Congenital left ventricular diverticulum associated with ASD, VSD, and epigastric hernia

Congenital left ventricular diverticulum is a rare cardiac malformation. Two categories of congenital ventricular diverticulum have been identified with regard to their localization: apical and non-apical. Apical diverticula are always associated with midline thoraco-abdominal defects and other heart malformations. Non-apical diverticula are always isolated defects. Diagnosis is established by imaging studies such as echocardiography, magnetic resonance imaging, or left ventricular angiography. Mode of treatment has to be individually tailored and depends on clinical presentation, accompanying abnormalities, and possible complications. We report a 10-month-old girl with left ventricular apical diverticulum, large atrial septal defect, two small muscular ventricular septal defects, and pulmonary hypertension, associated with epigastric hernia. This patient underwent total surgical repair for intra-cardiac defects as well as diverticular resection

Calculating the Cost of Co2e Emitted to Generate the Required Electricity: Case Study of Lecture Rooms in the Faculty of Engineering- Universiti Putra Malaysia.

Malaysia is endowed with abundant supplies of non-renewable energy resources, especially oil and gas. However, its current oil and gas reserves are expected to be depleted within the next few years. If new oil fields are not found, Malaysia will have its oil depleted around 2030.Malaysia has actively participated and involved in key conventions regarding environment and sustainable development, such as Montreal Protocol and Kyoto Protocol. University Putra Malaysia (UPM) as one of the largest universities in Malaysia should try to make its energy consumption as efficient as possible and Faculty of Engineering may be the pioneer in this regard. As the result of this study we can see that only for generating the required electricity for the eight lecture rooms at faculty of engineering about RM 45 per day is the cost of Co2e emissions. In this study authors will calculate the cost of Co2e Emitted to Generate the Required Electricity for the Lecture Rooms in the Faculty of Engineering of Universiti Putra Malaysia

New Permeability Model for Gel Coated Porous Media with Radial Flow

Gel polymer has been widely used to reduce water production in mature oil reservoirs. One of the challenges in this area is evaluation of permeability of media after the gel treatment. Darcy’s law has been used for this purpose while this equation has been developed for rigid porous media. In this study, a new mathematic model was introduced to calculate the permeability of gel coated porous media. For this purpose, a modified version of Brinkman equation was used. This model showed that permeability of gel impregnated porous media is a function of pressure drop, fluid viscosity, and gel viscoelastic properties. In order to obtain performance of new permeability model, several experiments were carried out in a porous media with radial flow. A copolymer of 2-acrylamido-2-methyl-propanesulfonic-acid sodium salt (AMPS) and acrylamide (AcA) gelant was used to form the gel in situ. Finally, to investigate the applicability of polymer gel treatment to water shut-off in porous media (sandpack), residual resistant factors (RRF) were calculated based on new permeability model

Earnings Management, Related Party Transactions and Corporate Performance: The Moderating Role of Internal Control

The primary purpose of this study is to investigate the impacts of earnings management (EM) and related party transactions (RPTs) on corporate financial performance in an emerging market, Iran. This paper also aims to examine the moderating role of internal control weakness (ICW) in the relationship between them. The study sample includes 108 Iranian manufacturing companies listed on the Tehran Stock Exchange (TSE) between 2013 and 2018, and panel data with random effects are used to test the hypotheses. When an accounting-based measure called ROA is defined as a proxy for corporate performance, the results show that there is a negative association between real earnings management (REM) and corporate financial situation, while accrual-based earnings management (AEM) and firm value are correlated positively. However, when Tobin's Q index is defined as a proxy for corporate performance, we do not find any significant association between them. Consistent with the tunneling hypothesis or agency theory, our findings confirm RPTs damage corporate value (ROA and Tobin's Q) because managers probably consider it a mechanism to exploit enterprise resources owing to existing conflictual interests. Moreover, purchase-related party transactions lead to lower ROA, whereas sale-related party transactions and Tobin's Q are correlated negatively. Moreover, weak internal control has a positive moderating influence on the linkage between AEM and Tobin's Q index. Finally, we provide robust evidence that there is a positive association between sale growth and institutional owners with ROA and Tobin's Q, although financial leverage and mergers and acquisitions (M&A) have a destructive effect on corporate value

