Sharif Digital Repository

Abdominal recordings of fetal ECG (fECG) have lower signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) as compared with invasive procedures. In this paper we have combined two previously proposed methods, one for extracting fECG, called piCA and the other, a transformation based on Hilbert transform to enhance the R-peaks. The combination of these methods seems to work well in situations of noisy data and fetal repositioning. Also a comparison is done by using ICA in order to extract the fetal signals. Performance of both methods is studied separately. Results show that applying the transformation on the components extracted with the use of piCA (after maternal ECG cancellation), had a very good performance. Also,... 

Neural activity is very important source for data mining and can be used as a control signal for brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). Particularly, Magnetic signals of neurons are enriched with information about the movement of different part of the body such as wrist movement. In this paper, we use MEG (Magneto encephalography) signals of two subjects recorded during wrist movement task in four directions. Data were prepared for BCI competition 2008 for multiclass classification. Our approach for this classification problem consists of PCA as a noise reduction method, ULDA for feature reduction and various linear classifiers such as Bayesian, KNN and SVM. Final results (58%-62% for subject 1... 

Purpose: Tests on animals of different species with large differences in intervertebral disc size are commonly used to investigate the therapeutic efficacy of intravenously injected solutes in the disc. We hypothesize that disc size markedly affects outcome. Methods: Here, using a small non-metabolized molecule, glucosamine (GL) as a model solute, we calculate the influence of disc size on transport of GL into rat, rabbit, dog and human discs for 10 h post intravenous-injection. We used transient finite element models and considered an identical GL supply for all animals. Results: Huge effects of disc size on GL concentration profiles were found. Post-injection GL concentration in the rat... 

A high-temperature-resisant solid-phase microextraction (SPME) fiber was prepared based on polyetherimide (PEI) by the electrospinning method. The PEI polymeric solution was converted to nanofibers using high voltages and directly coated on a stainless steel SPME needle. The scanning electron microscopy images of PEI coating showed fibers with diameter range of 500-650 nm with a homogeneous and smooth surface morphology. The SPME nanofibers coating was optimized for PEI percentage, electrospinning voltage, and time. The extraction efficiency of the coating was investigated for headspace SPME of some environmentally important polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons from aqueous samples followed by... 

A moving bed biofilm reactor with pre-denitrification configuration was fed with a synthetic wastewater containing high chemical oxygen demand (COD) and ammonia. By changing different variables including ammonium and COD loading, nitrification rate in the aerobic reactor and denitrification rate in the anoxic reactor were monitored. Changing the influent loading was achieved via adjusting the inlet COD (956-2,096 mg/L), inlet ammonium (183-438 mg/L), and hydraulic retention time of the aerobic reactor (8, 12, and 18 hours). The overall organic loading rate was in the range of 3.60-17.37 gCOD/m2·day, of which 18.5-91% was removed in the anoxic reactor depending on the operational conditions.... 

Apnea bradycardia (AB) is an outcome of apnea occurrence in preterm infants and is an observable phenomenon in cardiovascular signals. Early detection of apnea in infants under monitoring is a critical challenge for the early intervention of nurses. In this paper, we introduce two switching Kalman filter (SKF) based methods for AB detection using electrocardiogram (ECG) signal. The first SKF model uses McSharry's ECG dynamical model integrated in two Kalman filter (KF) models trained for normal and AB intervals. Whereas the second SKF model is established by using only the RR sequence extracted from ECG and two AR models to be fitted in normal and AB intervals. In both SKF approaches, a... 

Objective: Improving signal to noise ratio (SNR) and qualified images by the various methods is very important for detecting the abnormalities at the body organs. Scatter and attenuation of photons by the organs lead to errors in radiopharmaceutical estimation as well as degradation of images. The choice of suitable energy window and the radionuclide have a key role in nuclear medicine which appearing the lowest scatter fraction as well as having a nearly constant linear attenuation coefficient as a function of phantom thickness. Methods: The energy windows of symmetrical window (SW), asymmetric window (ASW), high window (WH) and low window (WL) using Tc-99m and Sm-153 radionuclide with... 

Several researches have been done to identify visual system characteristics. Some of them are based on the processing of the brain signal recordings. Visual evoked potentials (VEPs) are electrical signals which are produced in response to the visual stimuli and recorded by means of electrodes placed on the head. These signals are usually characterized by the amplitude and latency of their peaks. Different types of visual stimuli and visual system characteristics can affect the shape and hence the characteristics of VEPs. In this paper, proper visual stimuli were used and VEPs were recorded in order to classify visual acuity. To achieve this goal, visual evoked potentials were recorded and... 

In this study, degradation of trichloroethylene (TCE), a chlorinated hydrocarbon, using starch supported Fe/Ni nanoparticles was investigated. The scanning electron microscope images showed applying water soluble starch as a stabilizer for the Fe/Ni nanoparticles tended to reduce agglomeration and discrete particle. Also the mean particle diameter reduced from about 70 nm (unsupported Fe/Ni nanoparticle) to about 30 nm. Effects of three key independent operating parameters including initial TCE concentration (10.0-300.0 mg L-1), initial pH (4.00-10.00) and Fe0 dosage (0.10-2.00) g L-1 on TCE dechlorination efficiency in 1 hour were analysed by employing response surface methodology (RSM).... 

