Mapping and characterizing mangrove rice growing environments in West-Africa using remote sensing and secondary data

Rice is one of the major staple foods consumed in Africa and its demand continues to increase as a result of population growth, urbanization and changing diets. Mangrove rice cultivation is of importance along the West-African Atlantic coast from Senegal and Gambia down to Guinea-Bissau, Guinea-Conakry, Sierra Leone and Liberia. Although mangrove rice productivity is low it contributes for a major share to the regional rice production. Sea-level rise and reduction in river discharges, caused by the effects of climate change, lead to salt-water intrusion and are a potential threat to the mangrove rice production and regional food security. Information about rice areas is crucial to provide informed decision and management with the aim of safeguarding and improving rice production in those areas. However, till date such information is very limited or unavailable at all. Therefore our goal in this study was to map out rice cultivated areas within the mangrove ecosystem stretching from Senegal to Liberia and to characterize those systems in terms of altitude and the rice phenology using secondary data and spatial analysis. We deployed off-season Landsat 8 Images, 30 meters SRTM Digital elevation data, derived vegetation indices (EVI, SAVI, Tasseled cap Index Wetness) and Google Earth data. Decision tree classification was then applied using the DEM and Tasseled Cap index on Wetness to delineate the Landsat data into uplands and mangrove lowlands. Then, supervised classification using the ‘maximum likelihood’ classifier was applied on the delineated mangrove lowlands to characterize the area into rice and non-rice. The classification result was validated with Google Earth images. The second stage in this work was to investigate the rice phenology using MODIS NDVI time series. Overall, the study shows the potency of using medium resolution satellite images like Landsat for characterizing mangrove rice growing environment

Heart diseases diagnosis using heart sounds

Heart sound is one of the oldest means for assessing the function of heart valves. It helps, together with echocardiograms and electrocardiographs, to give a clear and proper diagnosis of several diseases. Artificial neural networks are used to classify several valve-related heart disorders. A library of heart sound files, recorded via the traditional stethoscope, are used to extract relevant features using several signal processing tools, e.g., discrete wavelet transform (DWT), fast Fourier transform (FFT) and linear predictive coding (LPC). The achieved recognition rates were around 95.7%

Prevention and management of type 2 diabetes: dietary components and nutritional strategies

In the past couple of decades, evidence from prospective observational studies and clinical trials has converged to support the importance of individual nutrients, foods, and dietary patterns in the prevention and management of type 2 diabetes. The quality of dietary fats and carbohydrates consumed is more crucial than is the quantity of these macronutrients. Diets rich in wholegrains, fruits, vegetables, legumes, and nuts; moderate in alcohol consumption; and lower in refined grains, red or processed meats, and sugar-sweetened beverages have been shown to reduce the risk of diabetes and improve glycaemic control and blood lipids in patients with diabetes. With an emphasis on overall diet quality, several dietary patterns such as Mediterranean, low glycaemic index, moderately low carbohydrate, and vegetarian diets can be tailored to personal and cultural food preferences and appropriate calorie needs for weight control and diabetes prevention and management. Although much progress has been made in development and implementation of evidence-based nutrition recommendations in developed countries, concerted worldwide efforts and policies are warranted to alleviate regional disparities

Heart diseases diagnosis using HMM

The bare ear and the stethoscope were until recently of great help in classifying most heart diseases especially those related to valve problems. The newly developed electronic stethoscope and phonocardiography represent useful tools for recording heart sound signals. In this paper a diagnostic technique for heart diseases using heart sounds is suggested. Wavelet decomposition and mel cepstrum are used for feature extraction. Classification of the different heart diseases is then done using hidden Markov models (HMM). Three different techniques have been used and compared. The obtained recognition rates (RR) were 97.3%, 98.2%, and 99.1%

Young Hispanics at risk of type 2 diabetes display endothelial activation, subclinical inflammation and alterations of coagulation and fibrinolysis

