Canine Gouging: A Taboo Resurfacing in Migrant Urban Population.

This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Cosmopolitan cities have become a pool of migrants from different parts of the world, who carry their cultural beliefs and superstitions with them around the globe. Canine gouging is a kind of infant oral mutilation (IOM) which is widely practiced among rural population of Africa where the primary tooth bud of the deciduous canine is enucleated. The belief is that the life threatening illnesses in children like vomiting, diarrhoea, and fevers are caused by worms which infest on tooth buds. This case report is of a 15-year-old Somalian born boy, who presented at the dental institute with intermittent pain in his lower right permanent canine which was associated with a discharging intra oral buccal sinus. The tooth was endodontically treated and then restored with composite. General dental practitioners need to be vigilant when encountered with tooth presenting unusual morphology, unilateral missing tooth, and shift in the midline due to early loss of deciduous/permanent canines. Identification of any such dental mutilation practice will need further counselling of the individual and family members. It is the duty of every dental professional to educate and safeguard the oral and dental health of general public

Cross-layer MAC/routing protocol for reliable communication in Internet of Health Things

Internet of Health Things (IoHT) involves intelligent, low-powered, and miniaturized sensors nodes that measure physiological signals and report them to sink nodes over wireless links. IoHTs have a myriad of applications in e-health and personal health monitoring. Because of the data’s sensitivity measured by the nodes and power-constraints of the sensor nodes, reliability and energy-efficiency play a critical role in communication in IoHT. Reliability is degraded by the increase in packets’ loss due to inefficient MAC, routing protocols, environmental interference, and body shadowing. Simultaneously, inefficient node selection for routing may cause the depletion of critical nodes’ energy resources. Recent advancements in cross-layer protocol optimizations have proven their efficiency for packet-based Internet. In this article, we propose a MAC/Routing-based Cross-layer protocol for reliable communication while preserving the sensor nodes’ energy resource in IoHT. The proposed mechanism employs a timer-based strategy for relay node selection. The timer-based approach incorporates the metrics for residual energy and received signal strength indicator to preserve the vital underlying resources of critical sensors in IoHT. The proposed approach is also extended for multiple sensor networks, where sensor in vicinity are coordinating and cooperating for data forwarding. The performance of the proposed technique is evaluated for metrics like Packet Loss Probability, End-To-End delay, and energy used per data packet. Extensive simulation results show that the proposed technique improves the reliability and energy-efficiency compared to the Simple Opportunistic Routing protocol

Separating Stimulus-Induced and Background Components of Dynamic Functional Connectivity in Naturalistic fMRI

We consider the challenges in extracting stimulus-related neural dynamics from other intrinsic processes and noise in naturalistic functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Most studies rely on inter-subject correlations (ISC) of low-level regional activity and neglect varying responses in individuals. We propose a novel, data-driven approach based on low-rank plus sparse (L+S) decomposition to isolate stimulus-driven dynamic changes in brain functional connectivity (FC) from the background noise, by exploiting shared network structure among subjects receiving the same naturalistic stimuli. The time-resolved multi-subject FC matrices are modeled as a sum of a low-rank component of correlated FC patterns across subjects, and a sparse component of subject-specific, idiosyncratic background activities. To recover the shared low-rank subspace, we introduce a fused version of principal component pursuit (PCP) by adding a fusion-type penalty on the differences between the columns of the low-rank matrix. The method improves the detection of stimulus-induced group-level homogeneity in the FC profile while capturing inter-subject variability. We develop an efficient algorithm via a linearized alternating direction method of multipliers to solve the fused-PCP. Simulations show accurate recovery by the fused-PCP even when a large fraction of FC edges are severely corrupted. When applied to natural fMRI data, our method reveals FC changes that were time-locked to auditory processing during movie watching, with dynamic engagement of sensorimotor systems for speech-in-noise. It also provides a better mapping to auditory content in the movie than ISC

Oil palm leaf fibre and its suitability for paper-based products

Due to the shortage of wood as origin materials for paper-based production, agro-residue materials have been explored in the quest of finding the best alternative fibre. Oil palm leaf (OPL) is one of agro-residue that has potential due to its comparable characteristics with wood fibre. Studies on chemical compositions, fibre morphology, and mechanical property of OPL have been carried out aiming to evaluate its potential as a substitute raw material for pulp and paper-based production. The chemical compositions were analysed according to the TAPPI standard, Kurscher-Hoffner and chlorite methods accordingly. The mechanical property (tensile, tearing and bursting strengths) were determined as described in TAPPI test methods. Fibre dimensions were determined using Franklin method and analysed under the optical microscope. The content of cellulose in the OPL is determined to be 43.8%. Although, this result is lower than wood fibre (53%), OPL has higher hemicellulose content (36.4%) than the wood fibre (27.5%). In addition, the lignin content (19.7%) of OPL is in the low range of those in wood resources (18 - 25%). These parameters are important components to produce good quality pulp and will provide high mechanical strength of the paper-based products. The measured fibre length of oil palm leaf (1.13 mm) is shorter than the wood fibre (1.90 mm). Meanwhile, the mechanical property of OPL showed lower indexes than wood resources, however, tear (1.80 mN.m2/g) and burst (0.95 kPa.m2/g) indexes of OPL are higher than other published and successful wood resources (Eucalyptus). Based on the analyses, the oil palm leaf is indeed a suitable alternative of raw material for pulp and paper-based industries

