The aim of this report is to describe the presentation and management of eyelid injury resulting from the hook of a rubber string. A seven-year-old boy presented with pain of the right upper eyelid. A rubber string with metal hook ends, snatched his right eye from below. The hook pierced through his upper eyelid from the conjunctival surface and remained in situ. However, there was no globe laceration noted. Removal was performed by reverse-tracking of the hook through the wound. The wound was stitched with 6'0 Vicryl sutures. Healing was excellent with minimal scarring.
The aim of this paper is to revisit the theory of planned behaviour (TPB) in relation to the halal food market, specifically in the context of the Cadbury scandal. The present survey (with 132 respondents) replicates the original study of TPB in the context of halal food, done before the scandal, and the results are compared. We rationalize the differences, and assess the impact of the halal scandal on consumer purchasing behaviour. In doing so, we validate the impact of a food scandal in terms of the purchasing intentions of halal customers under a new (post-scandal) condition of uncertainty. The results provide in-depth insights into halal purchasing behaviour and are intended to be used: (a) to increase the understanding of the impact of a food scandal on purchasing behaviour, (b) to clarify whether a food scandal has a real effect on customers, and (c) to ascertain whether the determinants of purchasing intention are similar before and after a food scandal.
Rice is a carbohydrate, one of the plant-based foods that can accumulate heavy metal from soil and the irrigation water. Since total heavy metal always overestimates the amount of heavy metal available in rice, bioavailability of heavy metal is always preferred. Many studies have been done and found that in vitro methods offer an appealing alternative to human and animal studies. They can be simple, rapid, low in cost and may provide insights which not achievable in the in vivo studies. In vitro digestion model for rice may differ from other in vitro digestion models applied in soil or other type of foods studies. This review aims to provide an overview of in vitro digestion model used to determine bioavailability of heavy metal in rice, summarize health risk assessment application of heavy metal in rice studies and highlight the importance of health risk assessment to be included in the studies. Future exploration of in vitro digestion model and health risk assessment application on the bioavailability of heavy metal in rice was also suggested.
The assessment of examination questions is crucial in educational institutes since examination is one of the most common methods to evaluate students' achievement in specific course. Therefore, there is a crucial need to construct a balanced and high-quality exam, which satisfies different cognitive levels. Thus, many lecturers rely on Bloom's taxonomy cognitive domain, which is a popular framework developed for the purpose of assessing students' intellectual abilities and skills. Several works have been proposed to automatically handle the classification of questions in accordance with Bloom's taxonomy. Most of these works classify questions according to specific domain. As a result, there is a lack of technique of classifying questions that belong to the multi-domain areas. The aim of this paper is to present a classification model to classify exam questions based on Bloom's taxonomy that belong to several areas. This study proposes a method for classifying questions automatically, by extracting two features, TFPOS-IDF and word2vec. The purpose of the first feature was to calculate the term frequency-inverse document frequency based on part of speech, in order to assign a suitable weight for essential words in the question. The second feature, pre-trained word2vec, was used to boost the classification process. Then, the combination of these features was fed into three different classifiers; K-Nearest Neighbour, Logistic Regression, and Support Vector Machine, in order to classify the questions. The experiments used two datasets. The first dataset contained 141 questions, while the other dataset contained 600 questions. The classification result for the first dataset achieved an average of 71.1%, 82.3% and 83.7% weighted F1-measure respectively. The classification result for the second dataset achieved an average of 85.4%, 89.4% and 89.7% weighted F1-measure respectively. The finding from this study showed that the proposed method is significant in classifying questions from multiple domains based on Bloom's taxonomy.
This protocol describes the processes involved in the generation of human antibody libraries in Fab format. The antibody repertoire is derived from peripheral blood mononucleocytes focusing on different immunoglobulin isotypes. A two-step cloning process was used to generate a diverse human Fab library for subsequent selection by phage display. The method can be applied for the generation of both naive and immune antibody libraries. The naive repertoire allows for the library to be applied for the generation of human monoclonal antibodies against a broad range of target antigens making it a useful resource for antibody generation. However, the immune repertoire will be focused against target antigens from a particular disease. The protocol will focus on the generation of the library including the panning process.
Heavy metal in rice studies has attracted a greater concern worldwide. However, there have been limited studies on marketed rice samples although it represents a vital ingestion portion for a real estimation of human health risk. This study was aimed to determine both total and bioaccessible of trace elements and heavy metals (Cd, Cr, Cu, Co, Al, Zn, As, Pb and Fe) in 22 varieties of cooked rice using an inductively coupled plasma-optical emission spectroscopy. Both total and bioaccessible of trace elements and heavy metals were digested using closed-nitric acid digestion and Rijksinstituut voor Volksgezondheid en Milieu (RIVM) in vitro digestion model, respectively. Human health risks via Health Risk Assessment (HRA) were conducted to understand exposure risks involving adults and children representing Malaysian population. Zinc was the highest while As was the lowest contents for total and in their bioavailable forms. Four clusters were identified: (1) Pb, As, Co, Cd and Cr; (2) Cu and Al; (3) Fe and (4) Zn. For HRA, there was no any risks found from single element exposure. While potential carcinogenic health risks present for both adult and children from single As exposure (Life time Cancer Risk, LCR>1×10(-4)). Total Hazard Quotient values for adult and children were 27.0 and 18.0, respectively while total LCR values for adult and children were 0.0049 and 0.0032, respectively.
Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) is the task of determining which sense of an ambiguous word (word with multiple meanings) is chosen in a particular use of that word, by considering its context. A sentence is considered ambiguous if it contains ambiguous word(s). Practically, any sentence that has been classified as ambiguous usually has multiple interpretations, but just one of them presents the correct interpretation. We propose an unsupervised method that exploits knowledge based approaches for word sense disambiguation using Harmony Search Algorithm (HSA) based on a Stanford dependencies generator (HSDG). The role of the dependency generator is to parse sentences to obtain their dependency relations. Whereas, the goal of using the HSA is to maximize the overall semantic similarity of the set of parsed words. HSA invokes a combination of semantic similarity and relatedness measurements, i.e., Jiang and Conrath (jcn) and an adapted Lesk algorithm, to perform the HSA fitness function. Our proposed method was experimented on benchmark datasets, which yielded results comparable to the state-of-the-art WSD methods. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of the dependency generator, we perform the same methodology without the parser, but with a window of words. The empirical results demonstrate that the proposed method is able to produce effective solutions for most instances of the datasets used.
BACKGROUND: The aim of this work was to describe the indications, complications, and outcomes of penetrating keratoplasty (PKP) in Saudi Arabia.
METHODS: In a retrospective, noncomparative interventional case series, the medical records of patients who underwent PKP from January 2000 to December 2008 and had a minimum follow-up of 6 months were reviewed. All corneas were obtained from eye banks in the US. Indications, complications, and outcomes of surgery were recorded. This study was approved by the institutional review board.
RESULTS: Eighty-five consecutive eyes were included in this study. There were 52 (61.2%) males and 33 (38.8%) females. The median age was 35.0 years (range 3-85 years), and the median follow-up period was 24 months (range 6-108 months). The indications for PKP were keratoconus, bullous keratopathy, corneal scars, corneal dystrophy, and corneal regraft. The overall graft survival time was 88.9 months ± 4.9 months (mean ± standard error of mean, 95% confidence interval [CI] 79.4 months -98.4 months) while the 3-year and 5-year cumulative survival rates were 90.7% and 84.3%, respectively. Surgical indication (P = 0.038), immune rejection (P < 0.001), preoperative corneal vascularization (P = 0.022), and perioperative high intraocular pressure (P = 0.032) were associated significantly with corneal graft failure in univariate analysis. Multivariate analysis reduced these significant associations to rejection (P < 0.001) and vascularization (P = 0.009). Relative risk for failure in rejected cornea was 16.22 (95% CI 4.99-52.69) and in vascularized cornea was 3.89 (95% CI 1.36-11.09). At last visit following PKP, 34 (40%) eyes had best spectacle-corrected visual acuity of 20/40 or better, and 51 (60.0%) eyes had 20/80 or better. Best spectacle-corrected visual acuity was worse than 20/400 in 15 (17.6%) eyes.
CONCLUSION: The overall corneal graft survival in a private setting in Saudi Arabia can be excellent. Thorough preoperative evaluation and comprehensive postoperative management are crucial for successful corneal transplantation. A larger multicenter study is recommended to portray the outcome of private corneal transplantation in Saudi Arabia in general.
KEYWORDS: bullous keratopathy; cornea; corneal dystrophy; corneal scars; corneal transplantation; herpetic keratitis; keratoconus
Diabetes mellitus and its consequences continue to put a significant demand on medical resources across the world. Diabetic neuropathic pain (DNP) is a frequent diabetes mellitus chronic microvascular outcome. Allodynia, hyperalgesia, and aberrant or lack of nerve fibre sensation are all symptoms of DNP. These clinical characteristics will lead to worse quality of life, sleep disruption, depression, and increased mortality. Although the availability of numerous medications that alleviate the symptoms of DNP, the lack of long-term efficacy and unfavourable side effects highlight the urgent need for novel treatment strategies. This review paper systematically analysed the preclinical research on the treatment of DNP using plant phytochemicals that contain only tannins. A total of 10 original articles involved in in-vivo and in-vitro experiments addressing the promising benefits of phytochemical tannins on DNP were examined between 2008 and 2021. The information given implies that these phytochemicals may have relevant pharmacological effects on DNP symptoms through their antihyperalgesic, anti-inflammatory, and antioxidant properties; however, because of the limited sample size and limitations of the studies conducted so far, we were unable to make definitive conclusions. Before tannins may be employed as therapeutic agents for DNP, more study is needed to establish the specific molecular mechanism for all of these activities along the pain pathway and examine the side effects of tannins in the treatment of DNP.