The present study analyzed the dose-dependent cyto- and genotoxicity of graphene oxide and reduced graphene oxide on spermatogonial stem cells (SSCs) for the first time. The results showed that graphene oxide significantly increased oxidative stress at concentrations of 100 and 400 μg/ml, while low concentrations did not have a significant effect. In addition, according to the MTT assay, the cell number decreased in high-concentration (100 and 400 μg/ml) graphene oxide-treated samples compared to untreated cells. However, a reduced graphene-treated sample demonstrated a significant increase in cell number. Moreover, microscopic analysis found high concentrations of graphene nanosheets in... 

Artifact removal is an essential part in electroencephalogram (EEG) recording and the raw EEG signals require preprocessing before feature extraction. In this work, we implemented three filtering methods and demonstrated their effects on the performance of different classifiers. Bandpass digital filtering, median filtering and facet method are three preprocessing approaches investigated in this paper. We used data set lib from the BCI competition 2003 for training and testing phase. Our accuracy varied between 80% and 96%. In our work, we demonstrated that the problems of choosing the classifier and preprocessing methods are not independent of each other. Two of our approaches could achieve... 

Different lifting analysis tools are commonly used to assess spinal loads and risk of injury. Distinct musculoskeletal models with various degrees of accuracy are employed in these tools affecting thus their relative accuracy in practical applications. The present study aims to compare predictions of six tools (HCBCF, LSBM, 3DSSPP, AnyBody, simple polynomial, and regression models) for the L4-L5 and L5-S1 compression and shear loads in twenty-six static activities with and without hand load. Significantly different spinal loads but relatively similar patterns for the compression (R2>0.87) were computed. Regression models and AnyBody predicted intradiscal pressures in closer agreement with... 

Goal: Continuous blood pressure (BP) monitoring can provide invaluable information about individuals' health conditions. However, BP is conventionally measured using inconvenient cuff-based instruments, which prevents continuous BP monitoring. This paper presents an efficient algorithm, based on the pulse arrival time (PAT), for the continuous and cuffless estimation of the systolic BP, diastolic blood pressure (DBP), and mean arterial pressure (MAP) values. Methods: The proposed framework estimates the BP values through processing vital signals and extracting two types of features, which are based on either physiological parameters or whole-based representation of vital signals. Finally,... 

In the current study, two series of antimicrobial dressings conjugated with silver sulfadiazine (SSD) and silver nanoparticles (AgNPs) were developed and evaluated for chronic wound healing. Highly porous polycaprolactone (PCL)/polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) nanofibers were loaded with different concentrations of SSD or AgNPs and compared comprehensively in vitro and in vivo. SSD and AgNPs indicated a strong and equal antimicrobial activity against S. aureus. However, SSD had more toxicity against fibroblast cells over one week in vitro culture. An in vivo model of wound healing on male Wistar rats was developed with a full thickness wound. All the wound dressings indicated enough flexibility and... 

Background: A small amount of methanol is produced endogenously in the human body but it is efficiently metabolized by alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH) and other enzymes, and the products eliminated without harm. In this study, we present a new entity of inborn error of methanol metabolism due to a mutation in the ADH1C gene coding for the γ subunit that is part of several ADH isoenzymes. Results: This disorder was discovered in an 11.58-year-old boy. During one 9-month hospital admission, he had periods of 1–4 days during which he was comatose, and between these periods he was sometimes verbose and euphoric, and had ataxia, dysarthria. Following hemodialysis treatments, he became conscious and... 

Disease prediction is a well-known classification problem in medical applications. Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) provide a powerful tool for analyzing the patients’ features relative to each other. This can be achieved by modeling the problem as a graph node classification task, where each node is a patient. Due to the nature of such medical datasets, class imbalance is a prevalent issue in the field of disease prediction, where the distribution of classes is skewed. When the class imbalance is present in the data, the existing graph-based classifiers tend to be biased towards the major class(es) and neglect the samples in the minor class(es). On the other hand, the correct diagnosis... 

In this research, an attempt was made toward synthesizing a sol–gel–based silica aerogel and its subsequent coating on a copper wire by phase separation of polystyrene. Adaption of this new approach enabled us to coat the metallic wire with powder materials. The use of this method for coating, led to the formation of a porous and thick structure of silica aerogel. The coated wire was placed in a needle and used as the sorbent for in–tube solid phase microextraction of chlorobenzenes (CBs). The superhydrophobicity of sorbent on extraction efficiency was investigated by using different ratios of tetraethylorthosilicate/methyltrimethoxysilane. The surface coated with the prepared silica aerogel... 

In this paper the field-effect transistor DNA biosensor for detecting hepatitis B virus (HBV) based on indium tin oxide nanowires (ITO NWs) in label free approach has been fabricated. Because of ITO nanowires intensive conductance and functional modified surface, the probe immobilization and target hybridization were increased strongly. The high resolution transmission electron microscopy (HRTEM) measurement showed that ITO nanowires were crystalline and less than 50 nm in diameter. The single-stranded hepatitis B virus DNA (SS-DNA) was immobilized as probe on the Au-modified nanowires. The DNA targets were measured in a linear concentration range from 1fM to 10 µM. The detection limit of... 

Since that pathogenic bacteria are major threats to human health, this paper describes the fabrication of an effective and durable sensing platform based on gold nanoparticles/carbon nanoparticles/cellulose nanofibers nanocomposite (AuNPs/CNPs/CNFs) at the surface of glassy carbon electrode for sensitive and selective detection of Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus). The AuNPs/CNPs/CNFs nanocomposite with the high surface area, excellent conductivity, and good biocompatibility was used for self-assembled of the thiolated specific S. aureus aptamer as a sensing element. The surface morphology of AuNPs/CNPs/CNFs nanocomposite was characterized with field emission scanning electron microscopy...