Fistulotomy versus fistulectomy for simple fistula in ano: a retrospective cohort study

OBJECTIVE: To compare fistulotomy with fistulectomy for wound healing, duration of surgery, post-operative pain, incontinence and recurrence in patients with fistula in ano. METHODS: This retrospective cohort study was conducted at the Aga Khan University Hospital, Karachi, and comprised data of adults who had undergone fistulotomy/fistulectomy for simple fistula in ano from January 2007 to August 2012. Data collection was done in August 2013 using questionnaire and telephonic interviews. Outcome variables like duration of wound healing, recurrence, incontinence, duration of surgery and post-operative pain were compared in both the groups. SPSS 19 was used for data analysis. RESULTS: Of the 192 cases, there were 96(50%) in each group. The mean age was 40.51 years (range: 21-72 years) in the fistulotomy group and 41.14 years (range: 21-66 years) in the fistulectomy group (p=0.66). Both groups were comparable for baseline demographic variables. The median duration of wound healing was shorter in the fistulotomy group 15 days (Interquartile range: 7-20 days) compared to the fistulectomy group 30 days (Interquartile range: 15-42 days) (p\u3c0.001). The incidence of recurrence was comparable in fistulotomy vs. fistulectomy (3[3.12%] vs. 4[4.16%]; p=0.70). The incidence of incontinence was higher in fistulotomy compared to fistulectomy (5[5.3%] vs. 12[12.5%]; p=0.07). The severity of incontinence was also compared but the difference was insignificant (p=0.06). The median duration of surgery was significantly shorter in fistulotomy group 17 minutes (Interquartile range: 12-25 minutes) compared to fistulectomy group 25 minutes Interquartile range: 20-35 minutes (p\u3c0.001). The median post-operative pain in the surgical day care unit and at the first follow-up in clinic was zero for both groups. CONCLUSIONS: Fistulotomy yielded better results than fistulectomy since it significantly decreased the duration of wound healing and duration of surgery without increasing the incidence of recurrence, incontinence and post-operative pain

A novel mppt technique based on mutual coordination between two pv modules/arrays

A novel maximum power point tracking (MPPT) technique based on mutual coordination of two photovoltaic (PV) modules/arrays has been proposed for distributed PV (DPV) systems. The proposed technique works in two stages. Under non-mismatch conditions between PV modules/arrays, superior performance stage 1 is active, which rectifies the issues inherited by the perturb and observe (P&O) MPPT. In this stage, the technique revolves around the perturb and observe (P&O) algorithm containing an intelligent mechanism of leader and follower between two arrays. In shading conditions, stage 2 is on, and it works like conventional P&O. Graphical analysis of the proposed technique has been presented under different weather conditions. Simulations of different algorithms have been performed in Matlab/Simulink. Simulation results of the proposed technique compliment the graphical analysis and show a superior performance and a fast response as compared to others, thus increasing the efficiency of distributed PV systems

Neighboring-Pixel-Based Maximum Power Point Tracking Algorithm for Partially Shaded Photovoltaic (PV) Systems

In this paper, a neighboring-pixel-based virtual imaging (NPBVI) technique is developed to comprehensively detect the shading conditions on PV arrays. The proposed VI technique is then merged with a probabilistic mechanism of shaded module currents. Finally, a mathematical model is presented, which predicts the current voltage (I-V) region corresponding to the global maximum (GM) of the shaded PV array. The effectiveness of the proposed NPBVI MPPT is validated through numerous experiments that were carried out using a hardware prototype with a 150 W power rating. For the experiments, a PV array consisting of 3 × 2 (Np× Ns ) 20 W PV modules was utilized. The experiments showcase agreement that the proposed method successfully identified the GM region of a partially shaded PV array

Informative Motif Detection Using Data Mining

Abstract: Motif finding in biological sequences is a fundamental problem in computational biology with important applications in understanding gene regulation, protein family identification and determination of functionally and structurally important identities. The large amounts of biological data let us solve the problem of discovering patterns in biological sequences computationally. In this research, we have developed an approach using a method of data mining to detect frequent residue informative motifs that are high in information content. The proposed approach modifies an existing method based on Apriori algorithm by using the Frequent Pattern tree (FP-tree) algorithm of data mining method. This method can efficiently detect novel motifs in biological sequences based on information content of the motifs and shows better performance than the existing method. Experiments on real biological sequence data sets demonstrate the effectiveness of the method

Low complexity DCO-FBMC visible light communication system

Filter Bank Multicarrier (FBMC) is a new waveform candidate in the visible light communication system (VLC). FBMC is a distinctive kind of multi-carrier modulation that can be regarded as an alternative to orthogonal frequency Division Multicarrier (OFDM) with CP (cyclic prefix). DCO-FBMC (DC-bias optical FBMC) has recently been used in VLC, because it overcomes all defects in the optical-OFDM system and has high spectral efficiency. but at the same time the traditional DCO-FBMC suffers from high complexity due to the use of Hermitian Symmetry for real signal, by using 2N-point subcarrier IFFT (Inverse Fast Fourier Transformer) in the modulator, and the output is N-point subcarrier FFT (Fast Fourier Transform) in the demodulator. In this paper, for the first time, the possibility of minimizing complexity and generating a real signal without the use of Hermitian Symmetry or any other technique has been verified. The proposed technology provides 50% of the size of the IFFT / FFT and this results in a significant reduction in power consumption and occupied chip area