The Incidence of Lymphoma in Children in Gezira State During 2005-2014:A general Population-Based Study

Introduction: Lymphomas are the third most often diagnosed malignant neoplasm among children and adolescents. They constitute about 10-15% of childhood malignancies. We aimed to quantify incidence of Lymphomas (HD and NHD) in the Gezira State and their difference with gender and age. Methods: The data was abstracted and classified accordingly to the third revision of the International Classification of Childhood Cancer. Age-standardised rates (ASR) for three 5-year age groups (0–4 years, 5–9 years and 10–14 years) calculated for males and females.  Results: The total number of children diagnosed with lymphoma was 140 patients.     NHL forms 75/140(53%) and HD 65/140(46%). Incidence of NHL was 6.68/million. Males with NHL was 48/75 (64%) with an ASR of 5.71/million and females 27/75(36%) with ASR of 4.04/million and a ratio of 1.7:1. The most common age group of presentation of NHL in males was 5-9 years of age, while in females was from 10-14 years of age. Incidence of HD was 4.22/million. Males constituted about 40/65 (62%) with an ASR of 4.72/million, while females were 25/65(38%) with ASR of 3.72 and males to females ratio of 1.6:1. The common age of presentation of HD in both males and females was 5-9 years of age. In conclusion: The results presented in this study were similar with international results and comparable with them. Implemented analytical studies to clarify the different types of haematological malignancies will help to choose the right treatment and better cure.&nbsp

Improved Mesh_Based Image Morphing ‎

        تحويل الصورة هي عملية متعددة الخطوات تلك التي  تولد سلسلة من الانتقالات بين صورتين. والفكرة هي الحصول على سلسلة من الصور الوسطية التي عند وضعها  جنبا إلى جنب مع الصور الأصلية من شأنه أن يمثل التغيير من صورة واحدة إلى أخرى.  عملية التحول  تتطلب وقت واهتمام بالتفاصيل من أجل الحصول على نتائج جيدة. تحول الصورة يتطلب عمليتين على الأقل هما التشويه والتداخل. التشويه هو عملية التحول الهندسي للصور، في حين  عملية التداخل تمثل  تداخل لون كل بكسل على مر الوقت من  قيمة الصورة الاولى الى ما يقابلها من قيمة الصورة الثانية. تقنيات تحول الصوره تختلف في الاسلوب  عن  اجراء تشويه الصورة. هذا العمل يقدم دراسة  لتقنيات مختلفة لبناء تحول الصور عن طريق استعراض تقنيات تشويه مختلفة. واحد من الاساليب السائده لعملية التشويه هو التشويه الشبكي الذي يعاني من بعض المشاكل بما في ذلك الظلال. هذا العمل المقترح ينفذ لتحسين تقنية التشويه الشبكية لبناء الصور المتحولة. وتبين النتائج أن الأسلوب المقترح يمكنه التغلب على مشاكل تقنية الشبكة التقليديةImage morphing is a multi-step process that generates a sequence of transitions between two images. The thought is to get a ₔgrouping of middle pictures which, when ₔassembled with the first pictures would represent the change from one picture to the other.  The process of morphing requires time and attention to detail in order to get good results. Morphing image requires at least two processes warping and cross dissolve. Warping is the process of geometric transformation of images. The cross dissolve is the process interpolation of color of eachₔ pixel from the first image value to theₔ corresponding second imageₔ value over the time. Image morphing techniques differ from in the approach of image warping procedure. This work presents a survey of different techniques to construct morphing images by review the different warping techniques. One of the predominant approaches of warping process is mesh warping which suffers from some problems including ghosting. This work proposed and implements an improved mesh warping technique to construct morphing images. The results show that the proposed approach can overcome the problems of the traditional mesh techniqu

