89 research outputs found

    Design and Analysis of Different Optical Attocells Deployment Models for Indoor Visible Light Communication System

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    Visible light communication (VLC) is a promising candidate that is expected to revolutionize indoor environment communications performance and fulfill fifth generation and beyond (5GB) technologies requirements. It offers high and free bandwidth, electromagnetic interference immunity, low-cost front end and low power consumption. Also, VLC has dual functions that could be utilized in both illumination and communication concurrently. The number of optical attocells (OAs) and their deployment in the room represent the main issue that should be taken into consideration in designing an optimal VLC system. In this paper, we have introduced a new model of five OAs in the typical room. In addition to an investigation of various optical attocells (OAs) deployment models, in which a multi-variable evaluation was performed in terms of received power, illumination, SNR and RMS delay spread in order to determine the optimal OAs model. Also, various modulation schemes performances were investigated which included NRZ-OOK, BPSK, and QPSK in order to improve the BER performance. Results indicated that BPSK modulation had superior BER performance when compared with all OAs models. Further, a comprehensive results analysis and comparison of all proposed models was conducted over various parameters, in which our new proposed OAs model achieved an optimal performance in comparison with the other models

    Ground Vehicle for Fire Fighting Purpose in Hazardous Environment

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    In this project, design, development and performance of a wirelessly controlled Fire Fighting Ground Vehicle (FIGOV) is described. FIGOV is a wireless control mobile machine that is equipped with firefighting equipment. It carries high density camera, sensors, communication equipment, firefighting equipment and other loads in order to control fire and perform victim searching task. The machine is wirelessly controlled via mobile computer. The nozzle of the machine can be directed at different angle and can be elevated in order to control fire at different height. FIGOV can be used to reduce the risks faced by fire fighters in performing their duties. This is due to the fact to the current fire fighting techniques require fire fighters to intervene in hazardous conditions. Working at very high temperature, dusty, low humidity, dangerous and others are among usual working conditions associated with fire fighting. Study conducted showed that the machine can be successfully be used in real fire fighting process. Effective use of the machine also can avoid direct contact of human especially fire fighter with radioactive or hazardous materials that may have immediate or long-term effects on health as well as fatigue to human

    Genes for tesin, villin and desmin are linked on mouse Chromosome 1

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    Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/47016/1/335_2004_Article_BF00354299.pd

    Molecular phylogenetics of Pleosporales: Melanommataceae and Lophiostomataceae re-circumscribed (Pleosporomycetidae, Dothideomycetes, Ascomycota)

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    The classification of Pleosporales has posed major challenges due to the lack of clear understanding of the importance of the morphological characters used to distinguish between different groups in the order. This has resulted in varied taxonomic treatments of many families in the group including Melanommataceae and Lophiostomataceae. In this study we employ two nuclear DNA gene markers, nuclear ribosomal large subunit DNA and translation elongation factor 1-alpha in order to examine the molecular phylogenetics of Pleosporales with strong emphasis on the families Melanommataceae and Lophiostomataceae. Phylogenetic analyses recovered Melanommataceae, Lophiostomataceae, Hypsostromataceae, and a few others as strongly supported clades within the Pleosporales. Melanommataceae as currently circumscribed was found to be polyphyletic. The genera Byssosphaeria, Melanomma, and Pseudotrichia were recovered within the family, while others such as Ostropella and Xenolophium nested outside in a weakly supported group along with Platystomum compressum and Pseudotrichia guatopoensis that may correspond to the family Platystomaceae. The genus Byssosphaeria was recovered as a strongly supported group within the Melanommataceae while Melanomma was weakly supported with unclear relationships among the species. The genera Herpotrichia and Bertiella were also found to belong in the Melanommataceae. Lophiostomataceae occurs as a strongly supported group but its concept is here expanded to include a new genus Misturatosphaeria that bears morphology traditionally not known to occur in the family. The strongly supported clade of Misturatosphaeria contains nine species that have gregarious, papillate ascomata with lighter coloured apices and plugged ostioles and that vary in ascospore morphology from 1- to 3-septate to muriform. Along with a strongly supported Lophiostoma clade, also within the family are Thyridaria macrostomoides based on new sequences from Kenyan collections and Massariosphaeria triseptata, M. grandispora, Westerdykella cylindrica and Preussia terricola based on GenBank sequences. The family Hypsostromataceae was recovered as a strongly supported monophyletic group nested within the Pleosporales

    Chronic respiratory disease surveys in adults in low- and middle-income countries: a systematic scoping review of methodological approaches and outcomes

