A Case Report of Incontinentia Pigmenti

ObjectiveIncontinentia Pigmenti (IP) (Bloch_Sulzberg syndrome) is a rare neurocutaneous syndrome characterized by multisystemic involvement that is prenatally lethal in the majority of affected males and shows great clinical variability when expressed in women. The diagnosis of IP is performed based on clinical features and the family history with the support of histological findings.We report a 10-day-old female neonate with typical skin lesions and frequent seizure. Skin biopsy showed second stage IP

V-06.02: Laparoscopic radical cystoprostatic adenectomy

Introduction: We hereby present a new laparoscopic prostate-preserving cystectomy technique that aims at reducing sexual dysfunction and urinary incontinence in comparison with the conventional technique of laparoscopic radical cystoprostatectom

Development of a Hardware-in-the-loop Platform for Hybrid and Electric Vehicles

On a larger scope, improving the hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs) and electric vehicles (EVs) could address the public concern on climate changes and environmental issues. While ongoing research at the University of Waterloo targets improving HEVs and EVs through studying their various components, there was a pressing need to develop setups or tools to assist in the progress of this research. Hence, the primary problem at hand was the time-consuming and costly procedure of developing individual experimental setups/tools for the proposed experiments. The approach taken to solve these interconnected challenges was the design and development of a modular test bench capable of running various hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) studies on HEV powertrain components. The HIL approach was adopted in order to increase the accuracy of computer-generated simulations through the use of physical components in combination with software simulations. MATLAB Simulink software was employed to create the models and programs, which were then downloaded to dSPACE, a device employed to control the various components of the test bench. The scope of this project expanded not only to accommodate specific experimental setups, such as the HWFET drive cycle test, but also to consider modularity requirements that would address unforeseen circumstances and experimental needs. Meeting the modularity requirements would greatly reduce the cost and time needed for running the experiments. As a result of this project, a test bench was developed with four major components: a modular area (for attaching various physical components that comprise the proposed experiment’s setup), a control panel, a dSPACE, and the electrical energy supply and load. Through running various experiments, numerous components of the test bench were characterized. The developed test bench is capable of accommodating various experimental setups as well as producing relevant data for further analysis. The implications of this project are that the ongoing research on HEVs at the University of Waterloo can now employ the test bench to run proposed experiments more effectively in order to obtain more accurate data

The Etiology, Clinical Type, and Short Outcome of Seizures in Newborns Hospitalized in Besat Hospital/Hamadan/ Iran

