Comparison of Distances for Supervised Segmentation of White Matter Tractography

Tractograms are mathematical representations of the main paths of axons within the white matter of the brain, from diffusion MRI data. Such representations are in the form of polylines, called streamlines, and one streamline approximates the common path of tens of thousands of axons. The analysis of tractograms is a task of interest in multiple fields, like neurosurgery and neurology. A basic building block of many pipelines of analysis is the definition of a distance function between streamlines. Multiple distance functions have been proposed in the literature, and different authors use different distances, usually without a specific reason other than invoking the "common practice". To this end, in this work we want to test such common practices, in order to obtain factual reasons for choosing one distance over another. For these reasons, in this work we compare many streamline distance functions available in the literature. We focus on the common task of automatic bundle segmentation and we adopt the recent approach of supervised segmentation from expert-based examples. Using the HCP dataset, we compare several distances obtaining guidelines on the choice of which distance function one should use for supervised bundle segmentation

Examining the Job Satisfaction among the Hotel Employees in Bangladesh: An Exploratory Study

This paper tries to explore the employees’ job satisfaction in different residential hotels in Bangladesh. To determine the employees’ job satisfaction regarding their work in residential hotels in Barisal, sixty four samples were selected and SPSS 16.0 was used for demographic information, descriptive statistics, regression and correlation analysis. This study reveals some job-related factors that affect the overall job satisfaction of hotel employees’ in Barisal. The multiple regression analysis of chances of promotion has significant relationship to the job satisfaction & other factors have no significant relationship to the job satisfaction in hotels of Barisal. The Pearson correlation analysis (sig. 0.002) clearly indicates that the research is statistically significant and the result depicts that job security (.289) and fair salary (.279*) are highly correlated with working environment. Findings of this study also suggests that overall job satisfaction is influenced by the chances of promotion and working environment. The implication of this study is that hotel industry should take proper action to ensure the better working environment and try to minimize the promotional barriers in increasing the employees’ satisfaction. Keywords: Hotels, Job satisfaction, SPSS, Work environment, Job security

An Investigation on The Intention to Adopt Mobile Banking on Security Perspective in Bangladesh

This research examines the information security of adopting mobile banking and suggests maximizing information security in mobile banking in different ways. Security issues pose a threat to mobile banking adoption and diffusion. Therefore, reliable security measures and improved trust improvement are suggested to address information security in adopting mobile banking for financial services. A questionnaire survey is conducted with users of mobile banking technology. Random sampling is adopted in the study. 650 questionnaires were sent to respondents, and 303 responses were recorded. A confirmatory factor analysis with varimax rotation was conducted following correlation and multiple regression analysis to test the hypothesis of the study. The research finds that (1) perceived security and trust affect mobile banking self-efficacy and performance (SEP) of adopting mobile banking for financial services; (2) Reliable security measure and perceive trust improvement positively influence (SEP) of adopting mobile banking for financial services. This study shows the significance of user perceptions of security by inspecting the content of the security rules of mobile banking for clients’ levels. It includes the adoption of technology in financial services. Therefore, the study links the technology acceptance model (TAM) with the literature on perceived security and trust of adopting mobile banking for financial services. The research has applied to the banking industry to develop and expand its banking market by developing reliable security measures and improving the perceived trust of customers to conduct banking transactions using mobile banking technology

Factors of Women Entrepreneurs’ success in Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in Bangladesh

Main objectives: The success of women entrepreneurship depends on different social and economic aspects. The success of women entrepreneurs in Bangladesh is also very challenging especially in the southern part of the country. This study aimed to investigate the key factors affecting the success of women entrepreneurs in SMEs in Faridpur city. Background problems: Lots of studies and discussions have been taken place regarding the role of women entrepreneurs across the world. As well as the success of women entrepreneurs in Bangladesh is also very challenging especially in the southern part of the country. Novelty: The study took into consideration the broad factors contributing to women entrepreneurship and applied such factors in particularly in the Faridpur district. Research Method: This study was conducted on 67 women entrepreneurs (N=67) of Faridpur city using a convenient sampling technique. The collected data were processed and then analyzed using SPSS. Structural equation modelling was applied to test hypotheses. Findings: The study revealed a bunch of factors that affect the success of women entrepreneurs among these psychological and motivational factors affect significantly and positively the success of women entrepreneurs in SMEs. Contribution: The survey results also show that women entrepreneurs face a range of challenges including financial, technological, lack of proper training, family and mentor supporting, competent staff, and networking for doing business in Bangladesh. Conclusions: The descriptive statistics, correlation, and regression analysis were carried out to identify the important determinants of the success of women entrepreneurs. The implications of this study are elaborated along with some recommendations

