A hidden cause of infertility in hypothyroid patients

Methylene tetrahydrofolate reductase (MTHFR) gene mutations could be the cause of infertility in hypothyroid patients. Hence, it is worthy to screen for MTHFR gene mutations in infertile hypothyroid females and their partners if infertility persists after optimizing thyroid function

A Course on Patient Safety: Pharmacy Student and Community Partner Perceptions

The authors of this article developed and piloted a three-week intensive elective course for students in their third professional years in the Doctor of Pharmacy program. The goal of this course was to provide students with an opportunity to apply patient safety concepts in a real-world setting using service-learning as the pedagogy and to evaluate student perceptions of the course for potential implementation in the curriculum. Seven pharmacy students were enrolled in the pilot course and divided into three groups. Each group of two to three students was assigned to one of three predetermined community partner sites. Students were instructed on how to perform a needs assessment before designing a project targeted to improve safety at their community sites. Students completed a pre-, retrospective pre-, and post-course questionnaire that assessed their perceptions of the course. Community partners provided feedback to their student groups, and the results were analyzed to determine whether a large-scale course should be developed for the curriculum. Ultimately, results from this pilot course suggest that offering pharmacy-based, service-learning experiences in safety may be beneficial for the professional development of the students, as well as for the local community

WHEAT YIELD AND ANTIOXIDANT ENZYMES RELATIONSHIP UNDER DIFFERENT SOIL WATER CONTENT

The objectives of this study were to examine the relationship between wheat yield cultivars (Sakha 93 and Giza 168) and antioxidant enzymes such as catalase (CAT), superoxide dismutase (SOD), peroxidase (POD), ascorbate peroxidase (APX) and phenylalanine ammonia-lyase (PAL) activities  under different soil water content i.e. low, moderate and high content by irrigation at 80% ETo (1280m³/fed.), by 100% ETo (1600m³/fed.) and120% ETo (1920m³/fed.), respectively. Two lysimeter experiments were carried out in two successive seasons i.e. 2006/2007 and 2007/2008 to estimate  wheat yield and one experiment in plastic bags carried out of the greenhouse to determine the antioxidant enzymes of 28 days wheat plant under three different soil water content i.e. providing wheat seedlings with aforementioned treatment.  Exposing wheat cultivars i.e. Giza 186 or Sakha 93 to water stress by irrigation at 80% ETo (1280 m³/fad.) exerted an increase in CAT, SOD, POD, APX and PAL over those irrigated at 100% ETo (1600 m³/fad.) or at 120% ETo (1920 m³/fad.), but the previous enzyme activities in the tissue of Saka 93 surpassed of that of Giza 168 cultivar. spike weight and weight of 100 grain/plant of Sakha 93 cultivar overcome that of Giza 168 at low soil moisture content (80% ETo), whereas opposite results were obtained at high and moderate water content (120% and 100% ETo) in the first growing season (2006/2007) and spike weight/plant in second growing season (2007/2008). There was a proportional relationship between increasing soil moisture content and grain yield/plant but the difference between moderate water content 100% ETo (1600 m³/fed.) and high water content 120% ETo (1920 m³/fed.) was not significant. Providing 28 days wheat plant with low water content, decreased wheat yield/plant and its attributes comparing with moderate water content for the two studied cultivars. The current study indicates that Sakha 93 cultivar was the most tolerant cultivar compared with Giza 168

Dynamic versus static neural network model for rainfall forecasting at Klang River Basin, Malaysia

