Development of models for predicting Torsade de Pointes cardiac arrhythmias using perceptron neural networks

Blockage of some ion channels and in particular, the hERG cardiac potassium channel delays cardiac repolarization and can induce arrhythmia. In some cases it leads to a potentially life-threatening arrhythmia known as Torsade de Pointes (TdP). Therefore recognizing drugs with TdP risk is essential. Candidate drugs that are determined not to cause cardiac ion channel blockage are more likely to pass successfully through clinical phases II and III trials (and preclinical work) and not be withdrawn even later from the marketplace due to cardiotoxic effects. The objective of the present study is to develop an SAR model that can be used as an early screen for torsadogenic (causing TdP arrhythmias) potential in drug candidates. The method is performed using descriptors comprised of atomic NMR chemical shifts and corresponding interatomic distances which are combined into a 3D abstract space matrix. The method is called 3D-SDAR (3 dimensional spectral data-activity relationship) and can be interrogated to identify molecular features responsible for the activity, which can in turn yield simplified hERG toxicophores. A dataset of 55 hERG potassium channel inhibitors collected from Kramer et al. consisting of 32 drugs with TdP risk and 23 with no TdP risk was used for training the 3D-SDAR model.An ANN model with multilayer perceptron was used to define collinearities among the independent 3D-SDAR features. A composite model from 200 random iterations with 25% of the molecules in each case yielded the following figures of merit: training, 99.2 %; internal test sets, 66.7%; external (blind validation) test set, 68.4%. In the external test set, 70.3% of positive TdP drugs were correctly predicted. Moreover, toxicophores were generated from TdP drugs. A 3D-SDAR was successfully used to build a predictive model for drug-induced torsadogenic and non-torsadogenic drugs.Comment: Accepted for publication in BMC Bioinformatics (Springer) July 201

Effect of OATP-binding on the prediction of biliary excretion

1.Biliary excretion of compounds is dependant on several transporter proteins for the active uptake of compounds from the blood into the hepatocytes. Organic anion-transporting polypeptides (OATPs) are some of the most abundant transporter proteins in the sinusoidal membrane and have been shown to have substrate specificity similar to the structural characteristics of cholephilic compounds. 2.In this study, we sought to use measures of OATP binding as predictors of biliary excretion in conjunction with molecular descriptors in a quantitative structure-activity relationship (QSAR) study. Percentage inhibitions of three subtypes of OATPs were used as surrogate indicators of OATP substrates. Several statistical modelling techniques were incorporated including classification and regression trees, boosted trees, random forest and multivariate adaptive regression splines (MARS) in order to first develop QSARs for the prediction of OATP inhibition of compounds. The predicted OATP percentage inhibition using selected models were then used as features of the QSAR models for the prediction of biliary excretion of compounds in rat. 3.The results indicated that incorporation of predicted OATP inhibition improves accuracy of biliary excretion models. The best result was obtained from a simple regression tree that used predicted OATP1B1 percentage inhibition at the root node of the tree

A Proposed Architecture for Continuous Web Monitoring Through Online Crawling of Blogs

Getting informed of what is registered in the Web space on time, can greatly help the psychologists, marketers and political analysts to familiarize, analyse, make decision and act correctly based on the society`s different needs. The great volume of information in the Web space hinders us to continuously online investigate the whole space of the Web. Focusing on the considered blogs limits our working domain and makes the online crawling in the Web space possible. In this article, an architecture is offered which continuously online crawls the related blogs, using focused crawler, and investigates and analyses the obtained data. The online fetching is done based on the latest announcements of the ping server machines. A weighted graph is formed based on targeting the important key phrases, so that a focused crawler can do the fetching of the complete texts of the related Web pages, based on the weighted graph.Comment: 10 pages, 2 figure

Activity-based Criteria on Internationalization

The world economy is moving ever faster toward a highly interdependent state in which international business is creating a global market. Often, in this environment, growth or even survival of a business hinges on its successful internationalization. Therefore, firms need to ask the vital question of how internationalized are their operations? To answer such question requires, among other things, measuring the extent of global involvement. This paper is an attempt toward constructing an internationalization measure by using financial performance and market engagement data outside firm’s home country