Surgical outcome of coronary artery fistulas repair in children

Coronary artery fistula (CAF) is a rare congenital anomaly that can be complicated by endocarditis, myocardial infarction, or coronary aneurysms. This article reviews the clinical characteristics and surgical outcome of 10 patients with CAF in Rajae Heart Center. From 1990 to 2000, 10 patients (age, 6 months to 15 years; mean age, 8.5 years) were diagnosed with CAF by echocardiography and cardiac catheterization. Six were female and 4 were male. All patients with isolated CAF (9) were asymptomatic. One patient with associated anomaly (mitral valve prolapse with severe mitral regurgitation) had dyspnea on exertion and palpitation. Five fistulas originated from the right coronary artery-three from the left and two from the left circumflex. Drainage was to the right ventricle (7), right atrium (2), and pulmonary artery (1). The ratio of pulmonary to systemic flow ranged between 1 and 1.6. All patients had surgical ligation. In the symptomatic patient, in addition to ligation, mitral valve replacement was performed. There was no operative or late death. Follow-up evaluation (range, 1-6 years; mean, 4.2 years) showed no evidence of recurrent or residual CAF. Surgical management of CAF is a safe and effective treatment resulting in 100 survival and clousure rate. © Springer Science+Business Media, Inc. 2005

Predictors of left ventricular performance after valve replacement in children and adolescents with chronic aortic regurgitation

Aortic valve replacement has been recommended in patients who have severe symptoms, in patients with extreme left ventricle (LV) dilatation (end diastolic dimension >4 SD above normal) or LV ejection fraction 4 SD above normal (p < 0.05) were predictors of persistent LV dysfunction. Extreme LV dilatation (p < 0.0003), LV end systolic dimension (p < 0.0007), and reduced LV ejection fraction (p < 0.01) predicted persistent LV dilatation. In the setting of chronic AR, preoperative symptoms, LV systolic function, and LV internal dimensions are the main predictors for persistent LV dysfunction and dilatation. Surgical correction should be performed before LV systolic dysfunction and/or extreme LV enlargement occurs. © Springer Science+Business Media, Inc. 2005

How direct is the link between words and images?

Current word embedding models despite their success, still suffer from their lack of grounding in the real world. In this line of research, Gunther et al. 2022 proposed a behavioral experiment to investigate the relationship between words and images. In their setup, participants were presented with a target noun and a pair of images, one chosen by their model and another chosen randomly. Participants were asked to select the image that best matched the target noun. In most cases, participants preferred the image selected by the model. Gunther et al., therefore, concluded the possibility of a direct link between words and embodied experience. We took their experiment as a point of departure and addressed the following questions. 1. Apart from utilizing visually embodied simulation of given images, what other strategies might subjects have used to solve this task? To what extent does this setup rely on visual information from images? Can it be solved using purely textual representations? 2. Do current visually grounded embeddings explain subjects' selection behavior better than textual embeddings? 3. Does visual grounding improve the semantic representations of both concrete and abstract words? To address these questions, we designed novel experiments by using pre-trained textual and visually grounded word embeddings. Our experiments reveal that subjects' selection behavior is explained to a large extent based on purely text-based embeddings and word-based similarities, suggesting a minor involvement of active embodied experiences. Visually grounded embeddings offered modest advantages over textual embeddings only in certain cases. These findings indicate that the experiment by Gunther et al. may not be well suited for tapping into the perceptual experience of participants, and therefore the extent to which it measures visually grounded knowledge is unclear.Comment: Accepted in the Mental Lexicon Journal: https://benjamins.com/catalog/m

