An experimental investigation of laser scabbling of concrete

Laser scabbling of concrete is the process of removal of surface material using a high power laser beam. The main aim of this investigation was to establish an experimental procedure for assessing the effects of various parameters that may be critical for the effectiveness of the process, such as material composition and initial moisture content. The study shows that the key characteristics of the process can be detected by monitoring surface temperature variations. This experimental procedure is used to provide data on the effects of each parameter to explain the mechanisms that drive the process. The results suggest that scabbling is mainly driven by pore pressures in the cement paste, but strongly affected by other factors. Reducing permeability by adding PFA to the cement paste resulted in significant increase in volume removal; but reducing moisture content by air-drying of the material did not result in the expected reduction in volume removal

Neurogenic bladder in patients with traumatic spinal cord injury: Treatment and follow-up

Study design:Multi-center, cross-sectional study.Objectives:Our aim was to evaluate the treatment methods and follow-up of neurogenic bladder in patients with traumatic spinal cord injury retrospectively using a questionnaire.Setting: Turkey.Methods:Three hundred and thirty-seven patients who had spinal cord injury for at least 2 years were enrolled from six centers in the neurogenic bladder study group. They were asked to fill-out a questionnaire about treatments they received and techniques they used for bladder management.Results:The study included 246 male and 91 female patients with a mean age of 42±14 years. Intermittent catheterization ( IC) was performed in 77.9% of the patients, 3.8% had indwelling catheters, 13.8% had normal spontaneous micturition, 2.6% performed voiding maneuvers, 1.3% used diapers and 0.6% used condom catheters. No gender difference was found regarding the techniques used in bladder rehabilitation ( P>0.05). Overall, 63.2% of patients used anticholinergic drugs; anticholinergic drug use was similar between genders ( P>0.05). The most common anticholinergic drug used was oxybutynin ( 40.3%), followed by trospium ( 32.6%), tolterodine ( 19.3%) darifenacin ( 3.3%), propiverine ( 3.3%) and solifenacin ( 1.1%). The specialties of the physicians who first prescribed the anticholinergic drug were physiatrists ( 76.2%), urologists ( 22.1%) and neurologists ( 1.7%). Only four patients had previously received injections of botulinum-toxin-A into the detrusor muscle and three of them stated that their symptoms showed improvement. Most of the patients ( 77%) had regular follow-up examinations, including urine cultures, urinary system ultrasound and urodynamic tests, when necessary; the reasons for not having regular control visits were living distant from hospital ( 15.3%) and monetary problems ( 7.7%). Of the patients, 42.7% did not experience urinary tract infections ( UTI), 36.4% had bacteriuria but no UTI episodes with fever, 15.9% had 1-2 clinical UTI episodes per year and 5% had ≥3 clinical UTIs. The clinical characteristics of patients with and without UTI ( at least one symptomatic UTI during 1 year) were similar ( P>0.05). The frequency of symptomatic UTI was similar in patients using different bladder management techniques ( P>0.05).Conclusion:The most frequently used technique for bladder rehabilitation in patients with SCI was IC ( 77.9%). In all, 63.2% of patients used anticholinergic drugs, oxybutynin being the most commonly used drug. Also, 77% of patients had regular control visits for neurogenic bladder; 42.7% did not experience any UTIs. © 2014 International Spinal Cord Society

Interleukins and ischemic stroke: Effect of neutralization of rat il-6 bioactivity on the degree of ischemic cerebral damage caused by experimental middle cerebral artery occlusion in the rat

The purpose was to investigate the effect of neutralization of rat interleukin-6 (IL-6) bioactivity on the activity levels of Na-K/Mg adenosine-5 2-triphosphatase and superoxide dismutase, and the degree of infarct size in ischemic brain produced by experimental middle cerebral artery occlusion in the rat. Seventy adult male Wistar rats weighing 280 to 310g were used in this study. The animals were randomly allocated to groups: group I (n?10) consisted of normal controls, group II (sham-operated, n?20) underwent surgical exposure of the middle cerebral artery but no cauterization, and the remaining 40 rats were subjected to middle cerebral artery occlusion. Immediately after occlusion, each of these 40 rats was randomly assigned to either the occlusion-only group (group III, n?20) or the occlusion plus IL-6 antibody treatment group (group IV, n?20). All evaluations were performed in blinded fashion. Our data provide evidence that neutralization of IL-6 bioactivity correlates with less secondary damage in long-term treatment after focal cerebral ischemia in the rat. © 2008 by Lippincott Williams & Wilkins

Electrical Characterization of Interdigitated Humidity Sensors Based on CNT Modied Calixarene Molecules

In this study, we report on the optimization and characterization of chloroform soluble cali

