Three-dimensional scaled-up transparent models of three human cystic ducts were prepared on the basis of anatomical specimens. The measurement of pressure drop across the cystic duct models and visualization of the flow structures within these ducts were performed at conditions replicating the physiological state. The flow visualization study confirmed the laminar nature of the flow of bile inside the cystic duct and values of pressure drop coefficient (Cp) decreased as the Reynolds number (Re) increased. The three tested models showed comparable behavior for the curve of Reynolds number versus the pressure drop coefficient. The results show that the tested cystic ducts have both increased pressure drop and complicated flow structures when compared with straight conduits. High resistance in a cystic duct may indicate that the gallbladder has to exert large force in expelling bile to the cystic duct. For patients with diseased gallbladder, and even in healthy persons, gallbladder is known to stiffen with age and it may lose its compliance or flexibility. A high resistance cystic duct coupled with a stiffened gallbladder may result in prolonged stasis of bile in the gallbladder, which is assumed to encourage the formation of gallstones.
A one year study was carried out to determine the outcome of the seminal fluid parameters collected via masturbation and coitus interruptus in 151 patients who were undergoing intrauterine insemination (IUI) and patients who came for seminal analysis. There were no statistically significant differences in terms of volume, concentration, progressive motility and normal morphology from specimens collected via coitus interruptus compared to specimens collected via masturbation. Pregnancy outcomes were also comparable.
Faecal incontinence is a debilitating chronic clinical condition which may affect the patient and care givers. Modality of treatment is based on severity of the symptoms as well as the anatomical defect itself, availability of resources and expertise. We describe a modified technique of dynamic graciloplasty as neoanal sphincter for the treatment severe faecal incontinence who has failed previous over lapping sphincteroplasty. In our modified version, instead of using implanted intramuscular electrodes and subcutaneous neurostimulator to provide continuous stimulation, the patient will undergo an external stimulation on the nerve of transplanted gracilis periodically and concurrent biofeedback therapy. We believe the technique is relatively easy to learn and very cost effective without any electrodes or neurostimulator related complications.
Matched MeSH terms: Electric Stimulation Therapy/methods*
Combined Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was used to recognize the infant cries with asphyxia. SVM classifier based on features selected by the PCA was trained to differentiate between pathological and healthy cries. The PCA was applied to reduce dimensionality of the vectors that serve as inputs to the SVM. The performance of the SVM utilizing linear and RBF kernel was examined. Experimental results showed that SVM with RBF kernel yields good performance. The classification accuracy in classifying infant cry with asphyxia using the SVM-PCA is 95.86%.
Matched MeSH terms: Principal Component Analysis/methods*
This paper presents Gene-Expression Programming (GEP), which is an extension to the genetic programming (GP) approach to predict the total bed material load for three Malaysian rivers. The GEP is employed without any restriction to an extensive database compiled from measurements in the Muda, Langat, and Kurau rivers. The GEP approach demonstrated a superior performance compared to other traditional sediment load methods. The coefficient of determination, R(2) (=0.97) and the mean square error, MSE (=0.057) of the GEP method are higher than those of the traditional method. The performance of the GEP method demonstrates its predictive capability and the possibility of the generalization of the model to nonlinear problems for river engineering applications.
Surface phonon polariton (SPP) characteristics of In(0.04)Al(0.06)Ga(0.90)N/AlN/Al(2)O(3) heterostructure are investigated by means of p-polarized infrared (IR) attenuated total reflection spectroscopy. Two absorption dips corresponding to In(0.04)Al(0.06)Ga(0.90)N SPP modes are observed. In addition, two prominent dips and one relatively weak and broad dip corresponding to the Al(2)O(3) SPP mode, In(0.04)Al(0.06)Ga(0.90)N/Al(2)O(3) interface mode, and Al(2)O(3) bulk polariton mode, respectively, are clearly seen. No surface mode feature originating from the AlN layer is observed because it is too thin. Overall, the observations are in good agreement with the theoretical predictions.
