Urban green space (UGS) in a city is the foundation of natural productivity in an urban structure. It is also known as a natural cooling device that plays a vital role in the city as an urban lung, discharging oxygen to reduce the city heat and as a wall against harmful air pollution. When urbanization happens, UGS, including the gazetted areas, is essentially converted into an artificial surface due to the population’s demand for new development. Therefore, identifying its significance is a must and beneficial to explore. The purpose of this study is to identify the 10 years of UGS change patterns and analyze the UGS loss, particularly in the affected gazetted zone. The study used available aerial imagery data for 2002, 2012, and 2017, and database record of green space. The study had classified UGS by using the Support Vector Machine (SVM) algorithm. The training area was determined by visual interpretation and aided by a land use planning map as reference. The result validity was then determined by kappa coefficient value and producer accuracy. Overall, the study showed that the city had lost its UGS by about 88% and the total gain in built up area was 114%. The loss in UGS size in the city could be compared to a total of 2,843 units of football fields, transformed forever in just 10 years. The uncontrolled development and lack of advanced monitoring mechanism had negatively affected the planning structure of green space in KL. The implementation of advance technology as a new mitigation tool to monitor green space loss in the city could provide a variety of enhanced information that could assist city planners and urban designers to defend decisions in protecting these valuable UGS.
Multivariate statistical techniques such as principal component analysis (PCA) and cluster analysis (CA) were applied to water quality parameters in order to interpret complex matrices for better assessment of water quality and environmental status of a watershed. A study was conducted to assess water quality and to establish relationship among water quality parameters in Kelantan River basin. Water quality data was obtained from Department of Environment, (DOE) Malaysia from 2005-2014. Multivariate statistical techniques such as principal component analysis (PCA) and cluster analysis (CA) were applied to 15 water quality parameters in order to interpret complex matrices for better assessment of water quality and environmental status of the watershed. From the results, five PCs were extracted which are collectively accountable for controlling approximately 70% of the watershed’s water quality. Results of cluster analysis indicated that three water quality parameters that included total suspended solids, total solids and turbidity control the water quality of the study area. These parameters were allocated into three clusters based on their similarity. The finding of this study will contribute to existing knowledge of the problems associated with water quality in the basin. This information can be put to use by land use managers and policy makers for future planning and development of the watershed.
The present study aims to determine the level of heavy metals in surface soils and street dust from selected urban and peri-urban locations in the metropolitan city of Kuala Lumpur. Samples were collected from 15 different locations, where Kuala Lumpur City Centre (KLCC) served as the centre point while other locations were located at specific distances from the centre. Surface soils and street dust were collected to detect the level of contamination based on five elements (Zn, Cu, Pb, Cd and Fe). Results indicated that the metal distribution displayed a descending trend as follows: [Fe] > [Zn] > [Pb] > [Cu] > [Cd] and [Fe] > [Zn] > [Cu] > [Pb] > [Cd] in the surface soil and street dust samples, respectively. Geoaccumulation index (Igeo), contamination factor (CF) and pollution load index (PLI) were calculated. Based on the Igeo index, Fe in both samples was found to cause no pollution in all study sites. In surface soils, CF showed all sites were contaminated with Cd in both soil and street dust. In conclusion, the soil sample was polluted with metals while no pollution was found in the street dust in all sites sampled. Further intensive studies are recommended in order to determine other factors which may cause contamination.
Sediment has been widely used as a means for assessing the impact of anthropogenic activities on aquatic environment, with metal pollution being the most well-known threat to aquatic environments. Therefore the aim of this study is to identify and determine metal concentrations, specifically that of copper (Cu), chromium (Cr), cadmium (Cd), iron (Fe), and zinc (Zn) on four sediment cores samples of KongKong Laut Masai Johor. The aqua regia method had been used to analyze Cu, Cr, Cd, Fe and Zn concentrations in sediment samples. Metal concentrations had then been determined through the use of flame atomic absorption spectrometry. The degree of metal contamination in sediment core samples had been determined through using Enrichment Factors (EF) and Geoaccumulation Indices (Igeo). From this study, the mean and standard deviation of metal concentrations in each sediment core sample were shown to be lower than the average shale concentration and lower than both the effects-range low (ERL) and effects-range median (ERM) parameters for aquatic toxicity. This information could be useful, serving as a baseline for evaluating the potential impacts of future development in the area.
