography depends significantly on de-noising for computer-aided-detection of malignant cells like Microcalcifications. In this work, we proposed an unique hybrid approach to reduce Gaussian noise in digital mammograms by combining the wave-atom translation and cycle spinning methods. Pictures denoised by thresholding of coefficients would produce pseudo-Gibbs events because wave atoms are not translationally invariant. Circular motion is applied to keep away the artefacts. Experimental results clearly establish that the method is effective at filtering out background noise while maintaining the integrity of edges and enhancing picture quality. Mini-Mias pictures with variable quantities of Gaussian Noise are used to evaluate and analyse the performance using peak signal-to-noise ratio and structural similarity index.  The provided technique outperforms several current filters in terms of evaluated results of peak signal-to-noise ratio and structural similarity index

Sustainable Agriculture Practice using Machine Learning

The changing climate has caused unpredictable rainfall, unusual temperature drops, and heat waves, leading to considerable damage to the environment. Fortunately Machine Learning has provided effective tools to address global issues, including agriculture. By employing different ML algorithms, it is possible to solve the agricultural problems caused by these climate changes. The objective of this article is to develop a system for crop recommendation and disease detection in a plant. Publicly available datasets were used for both tasks. For the crop recommendation system, feature extraction was performed, and the dataset was trained using various Machine Learning algorithms, namely Decision Tree, Logistic Regression, Random Forest, Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Multilayer Perceptron. The random forest algorithm achieved an excellent accuracy of 99.31%.For the plant disease identification system, CNN architectures like - VGG16, ResNet50, and EfficientNetV2 - were trained and compared. Among these, EfficientNetV2 achieved high accuracy of 96.07%

Interaction of human pancreatic ribonuclease with human ribonuclease inhibitor

Mammalian ribonucleases interact very strongly with the intracellular ribonuclease inhibitor (RI). Eukaryotic cells exposed to mammalian ribonucleases are protected from their cytotoxic action by the intracellular inhibition of ribonucleases by RI. Human pancreatic ribonuclease (HPR) is structurally and functionally very similar to bovine RNase A and interacts with human RI with a high affinity. In the current study, we have investigated the involvement of Lys-7, Gln-11, Asn-71, Asn-88, Gly-89, Ser-90, and Glu-111 in HPR in its interaction with human ribonuclease inhibitor. These contact residues were mutated either individually or in combination to generate mutants K7A, Q11A, N71A, E111A, N88R, G89R, S90R, K7A/E111A, Q11A/E111A, N71A/E111A, K7A/N71A/E111A, Q11A/N71A/E111A, and K7A/Q11A/N71A/E111A. Out of these, eight mutants, K7A, Q11A, N71A, S90R, E111A, Q11A/E111A, N71A/E111A, and K7A/N71A/E111A, showed an ability to evade RI more than the wild type HPR, with the triple mutant K7A/N71A/E111A having the maximum RI resistance. As a result, these variants exhibited higher cytotoxic activity than wild type HPR. The mutation of Gly-89 in HPR produced no change in the sensitivity of HPR for RI, whereas it has been reported that mutating the equivalent residue Gly-88 in RNase A yielded a variant with increased RI resistance and cytotoxicity. Hence, despite its considerable homology with RNase A, HPR shows differences in its interaction with RI. We demonstrate that interaction between human pancreatic ribonuclease and RI can be disrupted by mutating residues that are involved in HPR-RI binding. The inhibitor-resistant cytotoxic HPR mutants should be useful in developing therapeutic molecules

PROTECTIVE EFFECT OF ACORUS CALAMUS RHIZOME IN PARACETAMOL EXPOSURE INDUCED HEPATOTOXICITY IN RATS: BIOCHEMICAL AND HISTOPATHOLOGICAL STUDY

Objective: To study the hepatoprotective activity of an aqueous and alcoholic extract of Acorus calamus rhizomes against the paracetamol induced hepatotoxicity in rats.Methods: Hepatotoxicity was induced by oral administration of paracetamol and chemical parameters such as Glutathione peroxidase, Glutathione reductase, Glutathione, Catalase, lipid peroxidation and histopathological changes in liver was studied by comparing with Silymarin, a standard hepatoprotective drug.Results: Treatment of rats with aqueous and alcoholic extract of Acoruscalamus rhizome after paracetamol administration normalized the altered levels of above parameters which may comparable with Silymarin and Vit-E. The hepatoprotective activity was confirmed by histopathological examination of the liver tissue of control and treated animals.Conclusion: Based on the result it can be concluded that Acorus calamus rhizome possesses hepatoprotective effect against paracetamol-induced hepatotoxicity in rats

