An Efficient feature selection algorithm for the spam email classification

The existing spam email classification systems are suffering from the problems of low accuracy due to the high dimensionality of the associated feature selection (FS) process. But being a global optimization process in machine learning, FS is mainly aimed at reducing the redundancy of dataset to create a set of acceptable and accurate results. This study presents the combination of Chaotic Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm with Artificial Bees Colony (ABC) for the reduction of features dimensionality in a bid to improve spam emails classification accuracy. The features for each particle in this work were represented in a binary form, meaning that they were transformed into binary using a sigmoid function. The features selection was based on a fitness function that depended on the obtained accuracy using SVM. The proposed system was evaluated for performance by considering the performance of the classifier and the selected features vectors dimension which served as the input to the classifier; this evaluation was done using the Spam Base dataset and from the results, the PSO-ABC classifier performed well in terms of FS even with a small set of selected features

Large Spatial Database Indexing with aX-tree

Spatial databases are optimized for the management of data stored based on their geometric space. Researchers through high degree scalability have proposed several spatial indexing structures towards this effect. Among these indexing structures is the X-tree. The existing X-trees and its variants are designed for dynamic environment, with the capability for handling insertions and deletions. Notwithstanding, the X-tree degrades on retrieval performance as dimensionality increases and brings about poor worst-case performance than sequential scan. We propose a new X-tree packing techniques for static spatial databases which performs better in space utilization through cautious packing. This new improved structure yields two basic advantage: It reduces the space overhead of the index and produces a better response time, because the aX-tree has a higher fan-out and so the tree always ends up shorter. New model for super-node construction and effective method for optimal packing using an improved str bulk-loading technique is proposed. The study reveals that proposed system performs better than many existing spatial indexing structure

Polypharmacy among patients with diabetes: a cross-sectional retrospective study in a tertiary hospital in Saudi Arabia

Abstract Patients with diabetes are at high risk for polypharmacy (ie, use of multiple medications) for treatment of diabetes, associated comorbidities and other coexisting conditions. This study aims to estimate the prevalence of polypharmacy and factors associated with polypharmacy among adult patients with diabetes.Methods A cross-sectional retrospective observational study of adults with diabetes, who visited the outpatient clinic of a tertiary teaching hospital in Saudi Arabia, was conducted. Data were extracted from the Electronic Health Record database for a period of 12 months (January– December 2016). Polypharmacy was defined as the cumulative use of five or more medications. Polypharmacy among adults with diabetes was measured by calculating the average number of medications prescribed per patient. A multivariable logistic regression model was used to examine the factors associated with polypharmacy. Results A total of 8932 adults with diabetes were included in this study. Of these, nearly 78% had polypharmacy which was more likely among women as compared with men and more likely among older adults (age ≥60 years) as compared with the adults. Also, polypharmacy was two times as likely among patients with coexisting cardiovascular conditions (adjusted OR (AOR)=2.89; 95% CI 2.54 to 3.29), respiratory disease (AOR=2.42; 95% CI 1.92 to 3.03) and mental health conditions (AOR=2.19; 95% CI 1.74 to 2.76), and three times as likely among patients with coexisting musculoskeletal disease (AOR=3.16; 95% CI 2.31 to 4.30) as compared with those without these coexisting chronic conditions categories. Conclusions Polypharmacy is common among patients with diabetes, with an even higher rate in older adults patients. Healthcare providers can help in detecting polypharmacy and in providing recommendations for simplifying medication regimens and minimising medications to enhance the outcome of diabetes care

Antimicrobial resistance in aerobic bacterial isolates from broiler lungs

Antibacterial resistant bacteria cause a big concern to poultry and to public health in general because some bacterial poultry pathogens can infect human or transfer their resistance ability to human pathogens. Non therapeutic use of antibacterial in poultry especially as growth promoters to increase feed conversion efficiency is thought to be one of the main causes of resistance. The study included pulmonary swab samples collected during necropsy from 120 poultry farms showing respiratory symptoms with mortality. The disc diffusion method for antibiotic sensitivity testing was performed and antibiotic disks for 21 antibiotics was used. The results showed that three antibacterials were sensitive to more than 50% of the isolates. The first is doxycycline and 69.9% of the isolates were sensitive. The second is Cefalexin with 60.5% sensitive isolates and third is Chloramphenicol with 55.2% sensitive isolates. In the rest of antibacterials, less than 50% were sensitive. Five isolates were found resistant to all antibacterials. Moreover, three samples were found negative with no bacterial growth. The present study concluded that 50% of the aerobic bacteria isolated from poultry lungs are resistant to 85% of the 21 antibiotics tested in the study