An investigation on plant cell walls during biomass pyrolysis: A histochemical perspective on engineering applications

publishedVersio

Alignment of Tractograms As Graph Matching

The white matter pathways of the brain can be reconstructed as 3D polylines, called streamlines, through the analysis of diffusion magnetic resonance imaging (dMRI) data. The whole set of streamlines is called tractogram and represents the structural connectome of the brain. In multiple applications, like group-analysis, segmentation, or atlasing, tractograms of different subjects need to be aligned. Typically, this is done with registration methods, that transform the tractograms in order to increase their similarity. In contrast with transformation-based registration methods, in this work we propose the concept of tractogram correspondence, whose aim is to find which streamline of one tractogram corresponds to which streamline in another tractogram, i.e., a map from one tractogram to another. As a further contribution, we propose to use the relational information of each streamline, i.e., its distances from the other streamlines in its own tractogram, as the building block to define the optimal correspondence. We provide an operational procedure to find the optimal correspondence through a combinatorial optimization problem and we discuss its similarity to the graph matching problem. In this work, we propose to represent tractograms as graphs and we adopt a recent inexact sub-graph matching algorithm to approximate the solution of the tractogram correspondence problem. On tractograms generated from the Human Connectome Project dataset, we report experimental evidence that tractogram correspondence, implemented as graph matching, provides much better alignment than affine registration and comparable if not better results than non-linear registration of volumes

Combined Effect of Citric Acid and Polyphenol-Rich Grape Seed Extract towards Bioactive Smart Food Packaging Systems

Alginate films (2% w·v−1) were prepared with varying concentrations (5–20% w/w) of citric acid and aqueous grape seed extract (GSE) filtrate (11.66 ± 1.32 g GAE/L) using the solvent-evaporation method. Crosslinking alginate via ester bonds (FTIR analysis) with citric acid up to 10% (w/w) led to a 33% increase in tensile strength, a 34% reduction in water vapor transmission rate (WVTR), and had no impact on elongation at break. Crosslinking alginate with citric acid in the presence of GSE increased the tensile strength by 17%, decreased WVTR by 21%, and significantly improved DPPH scavenging activity. Moreover, after incubation for 24 h at 37 °C, the film-forming solutions exhibited increased antimicrobial activity, resulting in 0.5- and 2.5-log reductions for Escherichia coli and Staphylococcus aureus, respectively, compared to the values obtained without the addition of GSE. The stronger inhibitory effect observed against Gram-positive bacteria can be attributed to the unique composition and structure of their cell walls, which creates a barrier that restricts the penetration of polyphenols into the cells. The pH adjustment of the GSE film-forming solution from 2.0 to 10.0 shifted the UV/VIS absorption spectra, resulting in a colour change from yellow to red. The findings of this study have showcased the potential of combining GSE and citric acid to enhance the functionality and bioactivity of alginate films for applications in smart food packaging.publishedVersio

Effect of Citric Acid Cross Linking on the Mechanical, Rheological and Barrier Properties of Chitosan

In this study, acetic acid (AA-2% w/v), a combination of acetic acid and citric acid (AA-1% w/v + CA-1% w/w), and three different concentrations of citric acid (CA-2, 4 and 6% w/w) were used to create chitosan solution. The FTIR analysis showed the presence of residual CA in all the CA-containing samples where no trace of AA was observed. The tensile strengths of the CA-containing samples were lower than the AA samples. Whereas the values for the elongation at break of the CA samples were higher than the AA samples, which kept increasing with an increasing CA content due to the plasticizing effect from residual citric acid. The elongation at break values for 4 and 6% CA-containing samples were 98% higher than the AA samples. The samples prepared with CA showed shorter LVE regions that reduced with an increasing CA concentration compared to the AA samples. Different acid concentrations did not have a large effect on the gelation time. However, CA-containing samples showed higher viscosities as compared to the AA-containing solution, which increased with an increasing CA content. The water vapour transmission rates of the CA-containing samples were lower than the others. All the chitosan solutions suppressed the growth of the two test strains, and none of the variants reached an abs 600 nm at 0.2.Effect of Citric Acid Cross Linking on the Mechanical, Rheological and Barrier Properties of ChitosanpublishedVersio

L-DOPA coating improved phosphate glass fibre strength and fibre/matrix interface

publishedVersio

Compositional dependency on dissolution rate and cytocompatibility of phosphate-based glasses: effect of B2O3 and Fe2O3 addition

The unique property of phosphate-based glasses and fibres to be completely dissolved in aqueous media is largely dependent on the glass composition. This article focuses on investigating the effect of replacing Na2O with 3 and 5 mol% Fe2O3 on cytocompatibility, thermal and dissolution properties of P2O5–CaO–Na2O–MgO–B2O3 glass system, where P2O5 content was fixed at 45 mol%. The effect of increasing Fe2O3 from 3 to 5 mol% on P2O5–CaO–Na2O–MgO glasses was also evaluated. The glass transition temperature, onset of crystallisation temperature and liquidus temperature were found to decrease with increasing Fe2O3 content and the addition of B2O3, while the thermal expansion values were found to decrease. The density of the glasses decreased with increasing Fe2O3 content. However, an increase in the density was observed by the addition of 5 mol% B2O3. The dissolution properties and mode of bulk glass and fibres were also examined which were found to decrease with increasing B2O3 and Fe2O3. However, it was found that the dissolution properties of the glasses containing both B2O3 and Fe2O3 were lower than only Fe2O3 containing glasses. The in vitro cell culture studies using human osteoblast like (MG63) cell lines revealed that the glasses containing both B2O3 and Fe2O3 maintained and showed higher cell viability as compared to the only Fe2O3 containing glasses. Glasses containing both B2O3 and Fe2O3 showed a pronounced effect on the dissolution rate of the glasses, which eventually improved the cytocompatibility properties of the glasses investigated