A Comprehensive Review on Dry Eye Disease: Diagnosis, Medical Management, Recent Developments, and Future Challenges

Dry eye syndrome (DES) or keratoconjunctivitis sicca (KCS) is a common disorder of the tear film caused by decreased tear production or increased evaporation and manifests with a wide variety of signs and symptoms. The present review from interpretation of the literature gives detailed information on the prevalence, definition, causes, diagnostic tests, and medical management of dry eye disease. A number of systems contribute to the physiological integrity of the ocular surface and disruption of system may or may not produce symptoms. Therefore accurate diagnosis of dry eyes with no or minimal disruption of physiological function is necessary. The paper also discusses different colloidal drug delivery systems and current challenges in the development of topical ophthalmic drug delivery systems for treatment of KCS. Due to the wide prevalence and number of factors involved, newer, more sensitive diagnostic techniques and novel therapeutic agents have been developed to provide ocular delivery systems with high therapeutic efficacy. The aim of this review is to provide awareness among the patients, health care professionals, and researchers about diagnosis and treatment of KCS and recent developments and future challenges in management of dry eye disease

High Temperature Thermal Expansion Studies of Pure UO2, Gd2O3 & of UO2-1.5 w/o Gd2O3 Solid Solution

1096-109

QoS - Aware content oriented flow routing in optical computer network

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.In this thesis, one of the most important issues in the field of networks communication is tackled and addressed. This issue is represented by QoS, where the increasing demand on highquality applications together with the fast increase in the rates of Internet users have led to massive traffic being transmitted on the Internet. This thesis proposes new ideas to manage the flow of this huge traffic in a manner that contributes in improving the communication QoS. This can be achieved by replacing the conventional application-insensitive routing schemes by others which take into account the type of applications when making the routing decision. As a first contribution, the effect on the potential development in the quality of experience on the loading of Basra optical network has been investigated. Furthermore, the traffic due to each application was dealt with in different ways according to their delay and loss sensitivities. Load rate distributions over the various links due to the different applications were deployed to investigate the places of possible congestions in the network and the dominant applications that cause such congestions. In addition, OpenFlow and Optica Burst Switching (OBS) techniques were used to provide a wider range of network controllability and management. A centralised routing protocol that takes into account the available bandwidth, delay, and security as three important QoS parameters, when forwarding traffics of different types, was proposed and implemented using OMNeT++ networks simulator. As a novel idea, security has been incorporated in our QoS requirements by incorporating Oyster Optics Technology (OOT) to secure some of the optical links aiming to supply the network with some secure paths for those applications that have high privacy requirements. A particular type of traffic is to be routed according to the importance of these three QoS parameters for such a traffic type. The link utilisation, end to end delays and securities due to the different applications were recorded to prove the feasibility of our proposed system. In order to decrease the amount of traffic overhead, the same QoS constraints were implemented on a distributed Ant colony based routing. The traditional Ant routing protocol was improved by adopting the idea of Red-Green-Blue (RGB) pheromones routing to incorporate these QoS constraints. Improvements of 11% load balancing, and 9% security for private data was achieved compared to the conventional Ant routing techniques. In addition, this Ant based routing was utilised to propose an improved solution for the routing and wavelength assignment problem in the WDM optical computer networks

High Temperature Behaviour of Strontium Uranates

192-19

Development of Briquette From Coir Dust and Rice Husk Blend: an Alternative Energy Source

Biomass is one of the predominant renewable energy sources and the use of biomass for the energy generation has got much attention due to its environmental friendliness. Densification of coir dust into fuel briquette can solve waste disposal problem as well as can serve as an alternative energy source. The objective of this study was to investigate the possibility of producing briquette from coir dust and rice husk blend without binder. During this study, a briquetting experiment was conducted with different coir dust and rice husk blends (i.e. coir dust and rice husk ratio of 80:20, 60:40, 50:50, 40:60, 20:80 and 0:100). Briquetting operation was performed using a die-screw press type briquetting machine. The briquettes were tested to evaluate their density, compressive strength, calorific value, burning rate and water vaporizing capacity and it was found that mixing ratio had a significant effect on the physical, mechanical and combustion properties of the coir dust-rice husk briquettes. Density, compressive strength and calorific value and water vaporizing capacity were increased with increasing mixing ratio while burning rate was decreased. Coir dust-rice husk briquettes with mixing ratio of 20:80 had higher density (1.413 g/cm3), compressive strength (218.4 N/cm2), calorific value (4879 kcal/kg), water vaporizing capacity (0.853 l/kg) and low burning rate (0.783 kg/hour) followed by the mixing ratio 40:60, 50:50, 60:40 and 0:100. The results indicate that coir dust and rice husk blend briquettes were found to have better overall handling characteristics over rice husk briquette. However, production of briquettes from coir dust and rice husk at mixing ratio of 50:50 was found to be more suitable for commercial application in terms of cost effectiveness

