Bronchial Asthma and Salivary Surfactant Protein D: Review Article

Background: Chronic bronchial inflammation underlies asthma, which is a complex disease with varied and largely reversible blockage of the respiratory route. Asthma is a major public health issue that affects people of all ages around the world. Many countries are seeing an increase in the prevalence of this disease, particularly among children. Among children, asthma is the most frequent long-term condition, accounting for more than half of all missed school days, emergency room consultations, and hospitalizations. Surfactant Protein D, a pattern-recognition molecule, dampens elevated levels of particular antibodies, alveolar macrophage accumulation, eosinophilia, and subepithelial fibrosis and mucous metaplasia, as well as airway hyper-reactivity in allergic asthma in vivo. Objective: In order to discover the connection between children's bronchial asthma and surfactant protein D. Conclusion: Salivary SP-D is a simple, low-cost, quick, and noninvasive way to collect saliva from children. Salivary SP-D levels may be linked to asthma exacerbation severity and peripheral airway resistance

Targeted Delivery Of Nrf2 Sirna Using Modular Polymeric Micellar Nanodelivery System For Efficient Target Gene Knockdown In Hepatocellular Carcinoma

Tumor selective drug delivery as well as chemotherapy associated multi drug resistance (MDR) pose tremendous hurdles for effective cancer therapy. In this regard, designing multifunctional nanocarriers loaded with drug/gene payloads and engineered with tumor targeting ligands can serve as a modular platform for targeted drug/gene delivery. In this study we undertook the synthesis of a self-assembling block copolymer constructed using poly(styrene-co-maleic anhydride, partial iso-octyl ester) (SMAPIE) and branched polyethylenimine (PEI) as building blocks and evaluated its micelle forming ability, siRNA complexation and siRNA delivery potentials. In addition, we engineered galactosamine decorated nanomicelles using modular “click” chemistry based approaches for evaluating the targeted delivery of Nrf2 siRNA to Hep G2 liver cancer cells overexpressing asialoglycoprotein receptors (ASGPRs). Our results demonstrate that the galactosamine decorated nanocarriers could effectively deliver Nrf2 siRNA into Hep G2 liver cancer cells resulting in efficient target gene knockdown, evincing its potential for targeted liver cancer therapy

Assessing Soft Skills for Software Requirements Engineering Processes

Software requirement engineering (SRE) is the process of establishing, documenting, and maintaining software requirements. The goal of this research is to investigate the importance of soft skills in SRE. The data collection was performed through an online questionnaire. Descriptive statistics, principal components analysis (PCA), and stepwise regression techniques were used to analyze the data. A comprehensive review determined the 31 soft skills associated with SRE. There were 122 software development experts in Gaza who participated in the survey. The PCA analysis extracted six factors, named problem-solving, learning willingness, commitment, pressure resilience, critical thinking, and interpersonal skills. The analysis discovered that the level of SRE practice in Gaza is 73.71%. Furthermore, it was determined that 89.2% of respondents have critical thinking skills, and 85% have problem-solving and commitment skills. The result shows that all soft skills factors have strong links to SRE. However, only four soft skills (problem-solving, willingness to learn, pressure tolerance, and critical thinking) were found to have an impact on SRE. Considering these findings, we recommend focusing on the development of soft skills, especially problem-solving and willingness to learn skills, for the team analyzing software system requirements

Enhancing image captioning with depth information using a Transformer-based framework