Lip-Listening: Mixing Senses to Understand Lips using Cross Modality Knowledge Distillation for Word-Based Models

In this work, we propose a technique to transfer speech recognition capabilities from audio speech recognition systems to visual speech recognizers, where our goal is to utilize audio data during lipreading model training. Impressive progress in the domain of speech recognition has been exhibited by audio and audio-visual systems. Nevertheless, there is still much to be explored with regards to visual speech recognition systems due to the visual ambiguity of some phonemes. To this end, the development of visual speech recognition models is crucial given the instability of audio models. The main contributions of this work are i) building on recent state-of-the-art word-based lipreading models by integrating sequence-level and frame-level Knowledge Distillation (KD) to their systems; ii) leveraging audio data during training visual models, a feat which has not been utilized in prior word-based work; iii) proposing the Gaussian-shaped averaging in frame-level KD, as an efficient technique that aids the model in distilling knowledge at the sequence model encoder. This work proposes a novel and competitive architecture for lip-reading, as we demonstrate a noticeable improvement in performance, setting a new benchmark equals to 88.64% on the LRW dataset.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2108.0354

Antioxidant Activity of Sesame Seed Lignans in Sunflower and Flaxseed Oils

This study investigated the antioxidant activity of crude lignan extracts and purified lignans (sesamin, sesamolin, and sesamol) in sunflower and flaxseed oils. Lignan extracts were prepared from roasted sesame seed oil (LRSO) and unroasted sesame seed oil (LUSO). Additionally, the individual lignans were purified from both oils. The crude extracts and purified lignans were added at concentrations of 0.01, 0.02 and 0.03% to the oils and stored at 25 and 65°C over time and peroxide values and thiobarbituric acid values were measured. Each oil showed an increase in oxidation over time, with the samples stored at 65°C exhibiting accelerated oxidation. In general, LRSO showed higher antioxidant activity than LUSO and the antioxidant activity was similar to the antioxidant activity of butylated hydroxytoluene (0.02% BHT) in both oils when used at concentrations of 0.02 and 0.03%. Sesamol showed the highest antioxidant activity of each of the purified lignans followed by sesamin and sesamolin respectively. Crude and purified sesame lignans may have potential applications as natural antioxidants in food systems

Influence of salivary conditioning and sucrose concentration on biofilm-mediated enamel demineralization

The acquired pellicle formation is the first step in dental biofilm formation. It distinguishes dental biofilms from other biofilm types. Objective: To explore the influence of salivary pellicle formation before biofilm formation on enamel demineralization. Methodology: Saliva collection was approved by Indiana University IRB. Three donors provided wax–stimulated saliva as the microcosm bacterial inoculum source. Acquired pellicle was formed on bovine enamel samples. Two groups (0.5% and 1% sucrose–supplemented growth media) with three subgroups (surface conditioning using filtered/pasteurized saliva; filtered saliva; and deionized water (DIW)) were included (n=9/subgroup). Biofilm was then allowed to grow for 48 h using Brain Heart Infusion media supplemented with 5 g/l yeast extract, 1 mM CaCl2.2H2O, 5% vitamin K and hemin (v/v), and sucrose. Enamel samples were analyzed for Vickers surface microhardness change (VHNchange), and transverse microradiography measuring lesion depth (L) and mineral loss (∆Z). Data were analyzed using two-way ANOVA. Results: The two-way interaction of sucrose concentration × surface conditioning was not significant for VHNchange (p=0.872), ∆Z (p=0.662) or L (p=0.436). Surface conditioning affected VHNchange (p=0.0079), while sucrose concentration impacted ∆Z (p<0.0001) and L (p<0.0001). Surface conditioning with filtered/pasteurized saliva resulted in the lowest VHNchange values for both sucrose concentrations. The differences between filtered/pasteurized subgroups and the two other surface conditionings were significant (filtered saliva p=0.006; DIW p=0.0075). Growing the biofilm in 1% sucrose resulted in lesions with higher ∆Z and L values when compared with 0.5% sucrose. The differences in ∆Z and L between sucrose concentration subgroups was significant, regardless of surface conditioning (both p<0.0001). Conclusion: Within the study limitations, surface conditioning using human saliva does not influence biofilm–mediated enamel caries lesion formation as measured by transverse microradiography, while differences were observed using surface microhardness, indicating a complex interaction between pellicle proteins and biofilm–mediated demineralization of the enamel surface