10-[2-(Dimethyl­amino)eth­yl]-9-(4-methoxy­phen­yl)-3,3,6,6-tetra­methyl-3,4,6,7,9,10-hexa­hydro­acridine-1,8(2H,5H)-dione

In the title compound, C28H38N2O3, the central ring of the acridinedione system adopts a boat conformation, while one of the outer rings adopts a half-chair conformation and the conformation of the other outer ring is between a sofa and a half-chair. The acridinedione system is buckled, with an angle of 22.01 (3)°. The crystal packing comprises layers of mol­ecules laid parallel to the ac plane, being reinforced by an intermolecular C—H⋯O interaction

Exploring Fuzzy Set Concept in Priority Theory for Maintenance Strategy Selection Problem

This paper proposes and presents a different approach of choosing an appropriate maintenance strategy using Saaty’s priority theory and fuzzy sets. As per the priority theory, weights are assigned to the decision criteria via pair wise comparison of criteria. Basic three types of maintenance strategies specifically corrective maintenance, preventive maintenance and predictive maintenance and eight maintenance decision criteria namely low maintenance cost, improved reliability, improved safety, high product quality, minimum inventory, return on investment, acceptance by labor, enhanced competitiveness have been considered to evaluate the most favorable strategy. Instead of usual practice of considering single value for “intensity of importance” factor, more appropriate triangular fuzzy numbers are used to represent it. A different approach using fuzzy arithmetic (α-cuts) in priority theory for the above stated problem has been investigated in this paper

Scavenger receptor-mediated delivery of muramyl dipeptide activates antitumor efficacy of macrophages by enhanced secretion of tumor-suppressive cytokines

We showed that muramyl dipeptide (MDP) conjugated to maleylated bovine serum albumin (MBSA) was internalized by macrophages (Mphi) through scavenger receptor (SCR)-mediated endocytosis, which leads to 50-fold higher cytotoxic activity against non-Mphi tumor cells compared with that elicited by free MDP-treated Mphi. The enhanced cytotoxic effect of MBSA-MDP was found to be a result of higher secretion of interleukin (IL)-1, IL-6, tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF-alpha), and nitric oxide (NO) because the addition of antibodies directed against IL-1, IL-6, or TNF-alpha in combination with Mphi cultures totally abrogated the tumoricidal activity of MBSA-MDP. It is interesting to note that MBSA-MDP triggers the secretion of IL-12, whereas IL-10, a Mphi suppressor cytokine, could be detected only on free MDP treatment. The cytotoxic activity of MBSA-MDP was inhibited by indomethacin, indicating a regulatory role for prostaglandin E2 (PGE2). Efficient SCR-mediated intracellular delivery of MDP leading to elimination of cancer cells suggests the immunotherapeutic potential of this approach for treatment of neoplasia

EVALUATION OF STRESS ALLEVIATING POTENTIAL OF PERGULARIA DAEMIA ON CERTAIN IMMUNOLOGICAL PARAMETERS

Objective: Pergularia daemia [PD] Forsk, commonly called Veliparuthi†in Tamil belongs to the family of Asclepiadaceae. It has been used by villagers as traditional folk medicine for various ailments such as antipyretic, anti-venom, emmenagogue, anti-helminthic, and to treat malarial fever, infantile diarrhea. Scientific reports revealed several pharmacological properties of PD extract. Preliminary in vitro studies on the plant revealed the antioxidant, anti-inflammatory and antimicrobial activities of the plant. So the present study planned to investigate the in vivo stress alleviating the potential of  PD extract on noise stress induced model of wistar albino rats.Methods: Adult Wistar albino rats were exposed to pure tone noise stress for 45 min for one day and the effect of ethanolic PD extract on plasma corticosterone, organ weight body weight ratio of lymphoid organs and adrenal gland,immunological parameters like total leucocyte count, differential leukocyte, neutrophil adherence test and candida phagocytosis was studied.Results: Results revealed that acute stress significantly increased the plasma corticosterone level [p<0.001] and decreased the organ weight body weight ratio of the spleen [p<0.001] and thymus [p<0.01]. It also significantly decreased the total leucocyte count [p<0.001], percentage of neutrophils [p<0.001], eosinophils [p<0.004] and lymphocytes [p<0.001], neutrophil adherence [p<0.001] and enhanced the phagocytic index and avidity index [p<0.001] in acute noise stress exposed groups. Administration of PD extract significantly prevented those acute noise stress-induced changes [p<0.001].Conclusion: We can be  PD extract protected against the noise stress induced changes in albino rats and this stress alleviating and immunomodulatory potential of the plant may be attributed to the phytochemicals and bioactive compounds present in it.Keywords: Stress indices, Immunomodulatory, bioactive compounds, Pergularia daemiaÂ