Radiologic Manifestations of Patients with Smear Positive Pulmonary Tuberculosis in Zabol

Abstract: Background & Aims: Tuberculosis is one of the most important causes of mortality in the world and if it is not treated, 50 – 65% of patients would die in five years. Chest X-ray has an important role in the diagnosis of TB and early diagnosis and treatment prevent tuberculosis transmission. In this study we evaluated radiologic manifestations of patients with smear positive pulmonary tuberculosis in Zabol. Method: In this cross – sectional study, 325 patients with smear positive pulmonary tuberculosis from March 2004 to March 2005 were evaluated. Radiologic findings were recorded in a questionnaire and analyzed. Results: From 325 patients with smear positive pulmonary tuberculosis, 116(35.7%) were male and 209(64.3%) were female.The most frequent involved site was left upper lobe [175(53.8%)] followed by right upper lobe [134(41.2%)]. The most frequent radiologic finding was bronchopneumonia with 242 cases (74.4%). Patchy consolidation in 99 patients (30.4%), cavitary lesion in 68 ones (20.9%) and pleural effusion in 35 patients (10.7%) were observed. In 8 cases (2.4%) CXRs were normal. After six months treatment and according to CXRs, 90 patients (27.7%) recovered completely, 169 cases (52%) had slight recovery and 66 patients (20.3%) did not have any changes. Conclusion: Pulmonary upper lobes were the most frequent involved sites. Since pulmonary TB has different radiologic manifestations and chest X-ray has an important role in the early diagnosis and preventing transmission, careful attention to radiologic manifestations especially in upper lobes and considering TB as one of the differential diagnosis are highly recommended. Keywords: Pulmonary Tuberculosis, Sputum, Radiography, Thoraci

Comparing the efficiency of unmodified dried sludge adsorbents and those modified via chemical and microwave methods in removing 2,4-dinitrophenol from aqueous solutions

2,4-dinitrophenol (DNP) is found in small amounts in the effluent of many wastewater treatment plants. The contamination of drinking water with this pollutant, even in trace amounts, causes toxicity, health problems, and unfavorable taste and odor. This study aims to compare the efficiency of non-modified and modified dried sludge adsorbents in removing 2,4 DNP from aqueous solutions. The results of 2,4DNP removal by high-performance liquid chromatography method at the wavelength of 360 nm in a batch mode were obtained by changing the influential factors including contact time, pH, initial concentration of the contaminant, and adsorbent dosage. Eventually, the results were analyzed by kinetic and isotherm models. In this research, the optimal time was obtained as 60 min and pH as seven for all three adsorbents. The results showed that the removal percentage increases by rising adsorbent dosage and reducing contaminant concentration. The correlation coefficient value of linear and non-linear led that in kinetic studies, it follows the pseudo-second order model. In contrast, in isotherm studies, examining linear and non-linear models of isotherms showed that the data for every three types of adsorbents follow the Freundlich model well. The adsorption process is highly dependent on pH and affects the adsorbent surface properties, ionization degree, and removal percentage. At high pH, hydroxide ions (OH) compete with 2,4 DNP molecules for the adsorption sites. The adsorption occurs quickly and gradually reaches a constant value because, over time, the adsorption sites are occupied until reaching a saturated limit. By increasing the adsorbent dosage, the adsorption percentage increased significantly, which is due to the fact that higher amounts of adsorbent cause more adsorption sites. © 2020, Springer Nature Switzerland AG

Social Roles and Baseline Proxemic Preferences for a Domestic Service Robot

© The Author(s) 2014. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits any use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and the source are credited. The work described in this paper was conducted within the EU Integrated Projects LIREC (LIving with Robots and intEractive Companions, funded by the European Commission under contract numbers FP7 215554, and partly funded by the ACCOMPANY project, a part of the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013) under grant agreement n287624The goal of our research is to develop socially acceptable behavior for domestic robots in a setting where a user and the robot are sharing the same physical space and interact with each other in close proximity. Specifically, our research focuses on approach distances and directions in the context of a robot handing over an object to a userPeer reviewe

Municipal solid waste management during COVID-19 pandemic: effects and repercussions

The COVID-19 pandemic has an adverse effect on the environment. This epidemic�s effect on the waste composition and management and the impacts of municipal solid waste management (MSWM) on disease transmission or controlling are considered a compelling experience of living in the COVID-19 pandemic that can effectively control the process. This systematic review research was conducted to determine the effects of COVID-19 on the quantity of waste and MSWM. Searches were conducted in three databases (using keywords covid 19, coronaviruses, and waste), and among the published articles from 2019 to 2021, 56 ones were selected containing information on the quantity and waste management during the COVID-19 pandemic. The results showed that COVID-19 caused the quantity variation and composition change of MSW. COVID-19 also has significant effects on waste recycling, medical waste management, quantity, and littered waste composition. On the other hand, the COVID-19 pandemic has changed waste compounds� management activities and waste generation sources. Recognizing these issues can help plan MSWM more efficiently and reduce virus transmission risk through waste. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature

Application of Linear Discriminant Analysis in Dimensionality Reduction for Hand Motion Classification

The classification of upper-limb movements based on surface electromyography (EMG) signals is an important issue in the control of assistive devices and rehabilitation systems. Increasing the number of EMG channels and features in order to increase the number of control commands can yield a high dimensional feature vector. To cope with the accuracy and computation problems associated with high dimensionality, it is commonplace to apply a processing step that transforms the data to a space of significantly lower dimensions with only a limited loss of useful information. Linear discriminant analysis (LDA) has been successfully applied as an EMG feature projection method. Recently, a number of extended LDA-based algorithms have been proposed, which are more competitive in terms of both classification accuracy and computational costs/times with classical LDA. This paper presents the findings of a comparative study of classical LDA and five extended LDA methods. From a quantitative comparison based on seven multi-feature sets, three extended LDA-based algorithms, consisting of uncorrelated LDA, orthogonal LDA and orthogonal fuzzy neighborhood discriminant analysis, produce better class separability when compared with a baseline system (without feature projection), principle component analysis (PCA), and classical LDA. Based on a 7-dimension time domain and time-scale feature vectors, these methods achieved respectively 95.2% and 93.2% classification accuracy by using a linear discriminant classifier

An Autonomous Proxemic System for a Mobile Companion Robot

This paper presents an Autonomous Proxemic System (APS) for a mobile robot. It detects people in the surroundings and manipulates the robot’s motions to approach them keeping an acceptable proxemic distance. The APS sensing functions include face and upper body detection, leg detection, and motion detection using camera, laser, and infra-red sensors respectively. The control functions consist of approach a human and obstacle avoidance. APS uses the sonar and laser range devices to keep an accurate proxemic distance with the human. Initial system tests indicate that the APS keeps desired proxemic distances to within an acceptable error margin.LIREC Project, www.lirec.e