Within a framework that includes economic activity, real interest rate, grants, and subsidies, we aim to explore the role of renewable energy, technological innovation, and particularly the environmentally damaging militarization in driving green growth, which fosters sustainable economic growth by ensuring the values of natural assets, considering OECD countries. Our examination affirms a positive proposition between the development of renewable energy, technological innovation, and green growth in the long run by implementing the cross-sectional dependency panel autoregressive-distributed lags (CS-ARDL) framework in a dynamic heterogeneous panel setting. The findings also suggest that militarization is antagonistic to green growth. Our decomposed analysis is compatible with our premier analysis, indicating a conducive impact of both biomass and non-biomass types of renewable energy on green growth. We also document a negative association between the real interest rate (RIR) and green growth, while income muddles the results. The robustness tests confirm the sensitivity of our main findings to the magnitude of the subsidies and grants provided to renewable energy. The paper concludes with several policy recommendations.
Our study focuses on Traditional Chinese Medical (TCM) named entity recognition (NER), which involves identifying and extracting specific entity names from TCM record. This task has significant implications for doctors and researchers, as it enables the automated identification of relevant TCM terms, ultimately enhancing research efficiency and accuracy. However, the current Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers-Long Short Term Memory-Conditional Random Fields (BERT-LSTM-CRF) model for TCM NER is constrained by a traditional structure, limiting its capacity to fully harness the advantages provided by Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) and long short term memory (LSTM) models. Through comparative experiments, we also observed that the straightforward superimposition of models actually leads to a decrease in recognition results. To optimize the structure of the traditional BERT-BiLSTM-CRF model and obtain more effective text representations, we propose the Dyn-Att Net model, which introduces dynamic attention and a parallel structure. By integrating BERT and LSTM models with the dynamic attention mechanism, our model effectively captures semantic, contextual, and sequential relations within text sequences, resulting in high accuracy. To validate the effectiveness of our model, we compared it with nine other models in TCM dataset namely the publicly available PaddlePaddle dataset. Our Dyn-Att Net model, based on BERT, outperforms the other models, achieving an F1 score of 81.91%, accuracy of 92.06%, precision of 80.26%, and recall of 83.76%. Furthermore, its robust generalization capability is substantiated through validation on the APTNER, MSRA, and EduNER datasets. Overall, the Dyn-Att Net model not only enhances NER accuracy within the realm of traditional Chinese medicine, but also showcases considerable potential for cross-domain generalization. Moreover, the Dyn-Att Net model's parallel architecture facilitates efficient computation, contributing to time-saving efforts in NER tasks.
The effectiveness of data augmentation techniques, i.e., methods for artificially creating new data, has been demonstrated in many domains, from images to textual data. Data augmentation methods were established to manage different issues regarding the scarcity of training datasets or the class imbalance to enhance the performance of classifiers. This review article investigates data augmentation techniques for Arabic texts, specifically in the text classification field. A thorough review was conducted to give a concise and comprehensive understanding of these approaches in the context of Arabic classification. The focus of this article is on Arabic studies published from 2019 to 2024 about data augmentation in Arabic text classification. Inclusion and exclusion criteria were applied to ensure a comprehensive vision of these techniques in Arabic natural language processing (ANLP). It was found that data augmentation research for Arabic text classification dominates sentiment analysis and propaganda detection, with initial studies emerging in 2019; very few studies have investigated other domains like sarcasm detection or text categorization. We also observed the lack of benchmark datasets for performing the tasks. Most studies have focused on short texts, such as Twitter data or reviews, while research on long texts still needs to be explored. Additionally, various data augmentation methods still need to be examined for long texts to determine if techniques effective for short texts are also applicable to longer texts. A rigorous investigation and comparison of the most effective strategies is required due to the unique characteristics of the Arabic language. By doing so, we can better understand the processes involved in Arabic text classification and hence be able to select the most suitable data augmentation methods for specific tasks. This review contributes valuable insights into Arabic NLP and enriches the existing body of knowledge.