Influence of chemical and physical conditions on the production of bacteriocin by Aeromonas hydrophila

Aeromonas hydrophila have been isolated as a cause of a cute gastroenteritis in 23 (5.6%) of 410 patients. Other bacterial enteropathogens have been isolated from 387 patients with diarrhea, were 19 different strains. A. hydrophila occurred more commonly in children with acute diarrhea, the results showed that 18(78.26%) isolates of A. hydrophila found in children under 10 years old ,distributed to 10(43.47%) in male and 8(34.78%) in female ,and in adults with diarrhea 5 (21.73%). In the other hand, we noticed frequency of isolation was higher in male 14(60.86%) when compared with 9(39.14%) in female. Six strains of A. hydrophila have been observed to have bacteriocin activity against 12 of 23 different A. hydrophila ,as well as Staphylococcus aureas, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Escherichia coli, Enterobacter cloacea and Shigella dysenteria. The results showed Bacteriocin-like substances (BLS11) had isoinhibitory activity on 10 same A. hydrophila species and heteroinhibitory activity effects on all pathogenic bacterial strains used, while BLS5 showed isoinhibitory activity on 2 same A. hydrophila species and heteroinhibitory activity by effecting on gram negative only, and BLS3& BLS12 showed activity on E. coli isolates only, and none of BLS1& BLS10(isoinhibitory activity on 1 A.hydrophila respectively) had effect on all pathogenic bacteria. Among the standard laboratory media used Brain Heart Infusion broth (BHI) showed the maximum production and poor yields resulted from growth in Peptone Glyserol (PG) and Nutrient broth. We selected BLS11 to their wide range effect on same species and enteric pathogenic strains, to study the Influence of chemical and physical conditions on the production of BLS by A.hydrophila. The BLS11 preparations from A.hydrophila11 strains of A. hydrophila were tolerant to all three treatments of surfactant. In the other hand, effect of organic acid on BLS production BLS11 has been studied and showed no remarkable difference in zone of inhibition when used acetone as affecter element, while both of isopropanol and ethanol have narrow inhibition zone range when compared with control strain. These results indicated that most A. hydrophila might be harboring plasmid mediated bacteriocin like substance, and there are no relation between BLS production and number of plasmid bands present in bacteria

The Use of Fluorescence Technology Versus Visual and Tactile Examination in the Detection of Oral Lesions: A Pilot Study

PURPOSE: This study compared the effectiveness of the VELscope(R) Vx versus visual and tactile intraoral examination in detecting oral lesions in an adult, high risk population. METHODS: The pilot study compared the intra oral findings between 2 examination types. The sample was comprised of 30 participants who were addicted to either cigarettes or a dual addiction (cigarettes plus hookah). High risk population was defined as males who were current cigarette smokers or had a dual addiction. Two trained and experienced licensed dental hygienists conducted all examinations. Throughout the study, all visual and tactile intraoral examinations were conducted first by one dental hygienist first, followed by the VELscope(R) Vx fluorescence examinations by the second dental hygienist. All subjects received an inspection of the lips, labial and buccal mucosa, floor of the mouth, dorsal, ventral and lateral sides of the tongue, hard and soft palate, and visual inspection of the oropharynx and uvula. Both evaluations took place in 1 visit in the Dental Hygiene Research Center at Old Dominion University and external sites. All participants received oral cancer screening information, recommendations, referrals for tobacco cessation programs and brochures on the 2 types of examinations conducted. RESULTS: Participants were considered high risk based on demographics (current smokers and mostly males). Neither visual and tactile intraoral examination nor the VELscope(R) Vx examination showed positive lesions. No lesions were detected; therefore, no referrals were made. Data indicated the duration of tobacco use was significantly higher in cigarette smokers (14.1 years) than dual addiction smokers (5 years) (p\u3e0.005). The average numbers of cigarettes smoked per day were 13.5 compared to 14.2 cigarettes for dual addiction smokers. CONCLUSION: Results from this study suggest the visual and tactile intraoral examination produced comparative results to the VELscope(R) Vx examination. Findings from this study support that the VELscope(R) Vx is still considered an adjunct technology and cannot be used exclusively for oral cancer screening