How to Cite This Article: Sabzehei MK, Basiri B, Bazmamoun H. The Etiology, Clinical Type, and Short Outcome of Seizures in Newborns Hospitalized in Besat Hospital/ Hamadan/Iran. Iran J Child Neurol. 2014 Spring 8(2):24-28.ObjectiveSeizures in neonates are very different from those of older children and adults.The aim of this study was to determine the etiology, clinical presentation, and outcome of seizures in hospitalized neonates of Besat Hospital, Hamadan, Iran.Material & MethodsIn this retrospective study, we evaluated all neonates with seizures (aged 0-28 days) admitted to the Besat hospital, Hamadan, over a period of three years from September 2008 to September 2011. The data were obtained from hospital records and analyzed using SPSS 12.ResultsSeizures were reported in 102/1112 (9.1%) neonatal admissions. Among neonates with seizures, 57% were male and 23.5% were preterm. The mean birth weight was 2936±677 grams and the mean gestational age was 37.60±1.94 weeks. 16.7% of them were LBW and 2.9% VLBW. In terms of seizure type, subtle seizures were observed in 38.2%, tonic in 29.4%, clonic in 26.4%, andmyoclonic in 5.9% of cases. The main diagnosis in neonates with seizures included hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy (HIE) (34.3%), infections (24.4%), intracranial hemorrhage (6.9%), hypoglycemia (5.9%), hypocalcemia (2.9%), inborn error of metabolism (1%), and unknown cause (24.5%). The mortality rate was 14.7%.ConclusionNeonatal seizures indicate a significant underlying disease. HIE was the most common cause of neonatal seizures in our study. Therefore, efforts should be made to improve care during childbirth.References1. Mwaniki M, Mathenge A, Gwer S, Mturi N, Bauni E, Newton CR, et al. Neonatal seizures in a rural Kenyan District Hospital: aetiology, incidence and outcome of hospitalization BMC Medicine 2010;8:16.2. Digra SK, Gupta A. Prevalence of seizures in hospitalized neonates. JK Science 2007;9(1):27-9.3. Faiz N, Malik M, Azam M, Afzal U. Etiology and type of neonatal seizures, Ann Pak Inst Med Sci 2009;5(2):77-86.4. Aftab R. Neonatal seizures: Etiology, Clinical types and outcome. Professional Med J 2007;14(2):199-203.5. Fakhraee SH. Neonatal seizures: A Review. Iran J child Neurol 2007:1(4):7-11.6. Sheth RD, Hobbs GR, Mullett M. Neonatal seizure: Incidence, onset and etiology by gestational age. J Perinatol 1999;19(1):40-3.7. Saliba RM, Annegera Jf, waller DK, Tyson JE. Incidence of Neonatal seizures in harris county, American Journal of epidemiology 2000,150(7):763-9.8. Moayedi AR, Zakeri S, Moayedi F. Neonatal seizures: Etiology and type. Iran J child Neurol 2007:23-6.9. Ronen GM, Penney S, Andrew W. The epidemiology of clinical neonatal seizure in new found land, a populationbased study. J Pediatr 1999;134(1):71-5.10. Arpino C, Domizio S, Carrieri MP, Brescianini DS, Sabatino MH, Curatolo P. Prenatal and perinatal determinants of neonatal seizures occurring in first week of life. Abs J child Neurol 2001:16(9):651-6.11. Tekgul H, Gauvrea K, Soul J, Murphy L, Robertson R, stewart J, et al. The current etiology profile and neurodevelopmental outcome of seizures in term newborn infants. Pediatrics 2006;117(4):1270-80.12. Udani V. Long-term prognosis of neonatal seizure – where are we? Indian pediatr 2008;45(9):739-41.13. Ross AL, Lombroso CT.Neonatal seizures state. A study of clinical, pathological, and electroencephalographic features in 137 full-term babies with a long-term followup. Pediatrics 1970;45(3):404-25.14. Taksande A, Vilhecar K, Jain M, Lakra M. Clinico-Biochemical Profile of Neonatal Seizures. Indian J Pediatr 1995;52:424-7.15. Legido A, Clancy RR, Berman PH. Neurologic outcome after electroencephalographically proven neonatal seizures. Pediatrics 1991;88(3):583-96.16. Malik BA, Butt MA, Shamoon M, Tehseen Z, Fatima A, Hashmat N. Seizures etiology in the newborn period. J Coll Physicians Surg Pak 2005;15(12):786-90.17. Nunes ML, Martins MP, BareaBM, Wainberg R C, Costa da Costa J. Neurological outcome of newborns with neonatal seizures. Arq Neuropsiquiatr 2008;66(2A):168-74.18. Taghdiri MM, Emadi M, Tavasoli AR. Plain CT Scan in neonatal convulsion. Iranian Red Crescent Medical Journal 2005;7(3):43-45.19. Taghdiri MM, Eghbalian F, et al. Auditory Evaluation of high risk newborn by automated auditory brain stem response. Iranian J Pediatric 2008 Dec; 18(4):330-334

Optimization Model for Maintenance Planning of Loading Equipment in Open Pit Mines

Maintenance plays a significant role in operating costs in the mining industry. Improving this matter controls maintenance costs and enhances productivity and production effectively. Shovels are one of the most widely used loading machines in non-continuous activities. Thus, evaluating and optimizing their availability is one of the essential solutions to achieving high productivity and cost reduction. This paper presents a mathematical programming model to maximize availability and minimize the total expected costs. We programmed the proposed nonlinear planning model using the Symbiotic Organisms Search (SOS) meta-heuristic algorithm in Matlab software. It determines the optimal maintenance intervals for different parts of the shovel. The maintenance benefit analysis approach selects various maintenance activities in optimal maintenance intervals. The model is implemented in a practical case study, Chadormalu Iron Mine, to evaluate its performance. The failure distribution matches the Weibull distribution function. The computational results show the efficiency of the presented approach