Identifying Crisis Response Communities in Online Social Networks for Compound Disasters: The Case of Hurricane Laura and Covid-19

Online social networks allow different agencies and the public to interact and share the underlying risks and protective actions during major disasters. This study revealed such crisis communication patterns during hurricane Laura compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic. Laura was one of the strongest (Category 4) hurricanes on record to make landfall in Cameron, Louisiana. Using the Application Programming Interface (API), this study utilizes large-scale social media data obtained from Twitter through the recently released academic track that provides complete and unbiased observations. The data captured publicly available tweets shared by active Twitter users from the vulnerable areas threatened by Laura. Online social networks were based on user influence feature ( mentions or tags) that allows notifying other users while posting a tweet. Using network science theories and advanced community detection algorithms, the study split these networks into twenty-one components of various sizes, the largest of which contained eight well-defined communities. Several natural language processing techniques (i.e., word clouds, bigrams, topic modeling) were applied to the tweets shared by the users in these communities to observe their risk-taking or risk-averse behavior during a major compounding crisis. Social media accounts of local news media, radio, universities, and popular sports pages were among those who involved heavily and interacted closely with local residents. In contrast, emergency management and planning units in the area engaged less with the public. The findings of this study provide novel insights into the design of efficient social media communication guidelines to respond better in future disasters

Determination of resistance pattern of bacteriostatic antimicrobial drugs by analysis of blood culture reports

Background: Determination of each isolated bacterium from blood culture and pattern of antimicrobial sensitivity has an important role epidemiologically in a region and can assist physicians in the determination of primary antimicrobial agents. In this study, schema of resistance of bacteriostatic antimicrobials in blood culture is evaluated. Determination of resistance pattern of bacteriostatic antimicrobial drugs by analysis of blood culture report.Methods: A retrospective analysis of microbiological blood culture and antibiotics sensitivity results have been done. A total of 120 laboratory culture results were selected randomly during the observational period. These all-blood culture reports were analyzed for bacteriostatic antimicrobial resistance pattern.Results: The 41 bacterial isolates were obtained from 120 blood culture reports, 24.39% (10) were gram positive and 75.60% (31) were gram-negative. The most frequently isolated gram-negative organisms were K. pneumoniae (34.14%) followed by Pseudomonas (12.19%), E. coli (12.19%). The most frequently isolated gram-positive organism was staphylococcus aureus. All isolates showed less resistance to bacteriostatic antibiotics like clindamycin, chloramphenicol, co-trimoxazole, doxycycline, linezolid, tetracycline, nitrofurantoin, erythromycin, tigecycline.Conclusions: S. aureus, E. coli and Klebsiella spp. pseudomonas aeruginosa were the leading causes of septicaemia or any type of infection in our study finding. These bacteria isolates were highly resistant to bactericidal antimicrobials. But bacteriostatic antimicrobial has shown less resistance compared to bactericidal

A new approach for enhancing LSB steganography using bidirectional coding scheme

This paper proposes a new algorithm for embedding private information within a cover image. Unlike all other already existing algorithms, this one tends to employ the data of the carrier image more efficiently such that the image looks less distorted. As a consequence, the private data is maintained unperceived and the sent information stays unsuspicious.  This task is achieved by dividing the least significant bit plane of the cover image into fixed size blocks, and then embedding the required top-secret message within each block using one of two opposite ways depending on the extent of similarity of each block with the private information needed to be hidden. This technique will contribute to lessen the number of bits needed to be changed in the cover image to accommodate the private data, and hence will substantially reduce the   amount of distortion in the stego-image when compared to the classic LSB image steganography algorithms

Comprehensive Review of the Impact of Advanced Technology Adoption on Work and Continuous Improvement

Technology advances are changing how companies and their employees do their respective jobs. The intervention of technology has revolutionized the way jobs are conceptualized, discussed, performed, and delivered. This analysis aims to deliver a summary of the impact of the adoption of advanced technology on job characteristics and the impact on job demand and continuous improvement, which can act as a reference for theorists and practitioners to map, research, and analyze the effect of technology on work systems and productivity. By presenting a systematic review of the literature along with several avenues for future research, we hope that this research will contribute to job demand and ongoing research. A total of 30 articles were reviewed from a total generated article database of 335, which were systematically selected from different academic databases between 2001 and 2021. The review signifies the role of technology in influencing work complexities, privacy, workload, workflow interruptions, manual work, role expectations, and developmental opportunities. This study is pivotal in substantiating the influence of technology in work systems, besides furnishing variables and themes for further studies in the area.   Doi: 10.28991/HIJ-2023-04-03-014 Full Text: PD