Sharif Digital Repository

Background: Females are two times more likely to develop patellofemoral pain (PFP) than males. Abnormal trunk and pelvis kinematics are thought to contribute to the pathomechanics of this condition. However, there is a scarcity of evidence investigating proximal segments kinematics in females with PFP. Research question: The purpose of this study was to investigate whether females with PFP demonstrate altered trunk, pelvis, and knee joint kinematics compared with healthy controls during running. Methods: Thirty-four females (17 PFP, 17 controls) underwent a 3-dimensional motion analysis during treadmill running at preferred and fixed speeds, each trial for 30 s. Variables of interest... 

Abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA) is an irreversible bulge in the artery with higher prevalence among the elderlies. Increase of the aneurysm diameter by time is a fatal phenomenon which will lead to its sidewall rupture. Invasive surgical treatments are vital in preventing from AAA development. These approaches however have considerable side effects. Targeted drug delivery using microbubbles (MBs) has been recently employed to suppress the AAA growth. The present study is aimed to investigate the surface adhesion of different types of drug-containing MBs to the inner wall of AAA through ligand-receptor binding, using fluid-structure interaction (FSI) simulation by using a patient CT-scan... 

Targeted drug delivery (TDD) to abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA) using a controlled and efficient approach has recently been a significant challenge. In this study, by using magnetic microbubbles (MMBs) under a magnetic field, we investigated the MMBs performance in TDD to AAA based on the amount of surface density of MMBs (SDMM) adhered to the AAA lumen. The results showed that among the types of MMBs studied in the presence of the magnetic field, micromarkers are the best type of microbubble with a −50 % increase in SDMM adhered to the critical area of AAA. The results show that applying a magnetic field causes the amount of SDMM adhered to the whole area of AAA to increase −1.54 times... 

Chitosan-coated human serum albumin nanoparticles were functionalized by MUC1 aptamer to obtain a selective drug carrier toward cancers overexpressing MUC1. The negative charges of albumin nanoparticles were shifted to positive charges by surface modification with chitosan, and MUC1 was conjugated through an acrylate spacer. The cytotoxicity of targeted nanoparticles was significantly more than non-aptamer nanoparticles, and also the chitosan-coated nanoparticles had more cytotoxic effects than the negatively charged albumin nanoparticles. The IC50 of targeted nanoparticles was 28 and 26% of free paclitaxel in MCF7 and T47D cells at 48 h, respectively. Confocal laser scanning electron... 

Droplet microfluidic systems have attracted a large amount of research due to their numerous applications in biomedical micro-devices and drug discovery/delivery platforms. One of the most important problems in such systems is to investigate deformation, coalescence, and breakup of droplets within the channel. The present study demonstrates numerical simulation of a falling droplet subject to gravitational force in a channel with embedded rectangular obstacles. The lattice Boltzmann method incorporated using He–Chen–Zhang method for two phase flow is employed. Two rectangular obstacles with inverse aspect ratios are introduced to investigate the mechanism of breakup and deformation of the... 

In recent years, Solid-State Drives (SSDs) have gained tremendous attention in computing and storage systems due to significant performance improvement over Hard Disk Drives (HDDs). The cost per capacity of SSDs, however, prevents them from entirely replacing HDDs in such systems. One approach to effectively take advantage of SSDs is to use them as a caching layer to store performance critical data blocks in order to reduce the number of accesses to HDD-based disk subsystem. Due to characteristics of Flash-based SSDs such as limited write endurance and long latency on write operations, employing caching algorithms at the Operating System (OS) level necessitates to take such characteristics... 

Ta0.8Hf0.2C ceramic has the highest melting point among the known materials (4000 °C). However, this high melting point makes the ceramic difficult to be sintered at temperatures lower than 2300 °C, pressurelessly. The purpose of this study is to consolidate Ta 0.8Hf0.2C UHTC by pressureless sintering at 2000 °C using MoSi2 as sintering aid. In this regard, effect of different amounts of MoSi2 on sintering behavior of Ta0.8Hf 0.2 UHTC was investigated. It was observed that condensation of the UHTC after sintering at 2000 °C was enhanced by increasing MoSi2 content and the highest relative density of 95% was obtained in the presence of 24 vol.% MoSi2. XRD pattern of the sintered UHTC... 

Battery chargers are fundamental components for successful deployment of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) into future smart grid. Recently, an integrated isolated bidirectional battery charger has been proposed for PHEV applications. The proposed charger eliminates the conventional bulky dc-link capacitor by feeding a dual-bridge resonant tank directly from the three-phase grid. The disadvantages associated with the presented charger are the high number of semiconductor switches which contribute to high cost and switching losses of converter as well as complicated control circuitry. In this paper, the previous structure is modified to address the aforementioned drawbacks and is... 

Wind power generation is increasing fast as a clean renewable energy resource. Offshore wind farms are popular due to advantages such as higher and smoother wind speeds, less farm site limitations, etc. High capacitive currents and need to expensive compensations, make use of high-voltage-direct-current (HVDC) power transmission indispensable for longdistance wind farm power generations. Steady-state and transient performance improvements of HVDC systems have always been an interesting industrial and academic research area. In this paper, a novel control method is proposed to improve the steady-state operation of HVDC system. Moreover, a new fault detection scheme is proposed to improve the... 

Microfluidic experiments have found wide applications in medical sciences and engineering, such as cell separation and focusing. In the present study, focusing and separation of particles with different sizes and densities were investigated by designing inertial microfluidic devices. The microfluidic channel is designed by analyzing the induced forces on the particles. In the designing process, the objective was to focus and separate the particles in the shortest length of the channel with the lowest possible cycles and high efficiency. The simulation is then used for analyzing the two proposed geometries to evaluate their particle separation and focusing ability, named convergent and... 

