Factors affecting the outcome of community-acquired pneumonia among the patients hospitalized in Beheshti hospital (Kashan-Iran)

Background: Community-acquired pneumonia (CAP) is a common infectious disease with high morbidity and mortality. The goal of this study was to evaluate the factors affecting the outcome of pneumonia among the Beheshti hospital patients. Materials and Methods: This cohort study was done on pneumonia patients (n=140) in Kashan Beheshti hospital during 2014-2015. A questionnaire consisting the demographic, clinical and paraclinical findings and outcomes was filled-out. Results: Eighty three (59.3) out of 140 patients were male and 57(40.7) women. The majority of cases were ≥50 years old (mean age 60.02±1.70) .There was a history of diabetes in 54(38.6) .The most common signs and symptoms were coughing and the lung rales. The ninty-one and 9 of the cases were improved and complicated condition, respectively. The complication were: pleural effusion (77), empiyema (15) and abscess (8).There was positive CRP (100); increased ESR (82) and leukocytosis (80). While, there was no statistical association between the sex, age and clinical symptoms with the disease complication and outcome, there was a significant correlation between the first BS, HbA1C, CRP, duration of hospitalization, radiographic pattern and diabetes with disease outcome. Conclusion: Considering the association between the diabetes in one side and some factors (outcome of pneumonia, duration of hospitalization, history of pneumonia, times of admission, BS at admission, HbA1c, bilateral involvement, leukocytosis, increased ESR, CRP and CURB 65, the diabetes should be considered as an important factor affecting the pneumonia outcome. The managed control of diabetes can improve the pneumonia outcome

Exogenous salicylic acid positively affects morpho-physiological and molecular responses of Impatiens walleriana plants grown under drought stress

The aim of this experiment was to investigate the exogenous application of salicylic acid (SA) on morpho-physiological and molecular characteristics of Impatiens walleriana plants grown under water deficit stress. Three levels of soil water contents (95, 85, and 75% of field capacity; FC) and three levels of SA (0, 1, and 2 mM) were applied on two impatient cultivars (‘Tempo’ and ‘Salmon’). The results showed that increasing water deficit stress negatively affected growth and flowering characteristics. On the contrary, the foliar application of SA reduced the adverse effect of water deficit stress and improved growth and ornamental plant attributes. Water deficit increased the amount of electrolyte leakage (EL), malondialdehyde (MDA), peroxidase (POD) and ascorbate peroxidase (APX) activities; and proline content. The expression of the gene encoding for Δ1-pyrroline-5-carboxylate synthetase (P5CS) was slightly increased under control treatment (95% FC + SA 0 mM) and then significantly increased at 75% FC and after the SA treatments. The expression pattern of P5CR (Δ1-pyrroline-5-carboxylate reductase gene) was similar to that of P5CS, with differences in terms of intensity. The application of SA reduced the amount of EL and MDA through increased antioxidant activities and water balance. Overall, the results of this study showed that ‘Salmon’ cultivar was able to tolerate drought stress conditions better than ‘Tempo.’ The application of 2 mM SA increased growth and physiological indices in drought-stressed impatient, mitigating the detrimental effects of water deficit in this important ornamental species