Physical and Link Layer Implications in Vehicle Ad Hoc Networks

Vehicle Ad hoc Networks (V ANET) have been proposed to provide safety on the road and deliver road traffic information and route guidance to drivers along with commercial applications. However the challenges facing V ANET are numerous. Nodes move at high speeds, road side units and basestations are scarce, the topology is constrained by the road geometry and changes rapidly, and the number of nodes peaks suddenly in traffic jams. In this thesis we investigate the physical and link layers of V ANET and propose methods to achieve high data rates and high throughput. For the physical layer, we examine the use of Vertical BLAST (VB LAST) systems as they provide higher capacities than single antenna systems in rich fading environments. To study the applicability of VB LAST to VANET, a channel model was developed and verified using measurement data available in the literature. For no to medium line of sight, VBLAST systems provide high data rates. However the performance drops as the line of sight strength increases due to the correlation between the antennas. Moreover, the performance of VBLAST with training based channel estimation drops as the speed increases since the channel response changes rapidly. To update the channel state information matrix at the receiver, a channel tracking algorithm for flat fading channels was developed. The algorithm updates the channel matrix thus reducing the mean square error of the estimation and improving the bit error rate (BER). The analysis of VBLAST-OFDM systems showed they experience an error floor due to inter-carrier interference (lCI) which increases with speed, number of antennas transmitting and number of subcarriers used. The update algorithm was extended to VBLAST -OFDM systems and it showed improvements in BER performance but still experienced an error floor. An algorithm to equalise the ICI contribution of adjacent subcarriers was then developed and evaluated. The ICI equalisation algorithm reduces the error floor in BER as more subcarriers are equalised at the expense of more hardware complexity. The connectivity of V ANET was investigated and it was found that for single lane roads, car densities of 7 cars per communication range are sufficient to achieve high connectivity within the city whereas 12 cars per communication range are required for highways. Multilane roads require higher densities since cars tend to cluster in groups. Junctions and turns have lower connectivity than straight roads due to disconnections at the turns. Although higher densities improve the connectivity and, hence, the performance of the network layer, it leads to poor performance at the link layer. The IEEE 802.11 p MAC layer standard under development for V ANET uses a variant of Carrier Sense Multiple Access (CSMA). 802.11 protocols were analysed mathematically and via simulations and the results prove the saturation throughput of the basic access method drops as the number of nodes increases thus yielding very low throughput in congested areas. RTS/CTS access provides higher throughput but it applies only to unicast transmissions. To overcome the limitations of 802.11 protocols, we designed a protocol known as SOFT MAC which combines Space, Orthogonal Frequency and Time multiple access techniques. In SOFT MAC the road is divided into cells and each cell is allocated a unique group of subcarriers. Within a cell, nodes share the available subcarriers using a combination of TDMA and CSMA. The throughput analysis of SOFT MAC showed it has superior throughput compared to the basic access and similar to the RTS/CTS access of 802.11

CFD modelling of blood flow in portal vein hypertension with and without thrombosis for non-newtonian / Mohd Adib Mohammed Taha

Portal vein hypertension is a phenomenon where the pressure is increasing within the portal vein which carries blood from the digestive organs to the liver. Portal vein hypertension commonly accompanies liver cirrhosis. Cirrhosis is one of liver diseases resulting from a scarring of liver tissue injury caused by hepatitis and alcohol abuse. In cirrhosis, scar tissue blocks the flow of blood through the liver which leads to increasing pressure. In this project, Computational Fluid Dynamics software (CFD) is used to analyze and simulate non-Newtonian blood flow in a model of portal vein with and without obstructions. The model geometry is constructed by using CAD (CATIA) while the simulation is done using CFD software (STAR CCM+). First is a normal portal vein is analyzed and second is a blockage portal vein with three different blockage sizes. Based upon the study, it is planned to study the influence of the velocity magnitude, pressure, and shear stress of flow in normal and blocked portal veins. Based upon the work, it is possible to predict the effects of blockages to the blood flow in portal vein which can help to understand more about the portal vein hypertension phenomenon