Soy sauce taste has become a focus of umami taste research. Umami taste is a 5th basic taste, which is associated to a palatable and pleasurable taste of food. Soy sauce has been used as an umami seasoning since the ancient time in Asia. The complex fermentation process occurred to soy beans, as the raw material in the soy sauce production, gives a distinct delicious taste. The recent investigation on Japanese and Indonesian soy sauces revealed that this taste is primarily due to umami components which have molecular weights lower than 500 Da. Free amino acids are the low molecular compounds that have an important role to the taste, in the presence of sodium salt. The intense umami taste found in the soy sauces may also be a result from the interaction between umami components and other tastants. Small peptides are also present, but have very low, almost undetected umami taste intensities investigated in their fractions.
An important preliminary step in the diagnosis of leukemia is the visual examination of the patient's peripheral blood smear under the microscope. Morphological changes in the white blood cells can be an indicator of the nature and severity of the disease. Manual techniques are labor intensive, slow, error prone and costly. A computerized system can be used as a supportive tool for the specialist in order to enhance and accelerate the morphological analysis process. This research present a new method that integrates color features with the morphological reconstruction to localize and isolate lymphoblast cells from a microscope image that contains many cells. The localization and segmentation are conducted using a proposed method that consists of an integration of several digital image processing techniques. 180 microscopic blood images were tested, and the proposed framework managed to obtain 100% accuracy for the localization of the lymphoblast cells and separate it from the image scene. The results obtained indicate that the proposed method can be safely used for the purpose of lymphoblast cells localization and segmentation and subsequently, aiding the diagnosis of leukemia.
Genetic diseases are a pressing global health problem that requires comprehensive access to basic clinical and genetic data to counter. The creation of regional and international databases that can be easily accessed by clinicians and diagnostic labs will greatly improve our ability to accurately diagnose and treat patients with genetic disorders. The Human Variome Project is currently working in conjunction with human genetics societies to achieve this by establishing systems to collect every mutation reported by a diagnostic laboratory, clinic, or research laboratory in a country and store these within a national repository, or HVP Country Node. Nodes have already been initiated in Australia, Belgium, China, Egypt, Malaysia, and Kuwait. Each is examining how to systematically collect and share genetic, clinical, and biochemical information in a country-specific manner that is sensitive to local ethical and cultural issues. This article gathers cases of genetic data collection within countries and takes recommendations from the global community to develop a procedure for countries wishing to establish their own collection system as part of the Human Variome Project. We hope this may lead to standard practices to facilitate global collection of data and allow efficient use in clinical practice, research and therapy.
Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy studies of poly(vinyl alcohol) (PVA), and chitosan polymer blend doped with ammonium nitrate (NH(4)NO(3)) salt and plasticized with ethylene carbonate (EC) have been performed with emphasis on the shift of the carboxamide, amine and hydroxyl bands. 1% acetic acid solution was used as the solvent. It is observed from the chitosan film spectrum that evidence of polymer-solvent interaction can be observed from the shifting of the carboxamide band at 1660 cm(-1) and the amine band at 1591 cm(-1) to 1650 and 1557 cm(-1) respectively and the shift of the hydroxyl band from 3377 to 3354 cm(-1). The hydroxyl band in the spectrum of PVA powder is observed at 3354 cm(-1) and is observed at 3343 cm(-1) in the spectrum of the PVA film. On addition of NH(4)NO(3) up to 30 wt.%, the carboxamide, amine and hydroxyl bands shifted from 1650, 1557 and 3354 cm(-1) to 1642, 1541 and 3348 cm(-1) indicating that the chitosan has complexed with the salt. In the PVA-NH(4)NO(3) spectrum, the hydroxyl band has shifted from 3343 to 3272 cm(-1) on addition of salt from 10 to 30 wt.%. EC acts as a plasticizing agent since there is no shift in the bands as observed in the spectrum of PVA-chitosan-EC films. The mechanism of ion migration is proposed for the plasticized and unplasticized PVA-chitosan-NH(4)NO(3) systems. In the spectrum of PVA-chitosan-NH(4)NO(3)-EC complex, the doublet CO stretching in EC is observed in the vicinity 1800 and 1700. This indicates that there is some interaction between the salt and EC.