Brucellar cervical spinal epidural abscess: A case report

Spinal epidural abscesses account for 1 or 2 of every 10,000 hospital admissions. Brucellosis is a zoonotic disease and still a major health problem in South America and in Mediterranean countries in both Europe and Africa. Spondylitis is one of the most frequent osteoarticular complications of Brucella infection, but cervical spine involvement is rare. In this paper, a 36-year-old man with cervical spinal brucellosis associated with epidural abscess formation and granulation tissue, and diagnosed serologically, is presented. Compression of spinal nerve roots and cord by epidural masses due to brucellar disc infection is a rare condition but should be kept in mind in differential diagnosis of cervical epidural abscess. © 2009 Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, Inc

Effect of IL-6 antibody on Na+-K+/Mg+2 ATPase and superoxide dismutase after experimental subarachnoid hemorrhage

OBJECT: The purpose was to investigate the effect of neutralizing interleukin (IL)-6 antibody treatment on the activity levels of Na-K/Mg adenosine-5'-triphosphatase (ATPase) and superoxide dismutase (SOD) in brain after experimental subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH) in the rat. METHODS: Seventy adult male Wistar rats weighing 280 to 310 g were used in this study. The animals were randomly allocated to groups: group 1 (n=10) consisted of normal controls; group 2 (n=20) underwent microsurgical exposure of the atlantooccipital membrane and normal saline injection into the cisterna magna, but no blood injection; and the remaining 40 rats were subjected to injection of the blood-cerebrospinal fluid mixture into the cisterna magna. Immediately after mixture injection, each of these 40 rats was randomly assigned to either the mixture injection-only group (group 3, n=20) or the mixture injection plus IL-6 antibody treatment group (group 4, n=20). RESULTS: Two doses of IL-6 antibody affected the levels of SOD and Na-K/Mg ATPase when testing was carried out on day 2 after mixture injection. On the other hand, administering 5 doses of the antibody resulted in a significant decrease in SOD level and a significant increase in Na-K/Mg-ATPase activity compared with those seen in the mixture injection-only subgroup on day 5 after experimental SAH. CONCLUSIONS: The results of this study show that IL-6 antibody may be a beneficial treatment for peroxidation damage in long term after experimental SAH. © 2009 Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, Inc

From social media analysis to ubiquitous event monitoring: The case of Turkish tweets

9th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (2017 : Sydney; Australia)The work described in this paper illustrates how social media is a valuable source of data which may be processed for informative knowledge discovery which may help in better decision making. We concentrate on Twitter as the source for the data to be processed. In particular, we extracted and captured tweets written in Turkish. We analyzed tweets online and real-time to determine most recent trending events, their location and time. The outcome may help predicting next hot events to be broadcasted in the news. It may also raise alert and warn people related to upcoming or ongoing disaster or an event which should be avoided, e.g., traffic jam, terror attacks, earthquake, flood, storm, fire, etc. To achieve this, a tweet may be labeled with more than one event. Named entity recognition combined with multinomial naive Bayes and stochastic gradient descent have been integrated in the process. The reported 95% success rate demonstrate the applicability and effectiveness of the proposed approach. © 2017 Association for Computing Machinery.ACM SIGMOD,Gemalto,IEEE Computer Society,IEEE TCDE,Springer Natur

Possible directions of human cord blood mononuclear cells differentiation in the regenerating rat liver

It is known that human cord blood hematopoietic stem cells (HSC) are able to differentiate into hepatocytes. This ability can be widely used in treatment of various liver diseases. However, there are some genetic diseases of liver, when the application of autologous stem cells is not possible. So it could be very helpful to develop methods of genetic modification of stem/progenitor cells. However, it should be proved that genetic modification does not change the properties of HSC. We performed partial hepatectomy for the white mongrel male rats and injected human umbilical cord blood mononuclear cells transfected by gene of green fluorescent protein (GFP) into the spleen. Paraffin sections of the liver were stained with antibodies to stem cell factor receptor, human leukocyte antigen, α-smooth muscle actin, enhanced GFP, cytokeratin 19, hepatocyte specific antigen, human α-fetoprotein. Also we used a double-immunohistochemical staining to detect expression of stem cell factor receptor and desmin, enhanced GFP and cytokeratin 19. Our study showed that human cord blood mononuclear cells transfected by gfp transplanted into the spleen of rats after partial hepatectomy migrated to the liver and acquired the phenotype of hepatocytes, cholangiocytes and sinusoidal cells. At the same time the differentiation of such transplanted cells into myofibroblasts, as it was previously shown, does not occur. Hepatoblasts and hepatocytes found in the liver of rats after transplantation of genetically modified and native cells express human hepatocyte specific antigen and α-fetoprotein that means they are functionally active. © Human stem cells institute, 2013