Recent advancements in abstractive summarization models, particularly those built on encoder-decoder architectures, typically produce a single summary for each source text. Controlling the length of summaries is crucial for practical applications, such as crafting cover summaries for newspapers or magazines with varying slot sizes. Current research in length-controllable abstractive summarization employs techniques like length embeddings in the decoder module or a word-level extractive module in the encoder-decoder model. However, these approaches, while effective in determining when to halt decoding, fall short in selecting relevant information to include within the specified length constraint. This article diverges from prior models reliant on predefined lengths. Instead, it introduces a novel approach to length-controllable abstractive summarization by integrating an image processing phase. This phase determines the specific size of the summary output slot. The proposed model harnesses enhanced T5 and GPT models, seamlessly adapting summaries to designated slots. The computed area of a given slot is employed in both models to generate abstractive summaries tailored to fit the output slot perfectly. Experimental evaluations on the CNN/Daily Mail dataset demonstrate the model's success in performing length-controlled summarization, yielding superior results.
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Immunoassays are often coupled to peroxidase activity for antigen detection. Sensitivity and speed of detection has been increased by the advent of hybrid methods such as immuno-PCR (polymerase chain reaction). However, a more simplified immunoassay that retains both colorimetric peroxidase detection and effective DNA amplification in a setting closer to field application conditions has been nonexistent. Here we describe a method that successfully combines a competitive immunoassay with the new isothermal quadruplex-primed amplification (QPA) to generate excess quadruplex reporter molecules with intrinsic peroxidase DNAzyme activity.
The latissimus dorsi is a muscle of the back which forms the posterior fold of the axilla and its tendon twists to insert into the floor of the intertubercular sulcus of the humerus. Occasionally, the muscle has a muscular slip which crosses the axilla to insert into the pectoralis major. This muscular slip is often termed as "axillary arch." In the present study, we report bilateral axillary arch detected in a 45-year-old male cadaver. The average vertical length of the axillary arch measured 7 cm. The average maximum width of the uppermost, middle and lower part of the arch measured 2, 3.5 and 3.2 cm, respectively. The presence of the axillary arch is an uncommon finding in humans, considering the fact that it is solely found in the animals who prefer to hang on the trees. A histological study of the axillary arch was also performed and it showed skeletal muscle fibres which was uniformly arranged. The presence of the axillary arch may assist in the adduction of the shoulder. It may also compress the axillary vessels and nerves thereby causing resultant symptoms. Prior anatomical knowledge of the presence of axillary arch may be helpful for surgeons performing radical dissection of the axillary lymph nodes and ligation of axillary vessels, clinicians diagnosing abduction syndromes and interventional radiologists interpreting axillary mass in day to day clinical practice.
To evaluate the effect of suggesting coitus as a safe and effective means to expedite labour on pregnancy duration and requirement for labour induction.
Little is known about the bioavailability of heavy metal contamination and its health risks after rice ingestion. This study aimed to determine bioavailability of heavy metal (As, Cd, Cu, Cr, Co, Al, Fe, Zn and Pb) concentrations in cooked rice and human Health Risk Assessment (HRA). The results found Zn was the highest (4.3±0.1 mg/kg), whereas As showed the lowest (0.015±0.001 mg/kg) bioavailability of heavy metal concentration in 22 varieties of cooked rice. For single heavy metal exposure, no potential of non carcinogenic health risks was found, while carcinogenic health risks were found only for As. Combined heavy metal exposures found that total Hazard Quotient (HQtotal) values for adult were higher than the acceptable range (HQTotal<1), whereas total Lifetime Cancer Risk (LCRTotal) values were higher than the acceptable range (LCRTotal values >1×10(-4)) for both adult and children. This study is done to understand that the inclusion of bioavailability heavy metal into HRA produces a more realistic estimation of human heavy metal exposure.
Glutamate receptors are the integral cellular components associated with excitotoxicity mechanism induced by the ischemic cascade events. Therefore the glutamate receptors have become the major molecular targets of neuroprotective agents in stroke researches. Recent studies have demonstrated that a Group I metabotropic glutamate receptor agonist, (S)-3,5-dihydroxyphenylglycine ((S)-3,5-DHPG) preconditioning elicits neuroprotection in the hippocampal slice cultures exposed to toxic level of N-methyl-d-aspartate (NMDA). We further investigated the preconditioning effects of (S)-3,5-DHPG on acute ischemic stroke rats. One 10 or 100μM of (S)-3,5-DHPG was administered intrathecally to Sprague-Dawley adult male rats, 2h prior to induction of acute ischemic stroke by middle cerebral artery occlusion (MCAO). After 24h, neurological deficits were evaluated by modified stroke severity scores and grid-walking test. All rats were sacrificed and infarct volumes were determined by 2,3,5-triphenyltetrazolium chloride staining. The serum level of neuron-specific enolase (NSE) of each rat was analyzed by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). One and 10μM of (S)-3,5-DHPG preconditioning in the stroke rats showed significant improvements in motor impairment (P<0.01), reduction in the infarct volume (P<0.01) and reduction in the NSE serum level (P<0.01) compared to the control stroke rats. We conclude that 1 and 10μM (S)-3,5-DHPG preconditioning induced protective effects against acute ischemic insult in vivo.