The 2010 annual conference of the Asia Pacific Bioinformatics Network (APBioNet), Asia's oldest bioinformatics organisation formed in 1998, was organized as the 9th International Conference on Bioinformatics (InCoB), Sept. 26-28, 2010 in Tokyo, Japan. Initially, APBioNet created InCoB as forum to foster bioinformatics in the Asia Pacific region. Given the growing importance of interdisciplinary research, InCoB2010 included topics targeting scientists in the fields of genomic medicine, immunology and chemoinformatics, supporting translational research. Peer-reviewed manuscripts that were accepted for publication in this supplement, represent key areas of research interests that have emerged in our region. We also highlight some of the current challenges bioinformatics is facing in the Asia Pacific region and conclude our report with the announcement of APBioNet's 100 BioDatabases (BioDB100) initiative. BioDB100 will comply with the database criteria set out earlier in our proposal for Minimum Information about a Bioinformatics and Investigation (MIABi), setting the standards for biocuration and bioinformatics research, on which we will report at the next InCoB, Nov. 27 - Dec. 2, 2011 at Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
A signal subspace approach for extracting visual evoked potentials (VEPs) from the background electroencephalogram (EEG) colored noise without the need for a prewhitening stage is proposed. Linear estimation of the clean signal is performed by minimizing signal distortion while maintaining the residual noise energy below some given threshold. The generalized eigendecomposition of the covariance matrices of a VEP signal and brain background EEG noise is used to transform them jointly to diagonal matrices. The generalized subspace is then decomposed into signal subspace and noise subspace. Enhancement is performed by nulling the components in the noise subspace and retaining the components in the signal subspace. The performance of the proposed algorithm is tested with simulated and real data, and compared with the recently proposed signal subspace techniques. With the simulated data, the algorithms are used to estimate the latencies of P(100), P(200), and P(300) of VEP signals corrupted by additive colored noise at different values of SNR. With the real data, the VEP signals are collected at Selayang Hospital, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and the capability of the proposed algorithm in detecting the latency of P(100) is obtained and compared with other subspace techniques. The ensemble averaging technique is used as a baseline for this comparison. The results indicated significant improvement by the proposed technique in terms of better accuracy and less failure rate.
Tetrodotoxin (TTX), a toxic compound found in some puffers can cause death to humans through consumption. We have developed a simplified method for the screening of TTX in puffers using GC-MS. A puffer tissue of 0.5g was treated with 5mL of 0.1% acetic acid, followed by alkaline hydrolysis, LLE or liquid-liquid extraction and N-methyl-N-TMS-trifluoroacetamide derivatization. The developed method used only a small sample and solvent, simplified LLE and derivatization procedures and short chromatographic analysis (8.2min). All of these contribute to cost-saving, enhanced sample throughput and high sensitivity of the screening assay. The developed method was validated and proved to be within the acceptable range.
Matched MeSH terms: Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry/methods*
This study investigates the spatial water quality pattern of seven stations located along the main Langat River. Environmetric methods, namely, the hierarchical agglomerative cluster analysis (HACA), the discriminant analysis (DA), the principal component analysis (PCA), and the factor analysis (FA), were used to study the spatial variations of the most significant water quality variables and to determine the origin of pollution sources. Twenty-three water quality parameters were initially selected and analyzed. Three spatial clusters were formed based on HACA. These clusters are designated as downstream of Langat river, middle stream of Langat river, and upstream of Langat River regions. Forward and backward stepwise DA managed to discriminate six and seven water quality variables, respectively, from the original 23 variables. PCA and FA (varimax functionality) were used to investigate the origin of each water quality variable due to land use activities based on the three clustered regions. Seven principal components (PCs) were obtained with 81% total variation for the high-pollution source (HPS) region, while six PCs with 71% and 79% total variances were obtained for the moderate-pollution source (MPS) and low-pollution source (LPS) regions, respectively. The pollution sources for the HPS and MPS are of anthropogenic sources (industrial, municipal waste, and agricultural runoff). For the LPS region, the domestic and agricultural runoffs are the main sources of pollution. From this study, we can conclude that the application of environmetric methods can reveal meaningful information on the spatial variability of a large and complex river water quality data.
