Equilibrium And Kinetics Of Disperse Dye Adsorption On Activated Carbon Prepared From Rattan Sawdust By Chemical Activation.

The liquid-phase adsorption of C.I. Disperse Orange 30 (DO30) onto activated carbon prepared from rattan sawdust by chemical activation with H3PO4. The rattan sawdust was carbonized at 500oC, 2h and impregnated ratio weight with H3PO4 at 1:4.5

Health care intelligent system: A neural network based method for early diagnosis of Alzheimer\u27s disease using MRI images

Alzheimer\u27s disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative disease that causes memory loss and is considered the most common type of dementia. In many countries, AD is commonly affecting senior citizens having an aged more than 65 years. Machine learning-based approaches have some limitations due to data pre-processing issues. We propose a health care intelligent system based on a deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) in this research work. It classifies normal control (NC), mild cognitive impairment (MCI), and AD. The proposed model is employed on white matter (WM), and grey matter (GM) tissues with more cognitive decline features. In the experimental process, we used 375 Magnetic Resonance Image (MRI) subjects collected from Alzheimer\u27s disease neuroimaging initiative (ADNI), including 130 NC people, 120 MCI patients, and 125 AD patients. We extract three major regions during pre-processing, that is, WM, GM and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF). This study shows promising classification results for NC versus AD 97.94%, MCI versus AD 92.84%, and NC versus MCI 88.15% on GM images. Furthermore, our proposed model attained 95.97%, 90.82%, and 86.87% on the same three binary classes on WM tissue, respectively. When comparing existing studies in terms of accuracy and other evaluation parameters, we found that our proposed approach shows better results than those approaches based on the CNN method

Explicit asymptotic modelling of transient Love waves propagated along a thin coating

The official published version can be obtained from the link below.An explicit asymptotic model for transient Love waves is derived from the exact equations of anti-plane elasticity. The perturbation procedure relies upon the slow decay of low-frequency Love waves to approximate the displacement field in the substrate by a power series in the depth coordinate. When appropriate decay conditions are imposed on the series, one obtains a model equation governing the displacement at the interface between the coating and the substrate. Unusually, the model equation contains a term with a pseudo-differential operator. This result is confirmed and interpreted by analysing the exact solution obtained by integral transforms. The performance of the derived model is illustrated by numerical examples.This work is sponsored by the grant from Higher Education of Pakistan and by the Brunel University’s “BRIEF” research award

Rheological evaluation of the fabrication parameters of cellulose acetate butyrate membrane on CO2/N2 separation performance

The rise in emission of greenhouse gases (GHGs) mainly carbon dioxide (CO2) in recent years due to rapid development of modern civilisation, has been listed as the primary contributor to global warming. To address this global issue, membrane technology was applied and developed intensively because of its superior performance in terms of efficiency and economic advantages. In this study, the cellulose acetate butyrate (CAB) polymer was selected as the polymer matrix material since it exhibited excellent film-forming properties. In addition, the wet-phase inversion technique was adopted to synthesise the membrane based on different casting conditions. The optimum outcomes of the fabrication conditions were then characterised with the scanning electron micrograph (SEM) to determine the best CAB membrane for CO2/N2 separation. The results showed that CAB-70000 fabricated with 4 wt% of CAB polymer concentration, casting thickness of 250 µm, solvent evaporation time of 5 minutes, and 30 minutes of solvent exchange for isopropyl alcohol and n-hexane, exhibited the best gas separation performance. Further, CAB-70000 showed an average selectivity of 6.12 ± 0.09 and permeance up to 227.95 ± 0.39 GPU for CO2 and 37.28 ± 0.54 GPU for N2, respectively. In summary, this study is expected to show a detailed outline of the future direction and perspective of the novel CAB polymeric membrane that is suitable to be applied in the industry, and serves as an insight for researchers and manufacturers working in the related field of gas separation

Impact of membrane pore structure on protein detection sensitivity of affi nity-based immunoassay

Understanding a membrane’s morphology is important for controlling its fi nal performance during protein immobilization. Porous, symmetric membranes were prepared from a polyvinylidene fl uoride/N-methyl-2-pyrrolidinone solution by phase inversion process, to obtain membrane with various microsized pores. The concentration and surface area of aprotein dotted on the membrane surface were measured by staining with Ponceau S dye. The dotted protein was further scanned and analysed to perform quantitative measurements for relative comparison. The intensity of the red protein spot and its surface area varied depending on the membrane pore size, demonstrating the dependence of protein immobilization on this factor. The membrane with the smallest pore size (M3) showed the highest protein spot intensity and surface area when examined at different protein concentrations. An increase in the applied protein volume showed a linearity proportional trend to the total surface area, and an uneven round dot shape was observed at a large applied volume of protein solution

Mode of presentation and mortality amongst patients hospitalized with heart failure? A report from The First Euro Heart Failure Survey

Background: Heart failure is heterogeneous in aetiology, pathophysiology, and presentation. Despite this diversity, clinical trials of patients hospitalized for HF deal with this problem as a single entity, which may be one reason for repeated failures. Methods: The first EuroHeart Failure Survey screened consecutive deaths and discharges of patients with suspected heart failure during 2000–2001. Patients were sorted into seven mutually exclusive hierarchical presentations: (1) with cardiac arrest/ventricular arrhythmia; (2) with acute coronary syndrome; (3) with rapid atrial fibrillation; (4) with acute breathlessness; (5) with other symptoms/signs such as peripheral oedema; (6) with stable symptoms; and (7) others in whom the contribution of HF to admission was not clear. Results: The 10,701 patients enrolled were classified into the above seven presentations as follows: 260 (2%), 560 (5%), 799 (8%), 2479 (24%), 1040 (10%), 703 (7%), and 4691 (45%) for which index-admission mortality was 26%, 20%, 10%, 8%, 6%, 6%, and 4%, respectively. Compared to those in group 7, the hazard ratios for death during the index admission were 4.9 (p ≤ 0.001), 4.0 (p < 0.001), 2.2 (p < 0.001), 2.1 (p < 0.001), 1.4 (p < 0.04) and 1.4 (p = 0.04), respectively. These differences were no longer statistically significant by 12 weeks. Conclusion: There is great diversity in the presentation of heart failure that is associated with very different short-term outcomes. Only a minority of hospitalizations associated with suspected heart failure are associated with acute breathlessness. This should be taken into account in the design of future clinical trials