Detection and identification of text in natural scene images pose major challenges: image quality varies as scenes are taken under different conditions (lighting, angle and resolution) and the contained text entities can be in any form (size, style and orientation). In this paper, a robust approach is proposed to localize, extract and recognize scene texts of different sizes, fonts and orientations from images of varying quality. The proposed method consists of the following steps: preprocessing and enhancement of input image using the National Television System Committee (NTSC) color mapping and the contrast enhancement via mean histogram stretching; candidate text regions detection using hybrid adaptive segmentation and fuzzy c-means clustering techniques; a two-stage text extraction from the candidate text regions to filter out false text regions include local character filtering according to a rule-based approach using shape and statistical features and text region filtering via stroke width transform (SWT); and finally, text recognition using Tesseract OCR engine. The proposed method was evaluated using two benchmark datasets: ICDAR2013 and KAIST image datasets. The proposed method effectively dealt with complex scene images containing texts of various font sizes, colors, and orientation; and outperformed state-of-the-art methods, achieving >80% in both precision and recall measures.
A non-coastal cockle farming area such as an estuaries zone might become an alternative for continuous and sustainable cockle supply in the future. The main objective of this research is to determine the growth and mortality rate of Tegillarca granosa (T. granosa) within an estuary area. Three cockle plots were allocated along the estuary area of Kongkong Laut (P1, P2, P3) based on the geographical area, from upper to lower part of estuaries. Cockle monitoring activity was conducted from August to December 2015 for both in-situ water parameters and the cockles’ growth increments. This study shows that within a brackish estuarine environment, the highest cockle growth increment was recorded within the highest water salinity trend area (26.92 ± 4.79 ppt; P2), with a shell increment of 2.70 ± 0.52 mm per month, while the lowest cockle growth increment was recorded within the lowest water salinity trend area (17.65 ± 5.73 ppt; P1) with the shell increment of 2.05 ± 0.86 mm per month. One-way ANOVA shows that there was significant difference (p
Referring to the existing model that considers the image boundary as the image background,
the model is still not able to produce an optimum detection. This paper is introducing
the combination features at the boundary known as boundary components affinity that is
capable to produce an optimum measure on the image background. It consists of contrast,
spatial location, force interaction and boundary ratio that contribute to a novel boundary
connectivity measure. The integrated features are capable to produce clearer background
with minimum unwanted foreground patches compared to the ground truth. The extracted
boundary features are integrated as the boundary components affinity. These features were
used for measuring the image background through its boundary connectivity to obtain the
final salient object detection. Using the verified datasets, the performance of the proposed
model was measured and compared with the 4 state-of-art models. In addition, the model
performance was tested on the close contrast images. The detection performance was
compared and analysed based on the precision, recall, true positive rate, false positive
rate, F Measure and Mean Absolute Error (MAE). The model had successfully reduced
the MAE by maximum of 9.4%.
This study evaluates the spatiotemporal distribution of aerosol optical thickness (AOT) over Malaysia. The significance of aerosols in regional and global climate change assessment has become a pressing topic in recent climate discussions. Two different approaches are used in measuring AOT; satellite imagery and ground measurement approaches. However, the satellite approach is deemed the best way for monitoring the patterns and transport of aerosols largely due to its extensive spatial coverage and reliable repetitive measurements. The data in this study were obtained from a Sea-viewing Wide Field-of-view Sensor (SeaWiFS), a Multi-angle Imaging Spectroradiometer (MISR), and Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) satellite sensors based on a NASA-operated Giovanni portal. Ground-based Aerosol Robotic Network (AERONET) datasets from two sites over the study area were also used. The results show that the highest AOT ground values of 1.93 and 2.00 were recorded in September 2015, at USM station and Kuching station, respectively. Throughout the 15 years of recorded data, the monthly average value of AOT reached its highest values in September, October, and November. In these months, the value of AOT went above 0.40, unlike in other months of the year. Significantly, the results indicate that Malaysian air quality can be evaluated based on AOT values, as these show the variation in optical properties of aerosol.