Rainfall is considered as one of the major components of the hydrological process; it takes significant part in evaluating drought and flooding events. Therefore, it is important to have an accurate model for rainfall forecasting. Recently, several data-driven modeling approaches have been investigated to perform such forecasting tasks as multi-layer perceptron neural networks (MLP-NN). In fact, the rainfall time series modeling involves an important temporal dimension. On the other hand, the classical MLP-NN is a static and has a memoryless network architecture that is effective for complex nonlinear static mapping. This research focuses on investigating the potential of introducing a neural network that could address the temporal relationships of the rainfall series. <br><br> Two different static neural networks and one dynamic neural network, namely the multi-layer perceptron neural network (MLP-NN), radial basis function neural network (RBFNN) and input delay neural network (IDNN), respectively, have been examined in this study. Those models had been developed for the two time horizons for monthly and weekly rainfall forecasting at Klang River, Malaysia. Data collected over 12 yr (1997–2008) on a weekly basis and 22 yr (1987–2008) on a monthly basis were used to develop and examine the performance of the proposed models. Comprehensive comparison analyses were carried out to evaluate the performance of the proposed static and dynamic neural networks. Results showed that the MLP-NN neural network model is able to follow trends of the actual rainfall, however, not very accurately. RBFNN model achieved better accuracy than the MLP-NN model. Moreover, the forecasting accuracy of the IDNN model was better than that of static network during both training and testing stages, which proves a consistent level of accuracy with seen and unseen data

Traumatic Haemothorax: Diagnostic approaches and surgical management

  Background: Traumatic haemothorax is a collection of blood within the pleural cavity due to a penetrating or blunt injury leading to blood accumulation inside the pleural space with its respiratory and hemodynamic consequences. Objectives: Is to retrospectively study eighty victims of traumatic haemothorax regarding their age, gender, types of injury, and their sequel, as well as the methods of investigation, treatment modality (conservative or operative) and their outcome.   Patients and methods: The data of 80 patients with traumatic haemothorax admitted to Ibn AL-Nnafees teaching hospital from (1st of August 2018 to 30th. of September 2019), was collected. The data was analyzed according to age, gender, clinical features, associated findings, mechanism of injury, imaging, procedure performed, operative finding, post-operative outcome, morbidity, mortality and follow up. Result: Seventy-four (92.5%) of our patients were males, and 32 (40%) were between 21-30 year of age. Fifty-four patients (67.5%) were injured by bullet, stab or shell injury. The remaining 26 patients (32.5%) were affected by blunt injury. Sixty patients (75%) were treated successfully with tube thoracostomy only. Eight patients (10%) required emergency thoracotomy after the insertion of chest tube, ten patients (12.5%) needed elective thoracotomy for (clotted haemothorax, foreign body extraction or empyema), and the remaining two patients (2.5%) presented with minimal haemothorax and didn’t need any intervention. Sixty-two of our patients (77.5%) were discharged well within 7 days. Those with air leak or who needed thoracotomy (elective or emergency) had longer hospitalization periods. Only one patient with empyema needed to stay more than 30 days. Sixty-nine (86.3%) of our patients were discharged well, while complication occurred in three patients (3.8%) with air leak, two (2.5%) ended with empyema and four patients (5%) with clotted haemothorax. Two patients (2.5%) died due to sever uncontrolled bleeding. Conclusion: Most of the patients with traumatic haemothorax were simply managed by tube thoracostomy only. In haemodynamically unstable patients, no time should be wasted for investigations and a resuscitative thoracotomy can save the patient’s life. Rapid assessment and early intervention will save the life of patient with traumatic haemothorax

An enhanced error model for EKF-based tightly-coupled integration of GPS and land vehicle’s motion sensors

Reduced inertial sensor systems (RISS) have been introduced by many researchers as a low-cost, low-complexity sensor assembly that can be integrated with GPS to provide a robust integrated navigation system for land vehicles. In earlier works, the developed error models were simplified based on the assumption that the vehicle is mostly moving on a flat horizontal plane. Another limitation is the simplified estimation of the horizontal tilt angles, which is based on simple averaging of the accelerometers’ measurements without modelling their errors or tilt angle errors. In this paper, a new error model is developed for RISS that accounts for the effect of tilt angle errors and the accelerometer’s errors. Additionally, it also includes important terms in the system dynamic error model, which were ignored during the linearization process in earlier works. An augmented extended Kalman filter (EKF) is designed to incorporate tilt angle errors and transversal accelerometer errors. The new error model and the augmented EKF design are developed in a tightly-coupled RISS/GPS integrated navigation system. The proposed system was tested on real trajectories’ data under degraded GPS environments, and the results were compared to earlier works on RISS/GPS systems. The findings demonstrated that the proposed enhanced system introduced significant improvements in navigational performance

