Botulinum Toxin A Use in the Gastrointestinal Tract: A Reappraisal After Three Decades

The discovery of botulinum toxin A (BTX)\u27s therapeutic properties has led to studies evaluating its usefulness in multiple medical disorders. Its use in the gastrointestinal (GI) tract has been studied for 30 years. Multiple databases, including PubMed, AccessMedicine, ClinicalKey, Cochrane Library, Embase, and Medline, were used to review research from case series to randomized controlled trials on BTX use in the GI tract. This article reviews the current literature on the efficacy of BTX and the strength of recommendations for or against its use in various disorders, including cricopharyngeal dysphagia, achalasia, nonachalasia motility disorders, gastroparesis, obesity, sphincter of Oddi disorders, chronic anal fissure, chronic idiopathic anal pain, and anismus. The appeal of BTX comes from its simplicity of administration, good safety profile, and reliability in decreasing muscular tone. However, there are several drawbacks that limit its use, including the lack of long-term efficacy and/or limited data in many GI disorders

Arabic Text Summarization Challenges using Deep Learning Techniques: A Review

Text summarization is a challenging field in Natural Language Processing due to language modelisation and used techniques to give concise summaries.  Dealing with Arabic language does increase the challenge while taking into consideration the many features of the Arabic language, the lack of tools and resources for Arabic, and the Algorithms adaptation and modelisation. In this paper, we present several researches dealing with Arabic Text summarization applying different Algorithms on several Datasets. We then compare all these researches and we give a conclusion to guide researchers on their further work

Identifying learning style through eye tracking technology in adaptive learning systems

Learner learning style represents a key principle and core value of the adaptive learning systems (ALS). Moreover, understanding individual learner learning styles is a very good condition for having the best services of resource adaptation. However, the majority of the ALS, which consider learning styles, use questionnaires in order to detect it, whereas this method has a various disadvantages, For example, it is unsuitable for some kinds of respondents, time-consuming to complete, it may be misunderstood by respondent, etc. In the present paper, we propose an approach for automatically detecting learning styles in ALS based on eye tracking technology, because it represents one of the most informative characteristics of gaze behavior. The experimental results showed a high relationship among the Felder-Silverman Learning Style and the eye movements recorded whilst learning

Factors influencing cloud computing adoption in small medium enterprises

Cloud computing offers information technology (IT) infrastructure, platform, and various applications via the Internet with minimum start-up cost, network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources, and pay-per-use services. Although the potential for cloud computing is evident and much of the extant research has been carried out on cloud computing adoption, empirical studies on the factors that influence cloud computing adoption in the Malaysian Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) are, however, lacking. The objective of this study was to examine the factors that influence cloud computing adoption by the SMEs. We conducted a quantitative survey-based study to examine the relationship between perceived benefits, top management support, IT resources, external pressure, and cloud computing adoption. A free-form comment provided at the end of each section of the survey questionnaire was treated as qualitative data. We find that IT resources and external pressure significantly influence cloud computing adoption. Nonetheless, there is not enough evidence to support perceived benefits and top management support as significant factors of cloud computing adoption

A systematic reading in statistical translation: From the statistical machine translation to the neural translation models

Achieving high accuracy in automatic translation tasks has been one of the challenging goals for researchers in the area of machine translation since decades.Thus, the eagerness of exploring new possible ways to improve machine translation was always the matter for researchers in the field. Automatic translation as a key application in the natural language processing domain has developed many approaches, namely statistical machine translation and recently neural machine translation that improved largely the translation quality especially for Latin languages.They have even made it possible for the translation of some language pairs to approach human translation quality.In this paper, we present a survey of the state of the art of statistical translation, where we describe the different existing methodologies, and we overview the recent research studies while pointing out the main strengths and limitations of the different approaches

Redesign business model options for "University of the Future" and staying relevant in the fourth industrial revolution age

Several key studies have shown that the higher education sector is in need of new business models in order to stay relevant and sustainable in the New Digital Age. Pressures and drivers of change – funding, changes in the technology and Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR), digital socio-economy, and business model, to name a few – that demand institutional change by re-examine its existing business model and value proposition, if success is to be sustained over the long term. The digital changes are dynamic and complex. This paper adopted the design and system thinking approach. Strategy canvas with business modeling tools such as the Environmental Map (EM), Business Model Canvas (BMC) and Value Proposition Design Canvas (VPC) are modeling tools used to design, evaluate alternative business models and value propositions. The tools allows us to design business model options that create value for the business, and value propositions that create value for the customers, thus enabling the creation of sustainable businesses. In this paper we explore the use of business modeling tool to analyse, formulate, and design sustainable business models for the University of the Future (UotF) in facing the New Digital Age challenges and opportunities. Depending on the value proposition offered to targeted customer segments, this paper has established generic business model prototypes for UotF in the facing the challenges and opportunities created by the New Digital Age and 4IR. In our opinion these generic prototype options will help university decision makers, planners and relevant stakeholders to continuously enhance and customise sustainable, agile, and competitive business models

Inflammatory immune mediators and Plasmodium falciparum infection: a cross-sectional study among Sudanese patients with severe and uncomplicated malaria

Aim: A number of questions remain unanswered concerning how infected individuals regulate their immune response to Plasmodium falciparum (P. falciparum) parasites at varying levels of exposure. Due to the interactions of inflammatory mediators and cytokines with the P. falciparum parasite complex density, several mediators influence parasitaemia and may give some indications of disease severity and represent effective signs in clinical manifestations of malaria disease. Methods: In this study, various levels of immune response mediators of interleukin 8 (IL-8), tumor necrosis factor-beta (TNF-β, also known as lymphotoxin-α), interferon-gamma (IFN-γ), IL-6, and IL-10 were investigated to the different phases of infection with P. falciparum in hyperendemic states in Sudan (White Nile, Blue Nile). This study vetted the association between certain inflammatory mediators during malaria infection and parasite density. This study was based on a total of 108 cases, in which 86 patients (62.0%) were uncomplicated and (17.6%) were severe, all met the diagnostic criteria and were clinically admitted for malaria infections. Commercial enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) kits were employed to determine the inflammatory mediator’s serum concentration. Results: The analysis of data indicated that older infected children had substantially raised levels of IFN-γ (P < 0.05), among study groups, levels of IFN-γ, TNF-β, and IL-8 were strongly linked with the severity of malaria, in severe and uncomplicated cases (P < 0.001), IL-6 and IL-10 were significantly associated with severe malaria cases uniquely (P < 0.001). Furthermore, we reported a positive correlation between IL-8 and TNF-β during all infection cases (r = 0.760, P < 0.001). Additionally, in severe malaria cases IL-6 was positively correlated with IL-10 (r = 0.575, P = 0.010). Conclusions: Eliminating P. falciparum blood-stage infection needs effective, specific, and tuned immune response strategies, which may present in the mediator’s correlations and depend on the density of the infection. Besides the effective levels contribution of certain cytokines that play protective roles during different stages of an infection