The use of biometric features, to authenticate users of different applications, is growing rapidly in recent years, according to the high sensitivity of the protected information and the good security that biometric authentication provides. In this study, a method is proposed to measure the similarity between two fingerprint images, using convolutional neural networks, instead of classifying them. Thus, modifying the users that the proposed method can recognize is a matter of adding or removing model images of the users’ fingerprints. The similarity between the fingerprint image and every model image was measured in order to select the user with the highest similarity to the input image as the recognized user, where that similarity measure was compared to a threshold value in order to authenticate that user. The evaluation results of the proposed method, using FVC2002_DB1 and FVC2004_DB1 showed that the proposed method had 99.97% accuracy with 0.035% False Acceptance Rate (FAR) and 0% False Rejection Rate (FRR). Hence, the proposed method has been able to maintain high accuracy while eliminating the vulnerabilities of biometric authentication systems imposed by the use of separate stages for features extraction and similarity measurement.
Osteochondral fracture fixation could be challenging due to the low healing capacity of cartilage especially when the case is delayed. There are various fixation options available. The personality of the fractured fragment would determine which fixation method is more suitable. This is a case of a 14-year-old girl with right knee patellar osteo- chondral fracture fixed with suture passed through drilled holes after four weeks of injury. The outcome at eighteen months follow up shows a painless knee with a full range of motion and patient is asymptomatic. Knee radiograph shows union of the fragment and MRI did not show evidence of necrosis.
Cases of penile siliconoma are unusual and less commonly present to medical practitioners. The siliconoma is a subsequence of injecting high viscous solution into the penis; commonly sillicone with the aim to enhance its size and performance. This case will look at a patient who developed penile siliconoma after a dubious penile implant injection gone wrong. It will also look at what surgical options are available to the unfortunate patients to ease their suffering. Physician should have a high index of suspicion on the use of such substances to enhance sexual perfor- mances in patients presenting with atypical penile swelling.
We report a case of a fatal gunshot injury to the chest which illustrates the compatibility of the Postmortem Multislice Computed Tomography (PMCT) features with that of conventional forensic autopsy findings. This case demonstrates that the PMCT has high potential to enhance the investigation and performance of conventional forensic autopsy.
Plasmodium knowlesi has been discovered as the fifth species causing malaria in humans. It is a major public health problem in South East Asia especially in Borneo. We report a case of pericardial effusion that rapidly progressing to cardiac tamponade, an atypical presentation of P. knowlesi malaria. Our patient had no underlying known medical illness, presented with high grade fever with chills and rigors, epigastric pain, nausea, vomiting and with poor oral intake. Initial bedside cardiac ultrasound showed minimal pericardial effusion. Within a few hours, she became hypotensive, deteriorated rapidly despite fluid resuscitation requiring mechanical ventilation and inotropic sup- port. Bedside cardiac ultrasound showed cardiac tamponade and pericardiocentesis was done. We highlight the importance of having high level of suspicion for this atypical presentation of cardiac tamponade when a patient is hypotensive in P. knowlesi infection. Prompt diagnosis and management may prevent potentially fatal complication.
Acute locked knee is usually caused by mechanical blockage. We report an unusual case of a locked knee due to tibial osteophyte in a young man following a sport injury. To the best of our knowledge, there has been no previous report describing the same etiology. This case report emphasizes the need for thorough history taking and careful assessment to aid us in the diagnosis. The findings made by arthroscopy confirmed our diagnosis.
The consequence of post-operative infection can be devastating despite its rare incidence. Common organisms caus- ing post-operative infection are normal flora of the skin: Staphylococcus aureus and Staphylococcus epidermidis. Early diagnosis followed by arthroscopic debridement and antibiotic therapy with graft retention remains the main aim of treatment. However, there are certain cases where the infection persists despite early intervention. Vancomy- cin-loaded bone cement bullet inserted into bone tunnel can provide a high local concentration of vancomycin with bactericidal effect and low systemic complications to treat deep-seated infection.