Internet Based Oracle Financial Training: A Success Story

Most academic institutions wish to provide current, up to date and real world software applications to their students and this causes a number of common difficulties. This is especially true as those applications become far larger and more complex, such as Enterprise Systems. The authors’ institution has a degree program in accounting information systems, and the authors believed that it was critical that ERP skills and applications be included in order to maintain the stature of the program. Although difficulties were expected, the authors nonetheless pursued various classroom ERP alternatives. This paper reports on those efforts particularly the adoption of internet based training rather than the traditional computer lab in the creation and offering of an ERP financial applications class. It was quickly determined that avoiding a dedicated computer lab option will result in substantial saving in additional hardware expenditure. Creating an online classroom forum for sharing of ideas and information is another component of internet based training course. “Caucus” a proprietary online software developed by our university allows faculty and students share their comments, questions, comments and suggestions with one another on broad basis. It is believed that such information will provide encouragement and useful information to other institutions that are considering such implementations

Rapid Implementation Of ERP Financials Into The Curriculum: A Success Story

Most academic institutions wish to provide current, up to date and real world software applications to their students and this causes a number of common difficulties.  This is especially true as those applications become far larger and more complex, such as in Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, more recently referred to as Enterprise Systems.  The authors’ institution has a degree program in accounting information systems, and the authors believed that it was critical that ERP skills and applications be included in order to maintain the stature of the program.  Although difficulties were expected, the authors nonetheless pursued various classroom ERP alternatives.  This paper reports on those efforts, which culminated in the creation and offering of an ERP financial applications class in a six month time period.  It is believed that such information will provide encouragement and useful information to other institutions that are considering such implementations

Study the effectiveness of cognitive-behavioral intervention on the quality of life, job satisfaction, and nurses' organizational performance

Background and aims: Quality of life is an important concept in how to play the role of nursing care. In addition, the performance and job satisfaction of nurses as components of the effective health systems to provide better services to clients are in a particular significance. The aim of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of cognitive-behavioral intervention on the quality of life, organizational performance, and job satisfaction of nurses. Methods: The current study is a quasi-experimental research with pre-test and post-test with control group. The first experimental group received cognitive-behavioral training and the second group without training is studied. Both groups response the pre-test and post-test at the same time. The population studied in this research study comprised nurses who were working in Tabriz hospitals in the second half 2016. The primary samples in this study were 205 nurses who were determined in convenience after the implementation of a pilot study. 40 nurses first with lower scores on tests were selected and divided into two experimental and control groups (each 20 people). Tools of the research were questionnaires of The World Health Organization Quality of Life, Paterson Organizational Performance, Berry Field and Ruth job satisfaction questionnaire and Content of the Sessions of Cognitive Therapy Group. Data were analyzed using SPSS software and multivariate covariance analysis test. Results: The results of the research showed that the education of cognitive-behavioral intervention on the variables of quality of life, job satisfaction and organizational performance nurses have a significant positive effect (P<0.05). Conclusion: Regarding the effectiveness of cognitive-behavioral intervention training, it is recommended interventional programs for nurses be used in order to improve quality of life and increase job satisfaction and their organizational performance

Task allocation to actors in wireless sensor actor networks: an energy and time aware technique

AbstractTask allocation is a critical issue in proper engineering of cooperative applications in embedded systems with latency and energy constraints, as in wireless sensor and actor networks (WSANs). Existing task allocation algorithms are mostly concerned with energy savings and ignore time constraints and thus increase the makespan of tasks in the network as well as the probability of malfunctioning of the network. In this paper we take both energy awareness and reduction of actor tasks’ times to completion in WSANs into account and propose a two-phase task allocation technique based on Queuing theory. In the first phase, tasks are equally assigned to actors just to measure the capability of each actor to perform the assigned tasks. Tasks are then allocated to actors according to their measured capabilities in such a way to reduce the total completion times of all tasks in the network. The results of simulations on typical scenarios shows 45% improvement in the makespan of tasks in a network compared to the wellknown opportunistic load balancing (OLB) task allocation algorithm that is generally used in distributed systems. It is shown that our algorithms provide better tradeoffs between load balancing and completion times of all tasks in a WSAN compared to OLB