Application of Sharp- and Diffuse-Front Models for Predicting Mass Gain and Saturation in Fibrous Wicks

Wicking as imbibitional flow of a liquid driven by capillary pressure has been an important topic in different areas from simple applications like air refreshers and lightening torches to high-tech one such as Propellant Management Devices (PMD)[1, 2]. In this research, wicking of a liquid into porous wicks made parallel fibers is investigated. In the first step, we developed a model for predicting the height of liquid front during the wicking process as a function of time using Darcy’s law based on the assumption of single-phase flow behind a clear sharp front. Then the theoretically developed model was evaluated by performing mass-gain experiments where it revealed satisfying agreement for the majority of tested wicks. However, the model failed to account for partial saturations in the wicks. Therefore, we tried Richard’s equation to predict liquid saturation. The adapted Richard’s equation for our specific porous wicks is solved numerically in 2-D using COMSOL and analytically in 1-D using Mathematica where we treated the porous wicks as transversely-isotropic porous media. We determined capillary pressure and relative permeability directly from pore-scale simulations in wick microstructure using GeoDict. Also, in order to evaluate the numerical and analytical results for Richard’s equation, we used a new liquid-N2 based freezing technique to determine the saturation level along the wick length experimentally. After including the gravity effect, good agreements between the numerical/analytical predictions and experimental results were achieved in saturation distributions

FUZZY CONTROL CHARTS FOR VARIABLE AND ATTRIBUTE QUALITY CHARACTERISTICS

ABSTRACT. This paper addresses the design of control charts for both variable ( x chart) and attribute (u and c charts) quality characteristics, when there is uncertainty about the process parameters or sample data. Derived control charts are more flexible than the strict crisp case, due to the ability of encompassing the effects of vagueness in form of the degree of expert's presumption. We extend the use of proposed fuzzy control charts in case of linguistic data using a developed defuzzifier index, which is based on the metric distance between fuzzy sets

Psychedelics Promote Structural and Functional Neural Plasticity.

Atrophy of neurons in the prefrontal cortex (PFC) plays a key role in the pathophysiology of depression and related disorders. The ability to promote both structural and functional plasticity in the PFC has been hypothesized to underlie the fast-acting antidepressant properties of the dissociative anesthetic ketamine. Here, we report that, like ketamine, serotonergic psychedelics are capable of robustly increasing neuritogenesis and/or spinogenesis both in vitro and in vivo. These changes in neuronal structure are accompanied by increased synapse number and function, as measured by fluorescence microscopy and electrophysiology. The structural changes induced by psychedelics appear to result from stimulation of the TrkB, mTOR, and 5-HT2A signaling pathways and could possibly explain the clinical effectiveness of these compounds. Our results underscore the therapeutic potential of psychedelics and, importantly, identify several lead scaffolds for medicinal chemistry efforts focused on developing plasticity-promoting compounds as safe, effective, and fast-acting treatments for depression and related disorders

Antagonists of growth hormone-releasing hormone (GH-RH) inhibit IGF-II production and growth of HT-29 human colon cancers

Insulin-like growth factors (IGFs) I and II are implicated in progression of various tumours including colorectal carcinomas. To interfere with the production of IGFs, we treated male nude mice bearing xenografts of HT-29 human colon cancer with various potent growth hormone-releasing hormone (GH-RH) antagonists. Twice daily injections of antagonist MZ-4-71, 10 μg intraperitoneally or 5 μg subcutaneously (s.c.) resulted in a significant 43–45% inhibition of tumour growth. Longer acting GH-RH antagonists, MZ-5-156 and JV-1-36 given once daily at doses of 20 μg s.c. produced a 43–58% decrease in volume and weight of cancers. Histological analyses of HT-29 cancers demonstrated that both a decreased cell proliferation and an increased apoptosis contributed to tumour inhibition. GH-RH antagonists did not change serum IGF-I or IGF-II levels, but significantly decreased IGF-II concentration and reduced mRNA expression for IGF-II in tumours. In vitro studies showed that HT-29 cells produced and secreted IGF-II into the medium, and addition of MZ-5-156 dose-dependently decreased IGF-II production by about 40% as well as proliferation of HT-29 cells. Our studies demonstrate that GH-RH antagonists inhibit growth of HT-29 human colon cancers in vivo and in vitro. The effect of GH-RH antagonists may be mediated through a reduced production and secretion of IGF-II by cancer cells. © 2000 Cancer Research Campaig

New therapeutic approach to heart failure due to myocardial infarction based on targeting growth hormone-releasing hormone receptor

Background We previously showed that growth hormone-releasing hormone (GHRH) agonists are cardioprotective following myocardial infarction (MI). Here, our aim was to evaluate the in vitro and in vivo activities of highly potent new GHRH agonists, and elucidate their mechanisms of action in promoting cardiac repair. Methods and Results H9c2 cells were cultured in serum-free medium, mimicking nutritional deprivation. GHRH agonists decreased calcium influx and significantly improved cell survival. Rats with cardiac infarction were treated with GHRH agonists or placebo for four weeks. MI size was reduced by selected GHRH agonists (JI-38, MR-356, MR-409); this accompanied an increased number of cardiac c-kit+ cells, cellular mitotic divisions, and vascular density. One week post-MI, MR-409 significantly reduced plasma levels of IL-2, IL-6, IL-10 and TNF-? compared to placebo. Gene expression studies revealed favorable outcomes of MR-409 treatment partially result from inhibitory activity on pro-apoptotic molecules and pro-fibrotic systems, and by elevation of bone morphogenetic proteins. Conclusions Treatment with GHRH agonists appears to reduce the inflammatory responses post-MI and may consequently improve mechanisms of healing and cardiac remod eling by regulating pathways involved in fibrosis, apoptosis and cardiac repair. Patients with cardiac dysfunction could benefit from treatment with novel GHRH agonists