Safe and Secure Control of Connected and Automated Vehicles

Evolution of Connected and Automated Vehicles (CAV), as an important class of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), plays a crucial role in providing innovative services in transport and traffic management. Vehicle platoons, as a set of CAV, forming a string of connected vehicles, have offered significant enhancements in traffic management, energy consumption, and safety in intelligent transportation systems. However, due to the existence of the cyber layer in these systems, subtle security related issues have been underlined and need to be taken into account with sufficient attention. In fact, despite the benefits brought by the platoons, they potentially suffer from insecure networks which provide the connectivity among the vehicles participating in the platoon which makes these systems prone to be under the risk of cyber attacks. One (or more) external intelligent intruder(s) might attack one (or more) of the vehicles participating in a platoon. In this respect, the need for a safe and secure driving experience is highly sensible and crucial. Hence, we will concentrate on improving the safety and security of CAVs in different scenarios by taking advantage of security related approaches and CAV control systems. In this thesis, we are going to focus on two main levels of platoon control, namely I) High level secure platoon control, and II) Low level secure platoon control. In particular, in the high level part, we consider platoons with arbitrary inter-vehicular communication topoloy whereby the vehicles are able to exchange their driving data with each other through DSRC-based environment. The whole platoon is modeled using graph-theoretic notions by denoting the vehicles as the nodes and the inter-vehicular communication quality as the edge weights. We study the security of the vehicle platoon exposed to cyber attacks using a novel game-theoretic approach. The platoon topologies under investigation are directed (called predecessor following) or undirected (bidirectional) weighted graphs. The attacker-detector game is defined as follows. The attacker targets some vehicles in the platoon to attack and the detector deploys monitoring sensors on the vehicles. The attacker's objective is to be as stealthy to the sensors as possible while the detector tries to place the monitoring sensors to detect the attack impact as much as he can. The existence of equilibrium strategies for this game is investigated based on which the detector can choose specific vehicles to put his sensors on and increase the security level of the system. Moreover, we study the effect of adding (or removing) communication links between vehicles on the game value. We then address the same problem while investigating the optimal actuator placement strategy needed by the defender to mitigate the effects of the attack. In this respect, the energy needed by the attacker to steer the consensus follower-leader dynamics of the system towards his desired direction is used as the game payoff. Simulation and experimental results conducted on a vehicle platoon setup using Robotic Operating System (ROS) demonstrate the effectiveness of our analyses. In the low level platoon control, we exploit novel secure model predictive controller algorithms to provide suitable countermeasure against a prevalent data availability attack, namely Denial-of-Service (DoS) attack. A DoS intruder can endanger the security of platoon by jamming the communication network among the vehicles which is responsible to transmit inter-vehicular data throughout the platoon. In other words, he may cause a failure in the network by jamming it or injecting a huge amount of delay, which in essence makes the outdated transferred data useless. This can potentially result in huge performance degradation or even hazardous collisions. We propose novel secure distributed nonlinear model predictive control algorithms for both static and dynamic nonlinear heterogeneous platoons which are capable of handling DoS attack performed on a platoon equipped by different communication topologies and at the same time they guarantee the desired formation control performance. Notably, in the dynamic case, our proposed method is capable of providing safe and secure control of the platoon in which arbitrary vehicles might perform cut-in and/or cut-out maneuvers. Convergence time analysis of the system are also investigated. Simulation results on a sample heterogeneous attacked platoon exploiting two-predecessor follower communication environment demonstrates the fruitfulness of the method

Laparoscopic Reimplantation for Single-System Ectopic Ureter

INTRODUCTION Ureteral anomalies, ectopic ureter being one of them, are of the most important urogenital abnormalities because they directly affect kidney function.(1) Several techniques have been used for treatment of ectopic ureter. The goal of obstruction relief can be achieved by either ureteropyelostomy or common sheath ureteral reimplantation for a duplicated system, or reimplantation for a single system.(1) Heminephrectomy and ureteropyelostomy are well described elsewhere, but several technical points deserve

Non-closed acoustic cloaking devices enabled by sequential-step linear coordinate transformations

Hitherto acoustic cloaking devices, which conceal objects externally, depend on objects\u27 characteristics. Despite previous works, we design cloaking devices placed adjacent to an arbitrary object and make it invisible without the need to make it enclosed. Applying sequential linear coordinate transformations leads to a non-closed acoustic cloak with homogeneous materials, creating an open invisible region. Firstly, we propose to design a non-closed carpet cloak to conceal objects on a reflecting plane. Numerical simulations verify the cloaking effect, which is completely independent of the geometry and material properties of the hidden object. Moreover, we extend this idea to achieve a directional acoustic cloak with homogeneous materials that can render arbitrary objects in free space invisible to incident radiation. To demonstrate the feasibility of the realization, a non-resonant meta-atom is utilized which dramatically facilitated the physical realization of our design. Due to the simple acoustic constitutive parameters of the presented structures, this work paves the way toward realization of non-closed acoustic devices, which could find applications in airborne sound manipulation and underwater demands

Waste Dump Site Selection by Using Fuzzy VIKOR

Considering the nature of open pit mines, harvest volume, it usually is required to remove a lot of waste to access to mineral planned grade. So, one of the most important part of open pit mines design, is waste dump site selection. Many factors are effective in waste dump site selection. These factors are sometimes in conflict with each other. So selecting the desired location for waste dump is a process complex and multi-criteria decision making. There are a variety of methods for decision making under complicated condition, such as fuzzy, Delphi, multi-criteria decision making and Expert system methods can be hinted. VIKOR method, which is one of the decision making multi criteria methods, is useful tool for decision-making. On the other hand with regard to uncertainty in decision-making, fuzzy approach is a useful tool for this purpose. This article has tried to select the best waste dump site in Sari Gunay Gold Mine by Fuzzy VIKOR. The results show that C position has a higher priority than other positions