Revising the hygroscopicity of inorganic sea salt particles

This is the final version of the article. Available from Springer Nature via the DOI in this record.Sea spray is one of the largest natural aerosol sources and plays an important role in the Earth's radiative budget. These particles are inherently hygroscopic, that is, they take-up moisture from the air, which affects the extent to which they interact with solar radiation. We demonstrate that the hygroscopic growth of inorganic sea salt is 8-15% lower than pure sodium chloride, most likely due to the presence of hydrates. We observe an increase in hygroscopic growth with decreasing particle size (for particle diameters <150 nm) that is independent of the particle generation method. We vary the hygroscopic growth of the inorganic sea salt within a general circulation model and show that a reduced hygroscopicity leads to a reduction in aerosol-radiation interactions, manifested by a latitudinal-dependent reduction of the aerosol optical depth by up to 15%, while cloud-related parameters are unaffected. We propose that a value of κs=1.1 (at RH=90%) is used to represent the hygroscopicity of inorganic sea salt particles in numerical models.P.Z. was partially financed by an Advanced Postdoc.Mobility fellowship of the Swiss National Science Foundation (grant no. P300P2_147776). M.E.S., C.L. and I.R. were financed by the Nordic Center of Excellence on Cryosphere-Atmosphere-Cloud-Climate-Interactions (NCoE CRAICC) and the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsradet). O.V. and A.V. were supported by the Academy of Finland Centre of Excellence (grant no. 272041) and The Doctoral School of the University of Eastern Finland. J.C.C. and M.G. received financial support from the European Research Commission via the ERC grant ERC-CoG 615922-BLACARAT. A.N. acknowledges support from a Georgia Power Scholar chair and a Cullen-Peck faculty fellowship. S.B. and M.M.-F. acknowledge funding by the Swiss National Science Foundation (grant no. 200020_146760/1). I. Tegen (TROPOS, Germany) is acknowledged for providing help with the sea spray source functions. We thank D. Eklöf and Z. Bacsik from the Department of Materials and Environmental Chemistry at Stockholm University for their assistance in the pycnometre and Fourier transform infrared spectrometer measurements. The ECHAM-HAMMOZ model is developed by a consortium composed of ETH Zurich, Max Planck Institut für Meteorologie, Forschungszentrum Jülich, University of Oxford, the Finnish Meteorological Institute and the Leibniz Institute for Tropospheric Research, and managed by the Center for Climate Systems Modeling (C2SM) at ETH Zurich

The effect of fan speed control system on the inlet air temperature uniformity in a solar dryer

Introduction: Drying process of agricultural products, fruits and vegetables are highly energy demanding and hence are the most expensive postharvest operation. Nowadays, the application of control systems in different area of science and engineering plays a key role and is considered as the important and inseparable parts of any industrial process. The review of literature indicates that enormous efforts have been donefor the intelligent control of solar driers and in this regard some simulation models are used through computer programming. However, because of the effect of air velocity on the inlet air temperature in dryers, efforts have been made to control the fan speed based ont he temperature of the absorber plate in this study, and the behavior of this system was compared with an ordinary dryer without such a control system. Materials and methods: In this study, acabinet type solar dryer with forced convection and 5kg capacity of fresh herbs was used. The dryer was equipped with a fan in the outlet chamber (the chimney) for creating air flow through the dryer. For the purpose of research methods and automatic control of fan speed and for adjusting the temperature of the drying inlet air, a control system consisting of a series of temperature and humidity sensors and a microcontroller was designed. To evaluatethe effect of the system with fan speed control on the uniformity of air temperature in the drying chamber and hence the trend of drying process in the solar dryer, the dryer has been used with two different modes: with and without the control of fan speed, each in twodays (to minimize the errors) of almost the same ambient temperature. The ambient air temperature during the four days of experiments was obtained from the regional Meteorological Office. Some fresh mint plants (Mentha longifolia) directly harvested from the farm in the morning of the experiment days were used as the drying materials. Each experimental run continued for 9 hours, startingat 8:00 am and terminating at 17:00. To determine the moisture content for the purpose of observing and recording the drying process, the drying materials were sampled with one hour time step. The moisture contentwas determinedin the laboratory using the well- known method of oven drying which is presented elsewhere. Results and discussion: Since the ambient air temperature during the four days of experimental runs was almost the same, the effect of ambient air temperature on the drying process was ignored. Considering the dryer inlet air temperature charts obtained in this study (Fig. 2 and Fig. 3), it can be concluded that for those tests using the fan speed control system, the outlet air temperature of the collector during drying period associated with very little variations, is compared with the no control mode runs. At the beginning of the day and also during the hours at the end of the day, due to a decrease in the temperature of the absorber plate compared to the middle of theday, the fan speed is reduced as air passes slowly through the absorber plate and hence the temperature rises. But in the middle of the day, with increasing the temperature of absorber plate, the speed of the fan is increased to provide sufficient airflow and to prevent the absorber plate from warming up. Inexperiments without fan speed control, the fan works with no limitation, and the temperature of the inlet air was changed with the temperature change in the absorber plate. The fan speed control system in addition to lowering the temperature changes in the outlet air, also increased the average outlet temperature about 3C, compared to the dryer without such a control system. During the twodays of experiments, the average ambient air temperature was 28C and at the sametime the outlet air temperature was 40.6 and 40.8C, respectively. In twodays of no control system, the average temperature of the ambient air was 28.5 and 28C and at the sametime the outlet air temperature was 38 and 37.8C, respectively. The results showed that with fan speed control mode the variation of inlet air temperature of the drying chamber was more limited and remained within the range of 39 to 42 and 40 to 42°C during the two experimental days, respectively. However, without fan speed control, the system exhibited a wider variation of inlet drying air temperature and limited within the range of 33 to 44 and 32 to 43°C. Furthermore, with fan speed control in a solar dryer, along with more uniformity in moisture content, the drying rate may speed up and with further decrease in final moisture content up to 8%, when compared to a system with no fan speed control. Conclusions: The average temperatures of the outlet air of collector in two days with fan speed control system, were 40.6 and 40.8°C while in the system without the fan speed control, were 38 and 37.8, respectively. This clearly indicates that the system control could increase the temperature of the collector outlet. The dryer was also able to control the fan speed during the 9hours of drying mint with initial moisture content of 85% (w.b) and to reduce it to about 24.5 and 25.5%, during the two experimental days, respectively. While the corresponding values without the use of a control system were 33.5 and 33.5%, respectively. In other words, in the experiments with the use of control system, the final moisture content was about 8% lower than the moisture content of materials dried without such a system. Furthermore, the control system reduces the volume of air required by the system and hence speeds up the drying process