The Determinants of Foreign Direct Investment in Brazil

Brazil has been one of the significant recipients of foreign direct investment (FDI) among the newly emerging markets of global economy over the last 20 years, and has recorded rapid and sustained growth rates in a number of different industrial sectors. Indeed, FDI plays a significant role in the Brazilian economy. Brazil has been pursuing different foreign investment policies at different times depending on the development objectives and economic situation in the country. The present study has focussed on to empirically examine the influence of macroeconomic variables on Foreign Direct Investment in the Brazilian economy. The chosen macroeconomic variables are Gross Domestic Product (GDP), GDP per Capita (GDPPC), GDP growth rate(GDPGR), Trade ratio(TR), Exchange rate(ER), Inflation (INF) and rate of interest (Ri) as major determining factors. Regression method is applied to assess the functional relationship among these variables. The study is confined to the period of 20 years over 1990-2009 in Brazil. The findings of this study show that there is a strong positive relationship between Ex Rate, GDP, GDPPC and TR to the flow of FDI in the Brazilian economy.However, negative association between GDPGR, INF and Ri to FDI

Development of breast cancer diagnosis system based on fuzzy logic and probabilistic neural network

Breast cancer is one of the most common kinds of cancers that infect females in the whole world. It has happened when the cells in breast tissues start to grow in an uncontrollable way. Because it leads to death, early detection and diagnosis is a very important task to save the patient's life. Due to the restriction of human observers, computer plays a significant role in detecting early cancer signs. The proposed system uses a multi-resolution analysis and a top-hat operation for detecting the suspicious regions in a mammogram image. The discrete wavelet transform feature analysis is utilized for extracting features from the region of interest. Fuzzy Logic (FL) and Probabilistic Neural Network (PNN) are utilized for classifying the tumor into normal or abnormal. The differences between the proposed system and other researches are the use of adaptive threshold value depending on each image, by using Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) in both segmentation and feature extraction phases, which decrease complexity and time. Additionally, the detection of more than one tumor in the breast mammogram image and the utilization of FL and PNN work on increasing the system efficiency that led to raising the accuracy rate of the system and reducing the time. The obtained results of accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity were equal to 99 %, 98 %, and 47 %, respectively, and these results showed that the proposed system is more accurate than the other previous related work

The NORMAN Suspect List Exchange (NORMAN‑SLE): facilitating European and worldwide collaboration on suspect screening in high resolution mass spectrometry