HIRA directly targets the enhancers of selected cardiac transcription factors during in vitro differentiation of mouse embryonic stem cells

HIRA is a histone chaperone known to modulate gene expression through the deposition of H3.3. Conditional knockout of Hira in embryonic mouse hearts leads to cardiac septal defects. Loss of function mutation in HIRA, together with other chromatin modifiers, was found in patients with congenital heart diseases. However, the effects of HIRA on gene expression at earlier stages of cardiogenic mesoderm differentiation have not yet been studied. Differentiation of mouse embryonic stem cells (mESCs) towards cardiomyocytes mimics some of these early events and is an accepted model of these early stages. We performed RNA-Seq and H3.3-HA ChIP-seq on both WT and Hira-null mESCs and early cardiomyocyte progenitors of both genotypes. Analysis of RNA-seq data showed differential down regulation of cardiovascular development-related genes in Hira-null cardiomyocytes compared to WT cardiomyocytes. We found HIRA-dependent H3.3 deposition at these genes. In particular, we observed that HIRA influenced directly the expression of the transcription factors Gata6, Meis1 and Tbx2, essential for cardiac septation, through H3.3 deposition. We therefore identified new direct targets of HIRA during cardiac differentiation

INS/GPS/LiDAR integrated navigation system for urban and indoor environments using hybrid scan matching algorithm

This paper takes advantage of the complementary characteristics of Global Positioning System (GPS) and Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) to provide periodic corrections to Inertial Navigation System (INS) alternatively in different environmental conditions. In open sky, where GPS signals are available and LiDAR measurements are sparse, GPS is integrated with INS. Meanwhile, in confined outdoor environments and indoors, where GPS is unreliable or unavailable and LiDAR measurements are rich, LiDAR replaces GPS to integrate with INS. This paper also proposes an innovative hybrid scan matching algorithm that combines the feature-based scan matching method and Iterative Closest Point (ICP) based scan matching method. The algorithm can work and transit between two modes depending on the number of matched line features over two scans, thus achieving efficiency and robustness concurrently. Two integration schemes of INS and LiDAR with hybrid scan matching algorithm are implemented and compared. Real experiments are performed on an Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV) for both outdoor and indoor environments. Experimental results show that the multi-sensor integrated system can remain sub-meter navigation accuracy during the whole trajectory

Adaptive covariance estimation method for LiDAR-Aided multi-sensor integrated navigation systems

The accurate estimation of measurements covariance is a fundamental problem in sensors fusion algorithms and is crucial for the proper operation of filtering algorithms. This paper provides an innovative solution for this problem and realizes the proposed solution on a 2D indoor navigation system for unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) that fuses measurements from a MEMS-grade gyroscope, speed measurements and a light detection and ranging (LiDAR) sensor. A computationally efficient weighted line extraction method is introduced, where the LiDAR intensity measurements are used, such that the random range errors and systematic errors due to surface reflectivity in LiDAR measurements are considered. The vehicle pose change is obtained from LiDAR line feature matching, and the corresponding pose change covariance is also estimated by a weighted least squares-based technique. The estimated LiDAR-based pose changes are applied as periodic updates to the Inertial Navigation System (INS) in an innovative extended Kalman filter (EKF) design. Besides, the influences of the environment geometry layout and line estimation error are discussed. Real experiments in indoor environment are performed to evaluate the proposed algorithm. The results showed the great consistency between the LiDAR-estimated pose chan