Background: Hispanics have a high rate of diabetes that exposes them to an increased risk of cardiovascular disease. We hypothesized that many of the pathophysiological mechanisms that cause atherosclerotic disease may be present in young Hispanics who do not have clinical diabetes but are at increased risk of developing it. Methods: We studied 36 young Hispanic adults without diabetes (ages 18–40). Seventeen participants were at increased risk of developing type 2 diabetes given by overweight and a family history of diabetes on one or both parents (at risk group). Nineteen participants with normal body-mass index and no parental history of diabetes constituted the control group. We measured and compared plasma markers of endothelial dysfunction, disturbed coagulation and fibrinolysis, subclinical inflammation and adipose tissue dysfunction in the at risk and control groups. Results: Participants at risk of diabetes were more insulin-resistant according to different indicators, and had significantly higher levels of soluble intercellular adhesion molecule-1 (sICAM-1), tissue plasminogen activator (tPA), inhibitor of plasminogen activator-1 (PAi-1), high sensitivity C-reactive protein and free fatty acids, signaling the presence of multiple proatherogenic alterations despite the absence of overt diabetes. Levels of the prothrombotic molecule PAi-1 were most elevated in participants who were not only at risk of diabetes by the study definition, but also abdominally obese. Conclusions: Young adult Hispanics at risk of type 2 diabetes but without overt disease already bear considerably high levels of markers reflecting processes that lead to the development of atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease

Genetic and morphological identification of some crabs from the Gulf of Suez, Northern Red Sea, Egypt

AbstractMost crab species inhabiting the Red Sea have not been characterized morphologically and genetically. In the current work, five different crab species were collected from the northern part of the Egyptian Red Sea. They were morphologically identified through description of colors, dentations of the carapace and shapes of chelipeds and pereiopods. They were also genetically characterized by the partial sequencing of the barcode region in the mitochondrial cytochrome oxidase subunit I (COI) gene, which is known to be hypervariable among different crab species. Morphological and genetic characterization identified the crab species as: Charybdis (Charybdis) hellerii (A. Milne-Edwards, 1867), Charybdis (Charybdis) natator (Herbst, 1794), Portunus (Portunus) pelagicus (Linnaeus, 1758), Liocarcinus corrugatus (Pennant, 1777), and Atergatis roseus (Rüppell, 1830). This is the first record of L. corrugatus in the Egyptian Red Sea, despite being previously recorded in the Indian and Atlantic Ocean as well as in the Mediterranean Sea. DNA barcoding with precise morphological identification was effective in characterizing the crab species collected from the Egyptian Red Sea water

ANURIA SECONDARY TO HOT WEATHER-INDUCED HYPERURICAEMIA: DIAGNOSIS AND MANAGEMENT

There is little information on the management of anuria secondary to severe volume depletion or as a rare manifestation of heat stroke in areas of the world with very hot summers. We present our experience with hot weather-induced hyperuricaemia in Kuwait

ANURIA SECONDARY TO HOT WEATHER-INDUCED HYPERURICAEMIA: DIAGNOSIS AND MANAGEMENT

There is little information on the management of anuria secondary to severe volume depletion or as a rare manifestation of heat stroke in areas of the world with very hot summers. We present our experience with hot weather-induced hyperuricaemia in Kuwait

A Study of Brain Networks Associated with Swallowing Using Graph-Theoretical Approaches

Functional connectivity between brain regions during swallowing tasks is still not well understood. Understanding these complex interactions is of great interest from both a scientific and a clinical perspective. In this study, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was utilized to study brain functional networks during voluntary saliva swallowing in twenty-two adult healthy subjects (all females, 23.1±1.52 years of age). To construct these functional connections, we computed mean partial correlation matrices over ninety brain regions for each participant. Two regions were determined to be functionally connected if their correlation was above a certain threshold. These correlation matrices were then analyzed using graph-theoretical approaches. In particular, we considered several network measures for the whole brain and for swallowing-related brain regions. The results have shown that significant pairwise functional connections were, mostly, either local and intra-hemispheric or symmetrically inter-hemispheric. Furthermore, we showed that all human brain functional network, although varying in some degree, had typical small-world properties as compared to regular networks and random networks. These properties allow information transfer within the network at a relatively high efficiency. Swallowing-related brain regions also had higher values for some of the network measures in comparison to when these measures were calculated for the whole brain. The current results warrant further investigation of graph-theoretical approaches as a potential tool for understanding the neural basis of dysphagia. © 2013 Luan et al