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    Background Chronic respiratory diseases (CRDs) contribute significantly towards the global burden of disease, but the true prevalence and burden of these conditions in adults is unknown in the majority of low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). We aimed to identify strategies - in particular the definitions, study designs, sampling frames, instruments, and outcomes - used to conduct prevalence surveys for CRDs in LMICs. The findings will inform a future RESPIRE Four Country ChrOnic Respiratory Disease (4CCORD) study, which will estimate CRD prevalence, including disease burden, in adults in LMICs.Methods We conducted a scoping review to map prevalence surveys conducted in LMICs published between 1995 and 2018. We followed Arksey and O'Malley's six-step framework. The search was conducted in OVID Medline, EMBASE, ISI Web of Science, Global Health, WHO Global Index Medicus and included three domains: CRDs, prevalence and LMICs. After an initial title sift, eight trained reviewers undertook duplicate study selection and data extraction. We charted: country and populations, random sampling strategies, CRD definitions/phenotypes, survey procedure (questionnaires, spirometry, tests), outcomes and assessment of individual, societal and health service burden of disease.Results Of 36 872 citations, 281 articles were included: 132 from Asia (41 from China). Study designs were cross-sectional surveys (n = 260), cohort studies (n = 11) and secondary data analysis (n= 10). The number of respondents in these studies ranged from 50 to 512 891. Asthma was studied in 144 studies, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) in 112. Most studies (100/144) based identification of asthma on symptom-based questionnaires. In contrast, COPD diagnosis was typically based on spirometry findings (94/112); 65 used fixed-ratio thresholds, 29 reported fixed-ratio and lower-limit-of-normal values. Only five articles used the term `phenotype'. Most studies used questionnaires derived from validated surveys, most commonly the European Community Respiratory Health Survey (n = 47). The burden/impact of CRD was reported in 33 articles (most commonly activity limitation).Conclusion Surveys remain the most practical approach for estimating prevalence of CRD but there is a need to identify the most predictive questions for diagnosing asthma and to standardise diagnostic criteria.Public Health and primary carePrevention, Population and Disease management (PrePoD

    Bilateral extracephalic transcranial direct current stimulation improves endurance performance in healthy individuals

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    Background: Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) has been used to enhance endurance performance but its precise mechanisms and effects remain unknown. Objective: To investigate the effect of bilateral tDCS on neuromuscular function and performance during a cycling time to task failure (TTF) test. Methods: Twelve participants in randomized order received a placebo tDCS (SHAM) or real tDCS with two cathodes (CATHODAL) or two anodes (ANODAL) over bilateral motor cortices and the opposite electrode pair over the ipsilateral shoulders. Each session lasted 10 min and current was set at 2mA. Neuromuscular assessment was performed before and after tDCS and was followed by a cycling time to task failure (TTF) test. Heart rate (HR), ratings of perceived exertion (RPE), leg muscle pain (PAIN) and blood lactate accumulation (?B[La-]) in response to the cycling TTF test were measured. Results: Corticospinal excitability increased in the ANODAL condition (P < 0.001) while none of the other neuromuscular parameters showed any change. Neuromuscular parameters did not change in the SHAM and CATHODAL conditions. TTF was significantly longer in the ANODAL (P = 0.003) compared to CATHODAL and SHAM conditions (12.61 ± 4.65 min; 10.61 ± 4.34 min; 10.21 ± 3.47 min respectively), with significantly lower RPE and higher ?B[La-] (P < 0.001). No differences between conditions were found for HR (P = 0.803) and PAIN during the cycling TTF test (P = 0.305). Conclusion: Our findings demonstrate that tDCS with the anode over both motor cortices using a bilateral extracephalic reference improves endurance performance

    ENIGMA and global neuroscience: A decade of large-scale studies of the brain in health and disease across more than 40 countries

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    This review summarizes the last decade of work by the ENIGMA (Enhancing NeuroImaging Genetics through Meta Analysis) Consortium, a global alliance of over 1400 scientists across 43 countries, studying the human brain in health and disease. Building on large-scale genetic studies that discovered the first robustly replicated genetic loci associated with brain metrics, ENIGMA has diversified into over 50 working groups (WGs), pooling worldwide data and expertise to answer fundamental questions in neuroscience, psychiatry, neurology, and genetics. Most ENIGMA WGs focus on specific psychiatric and neurological conditions, other WGs study normal variation due to sex and gender differences, or development and aging; still other WGs develop methodological pipelines and tools to facilitate harmonized analyses of "big data" (i.e., genetic and epigenetic data, multimodal MRI, and electroencephalography data). These international efforts have yielded the largest neuroimaging studies to date in schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, substance use disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorder, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, autism spectrum disorders, epilepsy, and 22q11.2 deletion syndrome. More recent ENIGMA WGs have formed to study anxiety disorders, suicidal thoughts and behavior, sleep and insomnia, eating disorders, irritability, brain injury, antisocial personality and conduct disorder, and dissociative identity disorder. Here, we summarize the first decade of ENIGMA's activities and ongoing projects, and describe the successes and challenges encountered along the way. We highlight the advantages of collaborative large-scale coordinated data analyses for testing reproducibility and robustness of findings, offering the opportunity to identify brain systems involved in clinical syndromes across diverse samples and associated genetic, environmental, demographic, cognitive, and psychosocial factors

    Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

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    Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe
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