Language with Vision: a Study on Grounded Word and Sentence Embeddings

Grounding language in vision is an active field of research seeking to construct cognitively plausible word and sentence representations by incorporating perceptual knowledge from vision into text-based representations. Despite many attempts at language grounding, achieving an optimal equilibrium between textual representations of the language and our embodied experiences remains an open field. Some common concerns are the following. Is visual grounding advantageous for abstract words, or is its effectiveness restricted to concrete words? What is the optimal way of bridging the gap between text and vision? To what extent is perceptual knowledge from images advantageous for acquiring high-quality embeddings? Leveraging the current advances in machine learning and natural language processing, the present study addresses these questions by proposing a simple yet very effective computational grounding model for pre-trained word embeddings. Our model effectively balances the interplay between language and vision by aligning textual embeddings with visual information while simultaneously preserving the distributional statistics that characterize word usage in text corpora. By applying a learned alignment, we are able to indirectly ground unseen words including abstract words. A series of evaluations on a range of behavioural datasets shows that visual grounding is beneficial not only for concrete words but also for abstract words, lending support to the indirect theory of abstract concepts. Moreover, our approach offers advantages for contextualized embeddings, such as those generated by BERT, but only when trained on corpora of modest, cognitively plausible sizes. Code and grounded embeddings for English are available at https://github.com/Hazel1994/Visually_Grounded_Word_Embeddings_2

Temperature-dependence of exciton radiative recombination in (Al,Ga)N/GaN quantum wells grown on a-plane GaN substrates

This article presents the dynamics of excitons in a-plane (Al,Ga)N/GaN single quantum wells of various thicknesses grown on bulk GaN substrates. For all quantum well samples, recombination is observed to be predominantly radiative in the low-temperature range. At higher temperatures, the escape of charge carriers from the quantum well to the (Al,Ga)N barriers is accompanied by a reduction in internal quantum efficiency. Based on the temperature-dependence of time-resolved photoluminescence experiments, we also show how the local disorder affects the exciton radiative lifetime at low temperature and the exciton non-radiative lifetime at high temperature.We acknowledge financial support from the Swiss National Science Foundation through Project No. 129715 and from the Polish National Science Center (Project DEC-2011/ 03/B/ST3/02647). The work was partially supported by the European Union within European Regional Development Fund through Innovative Economy Grant No. POIG.01.01.02-00-008/08. P.C. also acknowledges financing from the European Union Seventh Framework Program under grant agreement No. 265073

Feasibility study of developing puffed snack from trimmed part of silver carp (Hypophthalmichthys molitrix)

Incorporation of silver carp (Hypophthalmichthys molitrix) meat in extruded puffed corn-fish snack was studied. Fish protein concentrate (FPC) was produced by liquid-solid extraction. Ethanol and isopropanol were used as the solvents. FPC extraction efficiency of 19.5% and 9.5% (w/w) were obtained based on fish meat and whole fish respectively. Protein content of isopropanol extracted FPC (93.3%±0.4) significantly (P<0.05) was higher than ethanol extracted (92.5%±0.3) FPC. On the contrary fat contents were 0.17%±0.4 and 0.65%±0.11 respectively. Puffed corn-fish snack with 2 and 4% FPC as well as 5, 10, 15, and 20% minced fish meat in corn grits was extruded by a single screw extruder. The best formula was evaluated at 15% fish meat and 85% corn grits in the snack base, considering higher protein content, higher consumer acceptability, higher expansion ratio and lower fish smell. Six month storage stability “same as control” was obtained considering chemical, microbial and sensory evaluation according to standard of Institute of Standards and Industrial Research of Iran; when Metalized Biaxillary-Oriented Poly Propylene was used as the packaging material. Incorporation of abdominal muscles (8% of whole fish body which obtained from trimming of fish fillets) on corn-fish snack was not feasible due to low-protein (11.7±0.1 i.e. 34% less than fish meat) and high-fat (14.2±0.1 i.e. 550% higher than fish meat) contents