Introducing a new measure for assessing self-efficacy in response to air pollution hazards for pregnant women

A self-efficacy instrument should be condition-specific. There are several instruments for measuring self-efficacy, but none are air pollution-specific. This study aimed to develop a self-efficacy measure for assessing pregnant women's responses to air pollution hazards. A random sample of pregnant women aged between 18 and 35 years attending three prenatal care centers were entered into the study. Prenatal care centers randomly selected from a list of centers located in different geographical regions of Tehran, Iran. After careful consideration and performing content and face validity, a 4-item measure was developed and participants completed the questionnaire. Reliability was estimated using internal consistency and validity was assessed by performing confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and known group comparison. In all 200 eligible pregnant women were studied. The mean age of participants was 26.9 (SD = 4.8) years and it was 27.9 (SD = 9.1) weeks for gestational age. The findings showed almost perfect results for both content validity ratio (CVR = 1) and content validity index (CVI = 1). The confirmatory factor analysis indicated a good fit to the data, and known group comparison revealed satisfying results. Internal consistency as measured by the Cronbach's alpha coefficient was found to be 0.74. In general, the findings suggest that this new generated scale is a reliable and valid specific measure of self-efficacy in response to air pollution hazards for pregnant women. However, further studies are needed to establish stronger psychometric properties for the questionnaire. © 2013 Araban et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd

The Incremental Cooperative Design of Preventive Healthcare Networks

This document is the Accepted Manuscript version of the following article: Soheil Davari, 'The incremental cooperative design of preventive healthcare networks', Annals of Operations Research, first published online 27 June 2017. Under embargo. Embargo end date: 27 June 2018. The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10479-017-2569-1.In the Preventive Healthcare Network Design Problem (PHNDP), one seeks to locate facilities in a way that the uptake of services is maximised given certain constraints such as congestion considerations. We introduce the incremental and cooperative version of the problem, IC-PHNDP for short, in which facilities are added incrementally to the network (one at a time), contributing to the service levels. We first develop a general non-linear model of this problem and then present a method to make it linear. As the problem is of a combinatorial nature, an efficient Variable Neighbourhood Search (VNS) algorithm is proposed to solve it. In order to gain insight into the problem, the computational studies were performed with randomly generated instances of different settings. Results clearly show that VNS performs well in solving IC-PHNDP with errors not more than 1.54%.Peer reviewe

Knocking down gene expression for growth hormone-releasing hormone inhibits proliferation of human cancer cell lines

Splice Variant 1 (SV-1) of growth hormone-releasing hormone (GHRH) receptor, found in a wide range of human cancers and established human cancer cell lines, is a functional receptor with ligand-dependent and independent activity. In the present study, we demonstrated by western blots the presence of the SV1 of GHRH receptor and the production of GHRH in MDA-MB-468, MDA-MB-435S and T47D human breast cancer cell lines, LNCaP prostate cancer cell line as well as in NCI H838 non-small cell lung carcinoma. We have also shown that GHRH produced in the conditioned media of these cell lines is biologically active. We then inhibited the intrinsic production of GHRH in these cancer cell lines using si-RNA, specially designed for human GHRH. The knocking down of the GHRH gene expression suppressed the proliferation of T47D, MDA-MB-435S, MDA-MB-468 breast cancer, LNCaP prostate cancer and NCI H838 non-SCLC cell lines in vitro. However, the replacement of the knocked down GHRH expression by exogenous GHRH (1–29)NH2 re-established the proliferation of the silenced cancer cell lines. Furthermore, the proliferation rate of untransfected cancer cell lines could be stimulated by GHRH (1–29)NH2 and inhibited by GHRH antagonists MZ-5-156, MZ-4-71 and JMR-132. These results extend previous findings on the critical function of GHRH in tumorigenesis and support the role of GHRH as a tumour growth factor

A fuzzy feature fusion method for auto-segmentation of gliomas with multi-modality diffusion and perfusion magnetic resonance images in radiotherapy

The difusion and perfusion magnetic resonance (MR) images can provide functional information about tumour and enable more sensitive detection of the tumour extent. We aimed to develop a fuzzy feature fusion method for auto-segmentation of gliomas in radiotherapy planning using multi-parametric functional MR images including apparent difusion coefcient (ADC), fractional anisotropy (FA) and relative cerebral blood volume (rCBV). For each functional modality, one histogram-based fuzzy model was created to transform image volume into a fuzzy feature space. Based on the fuzzy fusion result of the three fuzzy feature spaces, regions with high possibility belonging to tumour were generated automatically. The auto-segmentations of tumour in structural MR images were added in fnal autosegmented gross tumour volume (GTV). For evaluation, one radiation oncologist delineated GTVs for nine patients with all modalities. Comparisons between manually delineated and auto-segmented GTVs showed that, the mean volume diference was 8.69% (±5.62%); the mean Dice’s similarity coefcient (DSC) was 0.88 (±0.02); the mean sensitivity and specifcity of auto-segmentation was 0.87 (±0.04) and 0.98 (±0.01) respectively. High accuracy and efciency can be achieved with the new method, which shows potential of utilizing functional multi-parametric MR images for target defnition in precision radiation treatment planning for patients with gliomas