Improvement in switching techniques is one of the effective methods for increasing the voltage quality in Multilevel Inverters. In this paper, a novel switching technique using frequency modulation is proposed to achieve high quality output voltage of multilevel inverters. This method is employed to different configurations of multilevel inverters consist of Diode Clamped (or Neutral Point Clamped), Flying Capacitor and Cascaded H-bridge. Each multilevel inverter which utilizes this technique is modeled and simulated to investigate the performance of this method by the help of MATLAB/Simulink software. The Results show that this innovative method considerably reduces total harmonic... 

Over the past decade, storage has been the performance bottleneck in I/O-intensive programs such as online transaction processing applications. To alleviate this bottleneck with minimal cost penalty, cost-effective design of a high-performance disk subsystem is of decisive importance in enterprise applications. Data tiering is an efficient way to optimize cost, performance, and reliability in storage servers. With the promising advantages of solid-state drives (SSDs) over hard disk drives (HDDs) such as lower power consumption and higher performance, traditional data tiering techniques should be revisited to use SSDs in a more efficient way. Previously proposed tiering solutions have... 

In this study, the Lattice Boltzmann Method (LBM) is used to investigate the deformation of two droplets within microfluidic T-junctions (MFTD). In order to increase the accuracy the two immiscible fluids are modeled using the He-Chen-Zhang model. First, this model is applied to ensure that the surface tension effect existing between the droplets and the continuous fluid is properly implemented in the model. Then the collision and merging of the two droplets within the intersection of a T-shaped microchannel is investigated. For generating droplet formation the effects of relevant dimensionless parameters such as the Reynolds, the Weber numbers as well as a collision parameter affecting the... 

Targeted drug delivery methods have shown a significant impact on enhancing drug delivery efficiency and reducing drug side effects. While various stimuli have been used to promote the drug delivery process, applying ultrasound (US) waves to control drug particles through the human body, noninvasively, has drawn the scientist's attention. However, microcarriers delivery reaches the aneurysmal artery by US waves that exert volumetric forces on blood, and drug carriers, which can therefore affect blood flow patterns and movement pathways of drug carriers, have not yet been studied. In this study, we developed a 3-D patient-specific model of abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA) to evaluate the... 

To figure out the relationship between nutrient deprivation and cell growth, simulation can be effective. In the present work, the growth of Chinese Hamster Ovary (CHO) cells was simulated based on stoichiometric and kinetics calculations. The simulation results were compared to the experimental data from a packed-bed bioreactor and a good agreement was observed. The kinetic parameters (K Glc, K Amn, K Lact and μ Max) were optimized by a genetic algorithm method using stoichiometric parameters (Y X/Glc, Y X/Amm, and Y Lac/Glc). The stoichiometric and kinetic parameters were used in the simulation to study the growth of CHO cells. The concentrations of the toxic by-products, ammonium and... 

Public-key plays a significant role in today's communication over the network. However, current state-of-the-art public-key encryption (PKE) schemes are too complex to be efficiently employed in resource-constrained devices. Moreover, they are vulnerable to quantum attacks and soon will not have the required security. In the last decade, lattice-based cryptography has been a progenitor platform of the post-quantum cryptography (PQC) due to its lower complexity, which makes it more suitable for Internet of Things applications. In this article, we propose an efficient implementation of the binary learning with errors over ring (Ring-BinLWE) on the reduced instruction set computer-five (RISC-V)... 

The main purpose of this study is to provide the heating power for space heating and sanitary hot water for a residential house in sixteen stations located in Belgium using evacuated tube solar water (ETSW). A one-year dynamic simulation was performed using TSOL 5.5 software and Meteonorm 7.1 was used to obtain the climatic data. Technical and environmental studies as well as station rankings are the parameters that have been examined for the first time in the present study. The weighting results of using the Best-Worst method (BWM) revealed that total solar fraction and CO2 emission avoided have the highest and lowest weight, respectively. Station ranking was performed using ARAS technique... 

Fake news detection has become an emerging and critical topic of research in recent years. One of the major complications of fake news detection lies in the fact that news in social networks is multilingual, and therefore developing methods for each and every language in the world is impossible, especially for low resource languages like Persian. In an effort to solve this problem, researchers use machine translation to uniform the data and develop a method for the uniformed data. In this paper, we aim to explore the impacts of machine translation on fake news detection. For this purpose, we extracted and labeled a dataset of Persian Tweets from Twitter on the subject of COVID-19 and... 

To mitigate the environmental issues related to the utilisation of ordinary portland cement (OPC) in concrete mixtures, attempts have been carried out to find alternative binders such as rice husk ash (RHA) as replacements for OPC. This study contributes to moving from the traditional laboratory-based methods for the determination of compressive strength (CS) towards machine learning-based approaches by developing three accurate models (i.e. artificial neural network (ANN), multivariate adaptive regression spline (MARS) and M5P model tree) for the estimation of the CS of concretes containing RHA. For this purpose, the models were developed employing 909 data records collected through... 

Mitochondria is a major regulator of inducing tumor apoptosis and it is as a prime target for chemotherapy. Anticancers need to access specific tumor cells and also pass through different barriers such as outer and inner membranes of mitochondria. Targeted accumulation of paclitaxel (PTX) within the mitochondria was achieved by direct conjugation of PTX with triphenylphosphonium (TPP) as a mitochondrial membrane-permeable cation. PTX-TPP prodrug was synthesized by pH-sensitive ester bond between the hydroxyl function of PTX and the carboxylic function of TPP. This ester bond is only cleaved by the mitochondrial aldehyde dehydrogenase. Prodrug was loaded in the albumin nanoparticles by...