Assessment of Dental Environment Stress among Clinical Dentistry Students in Kerman Dental School, Iran, in 2014

Background & Objective: Dentistry has been widely acknowledged as being associated with high levels of stress. This stress originates in the process of dental education. The aim of the present study was to evaluate dental environment stress (DES) in students of the School of Dentistry of Kerman University of Medical Sciences, Iran. Methods: This cross-sectional study was conducted on 165 students. Data were collected using the Dental Environment Stress Questionnaire (consisting of 32 items in 6 scales) and demographic information questionnaire. Data were analyzed in SPSS software using t-test and ANOVA. P-value was considered at 5%. Results: Of the 165 respondents, 53.3% were women and 78.2% were single. Their mean age was 23.63 ± 2.94 years, and mean score was 16.05 ± 1.10. The mean of DES score was 82.60 ± 14.53 out of a total of 128. In academic factors, fear of exam and failure of the course were the most important stressors. There was a statistically significant association between mean DES score and gender. There was no statistically significant association between mean DES score and marriage status, student`s work, and priority of field selection. Conclusion: The results of the present study were similar to that of previous studies. They showed the existence of DES. Academic factors were one of the most important stressors. Key Words: Dental environment, Stress, Students, Kerman (Iran

Knowledge and Attitude About Research Ethics Among Iranian Dental Students

Objective: To evaluate the knowledge and attitude of the students of Kerman dental school (Iran) about ethics in dental research. Material and Methods: This cross-section study was conducted on 307 dental students selected through the census sampling method. Data were collected by a researcher-made questionnaire consisting of 12 items about knowledge and 17 items about attitude toward research ethics. Data analyzed in SPSS software using t-test and linear regression test. P-values of less than 0.05 were considered statistically significant. Results: Of the respondents, 33.9% were male and 66.1% were female, and 44% had good knowledge and 20.8% had a positive attitude about research ethics. A significant correlation was found between knowledge and attitude. A significant correlation was also observed between knowledge and participation in research workshops. Knowledge and attitude showed no significant correlation with gender or year of admission. Conclusion: Participants had appropriate knowledge and attitude about research ethics. There is some room for improvement in research ethics education concerning experimental works and retrospective studies on biologic samples. Holding research workshops with an introduction to ethical codes of research is recommended

Efficient Maliciously Secure Two Party Computation for Mixed Programs

We propose a new approach for practical secure two-party computation (2PC) achieving security in the presence of malicious adversaries. Given a program to compute, the idea is to identify subcomputations that depend on only one or neither of the parties’ private inputs. Such computations can be secured at significantly lower cost, using different protocol paradigms for each case. We then show how to securely connect these subprotocols together, and with standard 2PC yielding our new approach for 2PC for mixed programs. Our empirical evaluations confirm that the mixed-2PC approach outperforms state-of-the-art monolithic 2PC protocols for most computations

Internet Addiction Among Iranian Students of Medical Sciences

Objective: To identify the prevalence of Internet addiction (IA) and associated factors among Iranian medical students. Material and Methods: The cross-sectional survey was conducted on a random sample of 400 students. The self-administered questionnaire consisted of two sections: the first section was sociodemographic data, data about student's relations, and Internet use characteristics; the second part aimed at assessment of the level of IA using Young's 20-item scale for IA. Data analyzed in SPSS 20 at 0.05 significant level. Results: Considering their familiarity with the Internet, 80.3% stated personal experience and 12.3% individuals stated educational periods held outside the university. The most locations of using the Internet were dormitories (21.0%) and houses (43.5%). Concerning hours of Internet use, 45.2% used the Internet more than two hours per day. One hundred sixty-eight individuals (42.0%) stated that they used the Internet less than 15% for university activities. One hundred eighty-eight individuals (47.0%) used VPN and 75.5% were dissatisfied with Internet speed 61.2%. A total of 64.3% had a poor dependency on the Internet and the prevalence of IA was 3.5%. The mean score of IA questionnaire was 43.98 ± 15.92 from 125. The mean score of IA was higher in the male sex, but there was no significant correlation between sex and IA (p>0.05). There was not a significant correlation between the field of study and the year of entrance. Conclusion: The prevalence of Internet addiction among medical students was low. Identification of factors associated with IA can help in the planning of preventive programs to raise students’ knowledge about the hazards IA

Spatio-Temporal Hybrid Fusion of CAE and SWIn Transformers for Lung Cancer Malignancy Prediction

The paper proposes a novel hybrid discovery Radiomics framework that simultaneously integrates temporal and spatial features extracted from non-thin chest Computed Tomography (CT) slices to predict Lung Adenocarcinoma (LUAC) malignancy with minimum expert involvement. Lung cancer is the leading cause of mortality from cancer worldwide and has various histologic types, among which LUAC has recently been the most prevalent. LUACs are classified as pre-invasive, minimally invasive, and invasive adenocarcinomas. Timely and accurate knowledge of the lung nodules malignancy leads to a proper treatment plan and reduces the risk of unnecessary or late surgeries. Currently, chest CT scan is the primary imaging modality to assess and predict the invasiveness of LUACs. However, the radiologists' analysis based on CT images is subjective and suffers from a low accuracy compared to the ground truth pathological reviews provided after surgical resections. The proposed hybrid framework, referred to as the CAET-SWin, consists of two parallel paths: (i) The Convolutional Auto-Encoder (CAE) Transformer path that extracts and captures informative features related to inter-slice relations via a modified Transformer architecture, and; (ii) The Shifted Window (SWin) Transformer path, which is a hierarchical vision transformer that extracts nodules' related spatial features from a volumetric CT scan. Extracted temporal (from the CAET-path) and spatial (from the Swin path) are then fused through a fusion path to classify LUACs. Experimental results on our in-house dataset of 114 pathologically proven Sub-Solid Nodules (SSNs) demonstrate that the CAET-SWin significantly improves reliability of the invasiveness prediction task while achieving an accuracy of 82.65%, sensitivity of 83.66%, and specificity of 81.66% using 10-fold cross-validation.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2110.0872

Non-Interactive Secure Computation Based on Cut-and-Choose

In recent years, secure two-party computation (2PC) has been demonstrated to be feasible in practice. However, all efficient general-computation 2PC protocols require multiple rounds of interaction between the two players. This property restricts 2PC to be only relevant to scenarios where both players can be simultaneously online, and where communication latency is not an issue. This work considers the model of 2PC with a single round of interaction, called Non-Interactive Secure Computation (NISC). In addition to the non-interaction property, we also consider a flavor of NISC that allows reusing the first message for many different 2PC invocations, possibly with different players acting as the player who sends the second message, similar to a public-key encryption where a single public-key can be used to encrypt many different messages. We present a NISC protocol that is based on the cut-and-choose paradigm of Lindell and Pinkas (Eurocrypt 2007). This protocol achieves concrete efficiency similar to that of best multi-round 2PC protocols based on the cut-and-choose paradigm. The protocol requires only $t$ garbled circuits for achieving cheating probability of $2^{-t}$, similar to the recent result of Lindell (Crypto 2013), but only needs a single round of interaction. To validate the efficiency of our protocol, we provide a prototype implementation of it and show experiments that confirm its competitiveness with that of the best multi-round 2PC protocols. This is the first prototype implementation of an efficient NISC protocol. In addition to our NISC protocol, we introduce a new encoding technique that significantly reduces communication in the NISC setting. We further show how our NISC protocol can be improved in the multi-round setting, resulting in a highly efficient constant-round 2PC that is also suitable for pipelined implementation