A study to explore the expressed needs of ten primiparous mothers during labour and delivery

Thesis (M.S.)--Boston Universit

Automatic Classification of Bright Retinal Lesions via Deep Network Features

The diabetic retinopathy is timely diagonalized through color eye fundus images by experienced ophthalmologists, in order to recognize potential retinal features and identify early-blindness cases. In this paper, it is proposed to extract deep features from the last fully-connected layer of, four different, pre-trained convolutional neural networks. These features are then feeded into a non-linear classifier to discriminate three-class diabetic cases, i.e., normal, exudates, and drusen. Averaged across 1113 color retinal images collected from six publicly available annotated datasets, the deep features approach perform better than the classical bag-of-words approach. The proposed approaches have an average accuracy between 91.23% and 92.00% with more than 13% improvement over the traditional state of art methods.Comment: Preprint submitted to Journal of Medical Imaging | SPIE (Tue, Jul 28, 2017

Shelf Life and Quality Attributes Of Fresh Beef Infused With Organic Acids.

Fresh beef is a highly perishable food. It has a shelf life of one day at ambient temperature and a few days at refrigerated temperature. This study was conducted with the objective of extending the shelf life of fresh beef by infusing organic acids such as citric, tartaric, acetic and lactic acids, and combination of the organic acids with sodium chloride. Fresh beef (longissmus do@ purchased from the local market were sliced and were infused with citric, acetic, lactic and tartaric acids in concentration of 0.5%, 0.75% and 1 %, and combination of 1.00% of citric and acetic acids with and without sodium chloride by placing samples in vacuum desiccators and pulling the vacuum to 29.5 in. Hg. for 20 min.,. All samples were packed in vacuum packs (22 (L) x 18 (w) crn. and stored at S°C for 28 days. pH, A, Total Plate Count (TPC), Thiobarbaturic acid values, Hunter colour values , instrumental texture, proximate composition were determined. The pH values of treated samples dropped from the initial pH of 5.30 (untreated) to 4. 20 - 4. 47 and upon storage, the pH values of all sampies increased gradually. The TPC values were lower than 10' CFUlg on day 16, 20 and 28 in samples treated with 0.5%, 0.75% and 1.00% acids, respectively. The proximate com p s iti on of treated samples was affected by infusion process. The instrumental texture of fresh beef was harder upon treatment. The maximum shelf life of treated beef was 12 - 24 days for samples treated with 0.5% of all acids, 16 - 24 days for samples treated with 0.75% and 20 - 28 for samples treated with 1.00%. Citric acid in concentration of 1.00% gave the best effect which was followed by acetic acid. In citric and acetic acids and citric and acetic acids with sodium chloride combinations, the later in the ratio of 2:1 was more effective in decreasing the initial pH of fresh beef immediately after infusion. Increasing concentration of NaCl in the infusion solution resulted in the smaller decrease in the pH values. The TPC value was observed in samples treated with 2:1 citric: acetic acids. The growth of S.aureus and E.coli 0157:H7 were significantly (B0.05) decreased by 0.85 loglo and 0.73 logto, respectively. The initial thiobarbituric acid value in untreated fresh beef was 0.735 mg MDNkg which significantly (pc 0.05) decreased in all treated samples. At the end of storage study, lowest TBA values were obtained in samples treated with 2:l citric and acetic. The increase in the addition of NaCl caused a parallel increased in TBA values. For colour, Hunter 'b' and 'L' values increased with storage time while 'a' decreased significantly (R0.05). The processed beef burger during chilled storage had a storage life of 8 days

Peranan pedagogi dan atribut persembahan video sebagai bahan bantu pengajaran didaktik bagi pemasangan dan pendawaian elektrik di Kolej Vokasiaonal

Pengajaran didaktik bagi kursus pemasangan dan pendawaian elektrik merupakan suatu perkara yang rumit kerana melibatkan langkah kerja yang teliti disamping perlu mematuhi langkah-langkah keselamatan khusus. Kesilapan teknik dan prosedur akan mengakibatkan bahaya dan pembaziran ke atas bahan mentah. Oleh yang demikian, kajian ini adalah untuk meneroka peranan pedagogi dan atribut persembahan video sebagai bahan bantu pengajaran didaktik amali pemasangan dan pendawaian elektrik di kolej vokasional. Kajian kes dengan menggunakan kaedah kualitatif menggunakan temubual separa berstruktur telah dilaksanakan melibatkan pakar Teknologi Elektrik dari kolej vokasional. Analisis data tematik secara deduktif digunakan untuk meneroka elemen-elemen peranan pedagogi dan atribut persembahan video bagi pengajaran didaktik amali pemasangan dan pendawaian elektrik. Dapatan menunjukkan, terdapat empat domain utama peranan pedagogi video iaitu kognitif, pengalaman, afektif dan kemahiran manakala enam atribut persembahan video yang ditemui iaitu variasi tayangan, slow motion, kehidupan nyata, extreme close up, kronologi dan peralihan sisipan. Implikasinya, peranan pedagogi dan atribut persembahan video ini dapat menjadi panduan kepada tenaga pengajar Kementerian Pendidikan Malaysia untuk pembangunan bahan berbantu video bagi pengajaran dan pembelajaran amali pemasangan dan pendawaian elektrik

Fault tolerant radiation monitoring system using wireless sensor and actor network in a nuclear facility

In nuclear facilities, the reading of the sensors is very important in the assessments of the system state. The existence of an abnormal state could be caused by a failure in the sensor itself instead of a failure in the system. So, being unable to identify the main cause of the “abnormal state” and take proper actions may end in unnecessary shutdown for the nuclear facility that may have expensive economic consequences. That is why, it is extremely important for a supervision and control system to identify the case where the failure in the sensor is the main cause for the existence of an abnormal state. In this paper, a system based on a wireless sensor network is proposed to monitor the radiation levels around and inside a nuclear facility. A new approach for validating the sensor readings is proposed and investigated using the Castalia simulator

Antioxidant Role of Vitamin C in Alleviating the Reproductive Toxicity of Lead Acetate in Male Rats

Environmental pollution with heavy metals represents global problem. One of these heavy metals is the lead acetate that emits from many industries such as paint, ceramics, lead containing pipes and plastics led to a manifold rise in the occurrence of free lead in biological systems and the environment. Exposure to lead acetate affects most of the body’s organs especially testes since it has a unique vascular system. Therefore, the present study aimed to evaluate the protective effect of vitamin C against lead acetate induced testicular toxicity in rats. Thirty male adult albino rats were used in this study. They were equally divided into three groups; group I "control group", group II "lead acetate treated group" and group III "lead acetate and vitamin C treated group". Administration of lead acetate (20 mg /kg body weight for 8 successive weeks) resulted in a significant decrease in serum level of testosterone. It also led to a significant increase in the testicular tissue homogenate concentration of MDA and a significant decrease in GSH concentration and catalase activity. Administration of vitamin C (20 mg/kg body weight) with lead acetate for 8 successive weeks succeeded in improving semen quality and antioxidant enzyme concentrations of testes. It can be concluded that lead acetate testicular toxicity in rats led to disturbance in serum level of the main male reproductive hormone and increased testicular contents of oxidative markers and decreased the antioxidant markers. The use of vitamin C improved these changes.  &nbsp