This study aims to investigate the behaviour of Malaysian sub-bituminous coal (Mukah Balingian), oil palm biomass (empty fruit bunches (EFB), kernel shell (PKS) and mesocarp fibre (PMF)) and their respective blends during pyrolysis using thermogravimetric analysis (TGA). The coal/palm biomass blends were prepared at six different weight ratios and experiments were carried out under dynamic conditions using nitrogen as inert gas at various heating rates to ramp the temperature from 25 degrees C to 900 degrees C. The derivative thermogravimetric (DTG) results show that thermal decomposition of EFB, PMF and PKS exhibit one, two and three distinct evolution profiles, respectively. Apparently, the thermal profiles of the coal/oil palm biomass blends appear to correlate with the percentage of biomass added in the blends, thus, suggesting lack of interaction between the coal and palm biomass. First-order reaction model were used to determine the kinetics parameters for the pyrolysis of coal, palm biomass and their respective blends.
Metal cutting processes are important due to increased consumer demands for quality metal cutting related products (more precise tolerances and better product surface roughness) that has driven the metal cutting industry to continuously improve quality control of metal cutting processes. This paper presents optimum surface roughness by using milling mould aluminium alloys (AA6061-T6) with Response Ant Colony Optimization (RACO). The approach is based on Response Surface Method (RSM) and Ant Colony Optimization (ACO). The main objectives to find the optimized parameters and the most dominant variables (cutting speed, feedrate, axial depth and radial depth). The first order model indicates that the feedrate is the most significant factor affecting surface roughness.
The use of vascular intersection aberration as one of the signs when monitoring and diagnosing diabetic retinopathy from retina fundus images (FIs) has been widely reported in the literature. In this paper, a new hybrid approach called the combined cross-point number (CCN) method able to detect the vascular bifurcation and intersection points in FIs is proposed. The CCN method makes use of two vascular intersection detection techniques, namely the modified cross-point number (MCN) method and the simple cross-point number (SCN) method. Our proposed approach was tested on images obtained from two different and publicly available fundus image databases. The results show a very high precision, accuracy, sensitivity and low false rate in detecting both bifurcation and crossover points compared with both the MCN and the SCN methods.
Children with word-finding difficulties manifest a high frequency of word-finding characteristics in narrative, yet word-finding interventions have concentrated on single-word treatments and outcome measures.
This paper presents a statistical method for the detection of lobar pneumonia when using digitized chest X-ray films. Each region of interest was represented by a vector of wavelet texture measures which is then multiplied by the orthogonal matrix Q(2). The first two elements of the transformed vectors were shown to have a bivariate normal distribution. Misclassification probabilities were estimated using probability ellipsoids and discriminant functions. The result of this study recommends the detection of pneumonia by constructing probability ellipsoids or discriminant function using maximum energy and maximum column sum energy texture measures where misclassification probabilities were less than 0.15.
The purpose of this study was to optimize the parameters involved in the production of water-soluble phytosterol microemulsions for use in the food industry. In this study, response surface methodology (RSM) was employed to model and optimize four of the processing parameters, namely, the number of cycles of high-pressure homogenization (1-9 cycles), the pressure used for high-pressure homogenization (100-500 bar), the evaporation temperature (30-70 degrees C), and the concentration ratio of microemulsions (1-5). All responses-particle size (PS), polydispersity index (PDI), and percent ethanol residual (%ER)-were well fit by a reduced cubic model obtained by multiple regression after manual elimination. The coefficient of determination (R(2)) and absolute average deviation (AAD) value for PS, PDI, and %ER were 0.9628 and 0.5398%, 0.9953 and 0.7077%, and 0.9989 and 1.0457%, respectively. The optimized processing parameters were 4.88 (approximately 5) homogenization cycles, homogenization pressure of 400 bar, evaporation temperature of 44.5 degrees C, and concentration ratio of microemulsions of 2.34 cycles (approximately 2 cycles) of high-pressure homogenization. The corresponding responses for the optimized preparation condition were a minimal particle size of 328 nm, minimal polydispersity index of 0.159, and <0.1% of ethanol residual. The chi-square test verified the model, whereby the experimental values of PS, PDI, and %ER agreed with the predicted values at a 0.05 level of significance.