Captioning images is a challenging scene-understanding task that connects computer vision and natural language processing. While image captioning models have been successful in producing excellent descriptions, the field has primarily focused on generating a single sentence for 2D images. This paper investigates whether integrating depth information with RGB images can enhance the captioning task and generate better descriptions. For this purpose, we propose a Transformer-based encoder-decoder framework for generating a multi-sentence description of a 3D scene. The RGB image and its corresponding depth map are provided as inputs to our framework, which combines them to produce a better understanding of the input scene. Depth maps could be ground truth or estimated, which makes our framework widely applicable to any RGB captioning dataset. We explored different fusion approaches to fuse RGB and depth images. The experiments are performed on the NYU-v2 dataset and the Stanford image paragraph captioning dataset. During our work with the NYU-v2 dataset, we found inconsistent labeling that prevents the benefit of using depth information to enhance the captioning task. The results were even worse than using RGB images only. As a result, we propose a cleaned version of the NYU-v2 dataset that is more consistent and informative. Our results on both datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework effectively benefits from depth information, whether it is ground truth or estimated, and generates better captions. Code, pre-trained models, and the cleaned version of the NYU-v2 dataset will be made publically available.Comment: 19 pages, 5 figures, 13 table

Mitigating Crack Propagation in a Highly Maneuverable Flight Vehicle Using Life Extending Control Logic

In this research, life extending control logic is proposed to reduce the cost of treating the aging problem of military aircraft structures and to avoid catastrophic failures and fatal accidents due to undetected cracks in the airframe components. The life extending control logic is based on load tailoring to facilitate a desired stress sequence that prolongs the structural life of the cracked airframe components by exploiting certain nonlinear crack retardation phenomena. The load is tailored to include infrequent injections of a single-cycle overload or a single-cycle overload and underload. These irregular loadings have an anti-intuitive but beneficial effect, which has been experimentally validated, on the extension of the operational structural life of the aircraft. A rigid six-degree-of freedom dynamic model of a highly maneuverable air vehicle coupled with an elastic dynamic wing model is used to generate the stress history at the lower skin of the wing. A three-dimensional equivalent plate finite element model is used to calculate the stress in the cracked skin. The plate is chosen to be of uniform chord-wise and span-wise thickness where the mechanical properties are assigned using an ad-hoc approach to mimic the full scale wing model. An in-extensional 3-node triangular element is used as the gridding finite element while the aerodynamic load is calculated using the vortex-lattice method where each lattice is laid upon two triangular finite elements with common hypotenuse. The aerodynamic loads, along with the base-excitation which is due to the motion of the rigid aircraft model, are the driving forces acting on the wing finite element model. An aerodynamic control surface is modulated based on the proposed life extending control logic within an existing flight control system without requiring major modification. One of the main goals of life extending control logic is to enhance the aircraft\u27s service life, without incurring significant loss of vehicle dynamic performance. The value of the control-surface deflection angle is modulated so that the created overstress is sufficiently below the yield stress of the panel material. The results show that extension in crack length was reduced by 40% to 75% with an absence of damage mitigation logic. Moreover, the desired structural integrity is satisfied without affecting the air vehicle dynamic performance

Atypical antipsychotic Lumateperone beyond Schizophrenia: seeking clarity in a time of uncertainty

Lumateperone (ITI-007) is a serotonin 5HT2A tosylate salt with high affinity for dopamineD2 and D1 receptors and the serotonin transporter. It is unusual in that it controlsserotonin, dopamine, and glutamate neurotransmission concurrently, all of which havebeen implicated in severe mental illness. Consider it a multi-targeted ligand andmultifunctional modulator of the serotoninergic system with possible precognitive,antipsychotic, antidepressant, and anxiolytic properties. While lumateperone has beenexplored as a new agent for schizophrenia therapy, it also provides a unique therapeuticoption for a range of other psychiatric and neurological diseases, including behaviouralsigns of dementia or Alzheimer's disease, sleep problems, and bipolar depression.Additionally, it had a better safety profile than placebo, with no significant extrapyramidalside effects, hyperprolactinemia, or changes in cardiometabolic or endocrinecharacteristics. Additional study is needed to validate and analyse lumateperone's1 effectiveness, as well as to identify prospective therapeutic targets. This article gives acomprehensive overview of the most notable results and potential future applications ofthis chemical in personalised medicine, particularly for neurodegenerative disease