Sharif Digital Repository

An approach based pulse on contour analysis is proposed for the development of an aging index for the vascular system. The approach is non-invasive, using photoplethysmography (PPG), which is in wide clinical use. A probe is applied to the subject's finger-tip to provide a measure of the pulse waveform. The measured waveforms are filtered, digitized and post-processed. Individual pulses are extracted and the best pulse was selected by using the best pulse selection algorithm. Pulse contour analysis is then performed with specially formulated PPG fitness equation. Results of measurements taken from 72 subjects are reported. The age range of the subjects was from 19 to 68 years, all of them... 

The aim of this study is to employ feedback control loops to provide a stable forward dynamics simulation of human movement under repeated position constraint conditions in the environment, particularly during stair climbing. A ten-degrees-of-freedom skeletal model containing 18 Hill-type musculotendon actuators per leg was employed to simulate the model in the sagittal plane. The postural tracking and obstacle avoidance were provided by the proportional—integral—derivative controller according to the modulation of the time rate change of the joint kinematics. The stability of the model was maintained by controlling the velocity of the body's centre of mass according to the desired centre of... 

In this study, a series of highly swelling hydrogels based on sodium alginate (NaAlg) and polymethacrylamide (PMAM) was prepared through free radical polymerization. The graft copolymerization reaction was performed in a homogeneous medium and in the presence of ammonium persulfate (APS) as an initiator andN,N′-methylenebisacrylamide (MBA) as a crosslinker. The crosslinked graft copolymer, alginate-graft-polymethacrylamide (Alg-g-PMAM), was then partially hydrolyzed by NaOH solution to yield a hydrogel, hydrolyzed alginate-graft-polymethacrylamide (H-Alg-g-PMAM). During alkaline hydrolysis, the carboxamide groups of Alg-g-PMAM were converted into hydrophilic carboxylate anions. Either the... 

A combination of silica chloride and wet SiO2 was used as an effective deacetalizating agent for the conversion of acetals to their corresponding carbonyl derivatives under mild and heterogeneous condition  

Global warming escalation has extended average temperature of earth beyond its safe limit. To avert this environmental-threat, solar energy has acquired substantial attention of remarkable researchers in this century. To effectively utilize solar energy by transforming into thermal and electrical energy, the involvement of nanofluids having intensified thermal, optical and magnetic properties, has become very popular. The foremost objective of this article is to provide a comprehensive review on the applications of nanofluids in solar energy systems like solar collectors, photovoltaic cells, solar stills, and thermal energy storage, which are thoroughly discussed in this paper. The effect of... 

In this paper, heat and mass transportation flow of swimming gyrotactic microorganisms (microbes) and solid nanoparticles under the viscous dissipation effect is investigated. The flow model PDEs are renovated with ordinary ones using suitable boundary layer approximations. The system governing the flow model dimensionless equations as well as boundary conditions is numerically treated with the SOR (successive over relaxation) technique. The flow, heat, and mass transport characteristics are examined against the prime parameters. A comparison is examined to be in a good agreement with the earlier results. It is found here that flow and thermal characteristics of the problem are substantially... 

In this paper, the Monte Carlo technique is used to determine the optical detection strategies in three-layered (maternal, amniotic fluid and fetal) tissue model. This model is utilized to estimate the transabdominal optical power and optimum source-detector (S-D) separation. Results based on the launching of 2 million photons with 1 mW optical power showed that the expected optical power output is in the range of 10 -6-10 -10 W/cm 2 depending on S-D separation. Considering the limit of the signal processing methods (such as adaptive noise cancelling) and the use of silicon photodetector, an S-D separation of 4 cm has been selected as a practical compromise between signal level and... 

In obstetrics, fetal heart rate (FHR) detection remains the standard for intrapartum assessment of fetal well-being. In this paper, a low-power (<55 mW) optical technique is proposed for transabdominal FHR detection using near-infrared photoplesthys-mography (PPG). A beam of IR-LED (890 nm) propagates through to the maternal abdomen and fetal tissues, resulting in a mixed signal detected by a low-noise detector situated at a distance of 4 cm. Low-noise amplification and 24-bit analog-to-digital converter resolution ensure minimum effect of quantization noise. After synchronous detection, the mixed signal is processed by an adaptive filter to extract the fetal signal, whereas the PPG from the... 

Cardiotocograph (CTG) is widely used in everyday clinical practice for fetal surveillance, where it is used to record fetal heart rate (FHR) and uterine activity (UA). These two biosignals can be used for antepartum and intrapartum fetal monitoring and are, in fact, nonlinear and non-stationary. CTG recordings are often corrupted by artifacts such as missing beats in FHR, high-frequency noise in FHR and UA signals. In this paper, an empirical mode decomposition (EMD) method is applied on CTG signals. A recursive algorithm is first utilized to eliminate missing beats. High-frequency noise is reduced using EMD followed by the partial reconstruction (PAR) method, where the noise order is... 