Effect of PRD Deficit-irrigation Method and Growth Stabilizer on Yield, Yield Components and Water Use Efficiency of Safflower

While Iran is confronted with deficiency of fresh water resources, raising agricultural water use efficiency (WUE) is inevitable. A management method which could be effective in increasing agricultural WUE is PRD irrigation method. In PRD method, half of the root zone is irrigated and the other half is kept dry intermittently. The objective of this research was to study yield, yield components and WUE of safflower, using PRD irrigation method and a growth stabilizer in two soil textures. The factorial experiment, based on complete random design and three replications, included three irrigation methods (T1, complete irrigation T2, PRD with barrier T3, PRD without barrier), two levels of stabilizer (B1, spraying sodium salicylate and B2, without spraying sodium salicylate) and two soil textures (S1, clay loam and S2, sandy loam). Results showed that the PRD method in T2 treatment decreased plant height by 54.1%, number of heads by 68%, 1000-seed weight by 32%, plant dry-weight by 345, seed yield by 30%, harvest index by 17.6% and water consumption by 50%, as compared with T1 treatment. But WUE was increased by 35%. WUE of T3 treatment was 18.5% less than T2 treatment. Seed yield in sandy loam soil (8.8 g per plant) was more than seed yield of clay loam soil (3.8 g per plant). Application of growth stabilizer in T1, T2 and T3 treatments increased WUE by 14.3, 7.1 and 8.7%, respectively, as compared to non-sprayed treatments. In general, the PRD irrigation method and spraying sodium salicylate on the plants enhanced WUE of safflower in sandy loam soil. Implementation of this irrigation method in the field needs further investigations

Genetic algorithm based on optimization of neural network structure for fault diagnosis of the clutch retainer mechanism of MF 285 tractor

