An Extended Fuzzy Discrete Event System For Hiv/aids Treatment Regimen Selection

HIV/AIDS is a global problem. Its treatment is dependent on the physician experts\u27 opinion. A system which is capable of supporting the treatment decision will be desired. Recently, the HIV/AIDS treatment regimen selection system appeared in literature that utilized theory of fuzzy discrete event system (FDES) to capture the meaning of experts\u27 knowledge; a form of consensus involving estimated points and type-1 fuzzy sets. The goal was to assign exact matching regimens as close as possible to those regimens preferred by the experts for patients. The system performance was 80% of satisfaction level with the 35 retrospective patients. Extracting experts\u27 knowledge into the consensus forms would not be possible without being compromised by the experts. With equal respective experts, if one insists on his/her values, then the consensus would not be achieved. Conversely, the FDES theory would be no longer to handle such conflict. The theory of extended fuzzy discrete event system (EFDES) extended the FDES theory that type-2 fuzzy sets would be allowed to be used in the system. This dissertation is to apply the EFDES theory to the HIV/AIDS treatment regimen selection system. Seven scenarios of the diversity of experts\u27 knowledge representation were categorized for the system. The MATLAB was implemented to model the system. Genetic algorithm in MATLAB\u27s Direct Search Toolbox was used to search an optimal vector of 26 weights for system parameters regarding the experts\u27 regimen-choices. As the same input of the retrospective patient data for the FDES-based system, the overall means of simulation results of EFDES-based system demonstrated the degree of matching regimens being 80%. That result would be the same performance level of the FDES-based system as well. The EFDES-based system performance with self-learning provided the overall satisfaction level of above 80%. Moreover, the EFDES-based system with use of the type-2 fuzzy set gained the benefit on the extraction of diverse and uncertainty experts\u27 knowledge and expertise

Pretreatment of Palm Fruit by Using a Conveyor Belt Microwave Prototype

This paper presents a microwave drying prototype, which is a conveyor belt design for oil palm pretreatment. The prototype consists of four 800 W magnetrons launching electromagnetic energy to the rectangular waveguide cavity. Palm fruit was fed in the cavity by the conveyor belt and pretreated in the cavity. The cavity size was designed optimally to ensure that temperature distribution in the palm fruit is uniform. Another conveyor belt is applied to the cavity output to feed out the pretreated fruit. Two corrugated waveguide filters were installed at the conveyor belt ends to suppress the microwave leakage. Three hundred sixty palm fruit were pretreated to prove the prototype concept. From the experiment results, the prototype heated palm fruit to the temperature required for inhibiting lipase enzyme within 120 seconds. It is found that free fatty acids in the treated palm fruit was well below 2% even 1 week storage