Background: The NORMAN Association (https:// www. norman-​netwo rk. com/) initiated the NORMAN Suspect List Exchange (NORMAN-SLE; https:// www. norman-​netwo rk. com/ nds/ SLE/) in 2015, following the NORMAN collaborative trial on non-target screening of environmental water samples by mass spectrometry. Since then, this exchange of information on chemicals that are expected to occur in the environment, along with the accompanying expert knowledge and references, has become a valuable knowledge base for “suspect screening” lists. The NORMAN-SLE now serves as a FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) chemical information resource worldwide. Results: The NORMAN-SLE contains 99 separate suspect list collections (as of May 2022) from over 70 contributors around the world, totalling over 100,000 unique substances. The substance classes include per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), pharmaceuticals, pesticides, natural toxins, high production volume substances covered under the European REACH regulation (EC: 1272/2008), priority contaminants of emerging concern (CECs) and regulatory lists from NORMAN partners. Several lists focus on transformation products (TPs) and complex features detected in the environment with various levels of provenance and structural information. Each list is available for separate download. The merged, curated collection is also available as the NORMAN Substance Database (NORMAN SusDat). Both the NORMAN-SLE and NORMAN SusDat are integrated within the NORMAN Database System (NDS). The individual NORMAN-SLE lists receive digital object identifiers (DOIs) and traceable versioning via a Zenodo community (https:// zenodo. org/ commu nities/ norman-​sle), with a total of > 40,000 unique views, > 50,000 unique downloads and 40 citations (May 2022). NORMAN-SLE content is progressively integrated into large open chemical databases such as PubChem (https:// pubch em. ncbi. nlm. nih. gov/) and the US EPA’s CompTox Chemicals Dashboard (https:// compt ox. epa. gov/ dashb oard/), enabling further access to these lists, along with the additional functionality and calculated properties these resources offer. PubChem has also integrated significant annotation content from the NORMAN-SLE, including a classification browser (https:// pubch em. ncbi. nlm. nih. gov/ class ifica tion/# hid= 101). Conclusions: The NORMAN-SLE offers a specialized service for hosting suspect screening lists of relevance for the environmental community in an open, FAIR manner that allows integration with other major chemical resources. These efforts foster the exchange of information between scientists and regulators, supporting the paradigm shift to the “one substance, one assessment” approach. New submissions are welcome via the contacts provided on the NORMAN-SLE website (https:// www. norman-​netwo rk. com/ nds/ SLE/).NORMAN AssociationLuxembourg National Research Fund A18/BM/12341006European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme 101036756National Center for Biotechnology Information of the National Library of Medicine (NLM), National Institutes of Health (NIH)National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) of Australia EL1 2009209Australian Research Council DP190102476 Queensland Department of HealthInstituto de Salud Carlos III European Commission CP19/00060 European Union through Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional (FEDER)Federal Ministry of Education & Research (BMBF) FKz: 02WRS1495 A/B/EFWO 11G1821NNIH via grant NIH NIGMS R01GM092218 NIH via grant NIH NCI 1R03CA222452-01Vanderbilt Chemical Biology Interface training program 5T32GM065086-16Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) 15747SOLUTIONS project (European Union's Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration) 603437HBM4EU (European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme 733032German Research Foundation (DFG) 441958208NaToxAq (European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Grant 722493German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety (BMU) (FKZ) 3716 67 416 0German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Nuclear Safety and Consumer Protection (BMUV) Project (FKZ) 3719 65 408 0EU Cohesion Funds within the project Monitoring and assessment of water body status 310011A366Swiss Federal Office for the Environment (FOEN)Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) Genome CanadaMAVA foundationValery FoundationNational Science Foundation (NSF) RUI-1306074 National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) 22193051 21906177China Postdoctoral Science Foundation 2019M650863Environmental Protection Administration, Executive Yuan, R.O.C. Taiwan (Taiwan EPA) 108C002871Swiss Federal Office for the EnvironmentUnited States Environmental Protection AgencyCenter for Forestry Research & Experimentation (CIEF)European Commission 2019/040Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant 859891 European Commission European Commission Joint Research Centre 308610 289511Joint Programming Initiative FOODBALL 2014-17 MCIN/AEI RYC2020-028901-IESF investing in your futureAugust T Larsson Guest Researcher Programme from the Swedish University of Agricultural SciencesGerman Federal Ministry of Education and Research within the RiSKWa program 02WRS1273 02WRS1354RECETOX research infrastructure (the Czech Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports) LM2018121CETOCOEN PLUS project CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/15_ 003/0000469 CETOCOEN EXCELLENCE Teaming 2 project - Czech ministry of Education, Youth and Sports CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/1 7_043/000963

Clinical presentation, treatment and outcome of paraphenylene-diamine induced acute kidney injury following hair dye poisoning: a cohort study

Introduction: in Africa and Asia hair dye is applied together with henna to decorate the hands and feet. Paraphenylene-diamine (PPD), a highly toxic constituent of hair dye can lead to acute kidney injury (AKI). Methods: a cohort study was conducted during the period from April 2012 to March 2013 in Khartoum Teaching Hospital, Sudan. It targeted adults presenting acutely with an evident history and clinical  features of hair dye poisoning, together with AKI as per the RIFLE criteria. Analysis of data was done using SPSS. Results: 30 adults were included, their mean age was 25.6 ± 4.2 years, 93.3% were females. Exposure to PPD was suicidal in 86.7%. The mean duration to onset of renal symptoms was 34.8 ± 7.6 hours,  maximum median serum creatinine was 8.6 ± 2.3 mg/dl, 86.7% had loss of kidney function as per the RIFLE  classification and required dialysis. Initial renal recovery was seen after a mean duration of 9.8 ± 2.2 days. One patient died, 3.3%; all others, 96.7%, recovered normal kidney function. The amount of ingested PPD correlated significantly to the severity of symptoms, number of dialysis sessions required and time for renal recovery with P values < 0.05. Conclusion: hair dye poisoning was associated with prolonged hospital stay, requirement of dialysis and increased morbidity. The severity of symptoms directly correlates to the dose of PPD ingested, with the kidney damage being reversible in almost all survivors.Key words: Hair dye poisoning, paraphenylene-diamine, acute kidney injur