Medial meniscus root tear (MMRT) is uncommon and is often associated with osteoarthritis during presentation. Whether it is a cause or effect, it is still debatable at this point of time. However, when a combination of injuries occurs in a middle age group patient, a careful examination before offering a treatment is advised. We herein report a case of a middle-aged gentleman suffering from both arthritis and MMRT.
We describe our technique of single-bundle PCL reconstruction using a bony femoral press-fit system. 9 patients un- derwent PCL reconstruction using our pressfit system. The surgical procedure is described in detail. Post-operatively, 5 patients were available for assessment and review. Four patients gave a final Lysholm score of 92 – 100%. Three patients gave a Hospital for Special Surgery (HSS) score of excellent, one fair and one poor. Two patients gave a re- duced Tegner activity score post-operatively while the other three gave a similar score post-operatively. Assessment using KT-1000 revealed four patients with a side-to-side difference of less than 3 mm (average side-to-side difference,1.87 mm), while one patient exhibited a side-to-side difference of 5.8 mm. We believe that our technique enhances tunnel healing through usage of a bone-plug fixation and provides a cheap alternative for graft fixation on the femoral side in PCL reconstruction.
The attenuation degree labelled on hearing protectors is based on internationally set standards. The attenu- ation is measurement in laboratories using methodology of real-ear attenuation at threshold (REAT), microphone in-real ear (MIRE) and acoustics test feature (ATF). The measured attenuation gap from the actual workplace is a problematic predicament. The conceptual review of how far these methods affect the gap could embark future researches. Therefore, a conceptual review of the conducted methodologies according to standards for attenuation which include Noise Reduction Rating (NRR) and Single Number Rating (SNR) are discussed in this paper. 23 papers from ProQuest, EBSCOhost and Google Scholar databases are chronologically reviewed. Summarily, the improved attenuation measurement methods will help close the gap between laboratory data and field performance and sub- sequently will better prevent Noise-Induced Hearing Loss. Most of the latest findings after year 2010 were in agree- ment with the studies in 2000 to 2009.
The aim of this systematic review was to evaluate the effectiveness of educational programs on parenting stress and coping mechanism among parents of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder. Our current review retrieved the articles from databases such as CINAHL, Springer, Ovid, PubMed, Google Scholar, and EBSCO host. Only articles published between the years of 2000 and 2018 in these databases were recruited using keywords such as Autism Spectrum Disorder, education program, parenting stress, coping mechanism, and coping strategies. The search gen- erated 17 articles; 8 articles were relevant. This systematic review provides an important opportunity to advance our understanding of the effectiveness of the educational program for reducing parenting stress and improving coping mechanism among parents of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder. Nurses could also have a pivotal role in delivering the educational program for parents of children with ASD.
Introduction: Good indoor air quality (IAQ) is important for workers’ well-being whilst simultaneously optimize work productivity and job performance of the workers in an office. This study aims to determine the association between the sick building syndrome (SBS) in relation to the personal factors, indoor office environment and indoor air pollutants at an academic institution in Malaysia. Methods: A total of 342 office workers; made up of 188 (55%) female and 154 male (45%), from 14 different office buildings; made up of administrative, faculties, centers, institutes and school, participated in this study. A self-administered questionnaire was used to determine symptoms related to SBS. Real time readings of IAQ parameters were conducted three times daily for 15 minutes /sampling point. Results: Results showed higher prevalence of the SBS symptoms generally among women; diagnosed asthma was positively associated with mucosal symptoms; current smoking was significantly associated with skin symptoms; and centralized air conditioning system, the use of photocopiers, printers or fax machines for more than 1 hour per day and installation of a new carpet in the office environment were significant risk factors of SBS. After adjusting for de- mographic characteristics, formaldehyde, ultrafine particle and total volatile organic compounds were significantly associated with mucosal symptoms. Conclusion: Demographic characteristics, indoor office environment and indoor air pollutants were significant risk factors of SBS among workers in this study. It is highly recommended to maintain good housekeeping and to isolate printers and photocopier machines from the main workplace since both were sources of particulates.