We introduce the blind index coding (BIC) problem, in which a single sender communicates distinct messages to multiple users over a shared channel. Each user has partial knowledge of each message as side information. However, unlike classical index coding, in BIC, the sender is uncertain of what side information is available to each user. In particular, the sender only knows the amount of bits in each user's side information but not its content. This problem can arise naturally in caching and wireless networks. In order to blindly exploit side information in the BIC problem, we develop a hybrid coding scheme that XORs uncoded bits of a subset of messages with random combinations of bits from... 

We consider a basic caching system, where a single server with a database of N files (e.g. movies) is connected to a set of K users through a shared bottleneck link. Each user has a local cache memory with a size of M files. The system operates in two phases. a placement phase, where each cache memory is populated up to its size from the database, and a following delivery phase, where each user requests a file from the database, and the server is responsible for delivering the requested contents. The objective is to design the two phases to minimize the load (peak or average) of the bottleneck link. We characterize the rate-memory tradeoff of the above caching system within a factor of... 

In this paper, we consider $K$ -user interference channels with $M$ antennas per node and with backhaul collaboration in one side (among the transmitters or among the receivers), for $M,Kin mathbb {N}$ , and investigate the tradeoff between the rate in the channel versus the communication load in the backhaul. In this investigation, each node is equipped with $M$ antennas and we focus on a first order approximation result, where the rate of the wireless channel is measured by the degrees of freedom (DoF) per user, and the load of the backhaul is measured by the entropy of backhaul messages per user normalized by $log $ of transmit power, at high power regimes. This tradeoff is fully... 

This study concentrated on the formulation of self-flowing and an energy efficient lightweight aggregate foamed concrete (LAFC) to be employed as thermal insulation, thermal mass and structural material. Low density concrete mixtures (for the density values from 800 to 1300 kg/m3) were prepared by changing the volume of lightweight expanded clay aggregate (ECA) from 49.4% to 20.1%. Flowing properties of concrete mixtures were improved with the help of stable foam. Ordinary Portland cement (OPC) was replaced by the 5% and 10% silica fume (SF) to examine the influence of SF on the properties of LAFC. Compressive strength and tensile strength of LAFC mixtures were respectively enhanced from 6.5... 

Current techniques in sequencing a genome allow a service provider (e.g. a sequencing company) to have full access to the genome information, and thus the privacy of individuals regarding their lifetime secret is violated. In this paper, we introduce the problem of private DNA sequencing, where the goal is to keep the DNA sequence private to the sequencer. We propose an architecture, where the task of reading fragments of DNA and the task of DNA assembly are separated, the former is done at the sequencer(s), and the later is completed at a local trusted data collector. To satisfy the privacy constraint at the sequencer and reconstruction condition at the data collector, we create an... 

We consider the problem of interference management in wireless cellular networks with caches at both base stations and receivers, and we characterize the degrees of freedom (DoFs) per cell to within an additive gap of (1/3) and a multiplicative gap of 2 for all system parameters, under one-shot linear schemes. Our result indicates that the one-shot linear DoF per cell scales linearly with the total amount of cache available in the cell, i.e., the sum of the caches at the central base station and all the receivers within the cell, resembling a similar phenomenon previously observed for the case of fully connected wireless networks. To establish the result, we propose a decentralized and... 

We consider a basic caching system, where a single server with a database of N files (e.g., movies) is connected to a set of K users through a shared bottleneck link. Each user has a local cache memory with a size of M files. The system operates in two phases: A placement phase, where each cache memory is populated up to its size from the database, and a following delivery phase, where each user requests a file from the database, and the server is responsible for delivering the requested contents. The objective is to design the two phases to minimize the load (peak or average) of the bottleneck link. We characterize the rate-memory tradeoff of the above caching system within a factor of... 

Private set intersection (PSI) is a fundamental cryptographic protocol which has a wide range of applications. It enables two clients to compute the intersection of their private datasets without revealing non-matching elements. The advent of cloud computing drives the ambition to reduce computation and data management overhead by outsourcing such computations. However, since the cloud is not trustworthy, some cryptographic methods should be applied to maintain the confidentiality of datasets. But, in doing so, data owners may be excluded from access control on their outsourced datasets. Therefore, to control access rights and to interact with authorized users, they have to be online during... 

With the development of cloud computing, many enterprises have been interested in outsourcing their data to cloud servers to decrease IT costs and rise capabilities of provided services. To afford confidentiality and fine-grained data access control, attribute-based encryption (ABE) was proposed and used in several cloud storage systems. However, scalability and flexibility in key delegation and user revocation mechanisms are primary issues in ABE systems. In this paper, we introduce the concept of a fully distributed revocable ciphertext-policy hierarchical ABE (FDR-CP-HABE) and design the first FDR-CP-HABE scheme. Our scheme offers a high level of flexibility and scalability in the key... 

In the problems of Genome-Wide Association Study (GWAS), the objective is to associate subsequences of individual's genomes to the observable characteristics called phenotypes. The genome containing the biological information of an individual can be represented by a sequence of length G. Many observable characteristics of the individuals can be related to a subsequence of a given length L, called causal subsequence. The environmental affects make the relation between the causal subsequence and the observable characteristics a stochastic function. Our objective in this paper is to detect the causal subsequence of a specific phenotype using a dataset of N individuals and their observed...