Introduction The diagnosis of agricultural machinery faults must be performed at an opportune time, in order to fulfill the agricultural operations in a timely manner and to optimize the accuracy and the integrity of a system, proper monitoring and fault diagnosis of the rotating parts is required. With development of fault diagnosis methods of rotating equipment, especially bearing failure, the security, performance and availability of machines has been increasing. In general, fault detection is conducted through a specific procedure which starts with data acquisition and continues with features extraction, and subsequently failure of the machine would be detected. Several practical methods have been introduced for fault detection in rotating parts of machineries. The review of the literature shows that both Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) and Support Vector Machines (SVM) have been used for this purpose. However, the results show that SVM is more effective than Artificial Neural Networks in fault detection of such machineries. In some smart detection systems, incorporating an optimized method such as Genetic Algorithm in the Neural Network model, could improve the fault detection procedure. Consequently, the fault detection performance of neural networks may also be improved by combining with the Genetic Algorithm and hence will be comparable with the performance of the Support Vector Machine. In this study, the so called Genetic Algorithm (GA) method was used to optimize the structure of the Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) for fault detection of the clutch retainer mechanism of Massey Ferguson 285 tractor. Materials and Methods The test rig consists of some electro mechanical parts including the clutch retainer mechanism of Massey Ferguson 285 tractor, a supporting shaft, a single-phase electric motor, a loading mechanism to model the load of the tractor clutch and the corresponding power train gears. The data acquisition section consists of a data analyzer (PCA-40), a personal computer, a piezoelectric accelerometer (VMI-102, DT-2234B), a tachometer and two rubber vibration absorbing elements are located between the rig’s components and the plate holder. An evaluation function was employed in order to achieve the optimal structure of neural network models by selecting the number of layers, number of cells in the layers, transfer function, training function, learning functions, performance function, and number of epochs, in such a way that the MSE of the calculated output error was minimal. The data were collected by means of the accelerometer sensor attached on the clutch mechanism, with three different working conditions (normal condition, with worn bearing, and with worn shaft), and three rotational speeds including: 1000 rpm, 1500 rpm and 2000 rpm. The Wavelet Packet Transform (WPT) was applied on the data-set for features vector extraction and the principle component analyses (PCA) was applied for dimension reduction of the features vector. The signal processing and the features extraction are the most important characteristics of the monitoring methodology, by which the working condition of the machine can be determined. These characteristics may be acquired by transforming the signals from the time domain to the frequency domain and MATLAB software is used for this purpose. This software receives the vibration data (time series of output voltage) which are in Excel files format. To remove the noise a suitable filtering procedure was used and finally the statistical parameters of time - frequency were calculated. Results and Discussion To verify the accuracy of the Genetic Algorithm model, the required data were collected from the training and testing steps of the Neural Network. For this purpose, the statistical parameters such as mean squared error (MSE), mean absolute error (MAE) and correlation coefficient (r) were used. The optimal parameters of the neural network obtained for the family of Db4. A trial and error procedure was used to minimize the mean square error of the network output and the desired amount of training step. During the training step, four neural networks including Db4, Db30, Db35 and Db40 achieved a gradient descent weight in the learning bias and four neural networks including Db9, Db15, Db20 and Db25 achieved a gradient descent with momentum weight in the learning bias. The two of the achieved neural networks including Db4, Db20 have circular logarithm function and the remaining networks have annular hyperbolic tangent transfer function. The most appropriate networks configuration was acquired when the network exhibited the minimal error with the training and testing data sets. The results show that the highest accuracy of the GA-ANN Artificial neural networks for all rotational speeds (1000, 1500 and 2000 rpm), and working conditions (intact gear and shaft, damaged bearing and worn shaft) observed for the network family of Db4. The highest error observed for the family of Db20 with MSE of 0.011. Conclusions Artificial neural networks can somewhat think and make decisions similar to an expert person. In this project in order to predict the occurrence of a failure of the clutch mechanism of MF 285 tractor, the experimental data were obtained using some sensors, and the data were transferred to a computer by means of a data analytical. By training of the neural networks, the errors were identified separately. The output data from the combined Neural Network and Genetic Algorithm shows that the performance of the prediction model is enhanced. Based on the experiments and calculations, the best data set belongs to the family of Db4 network with the least MSE equal to 4.09E-07 and r equal to 0.99999, indicating that the model could precisely detect the faulty bearings or shafts