Sharif Digital Repository

Memory and motor deficits are commonly identified in Parkinson's disease (PD). 1-Methyl-4-phenyl-1,2,3,6-tetrahydropyridine (MPTP) is transformed to MPP+ via monoamine oxidase B (MAOB), which causes oxidative stress and destroys dopaminergic (DA) neurons in substantia nigra pars compacta (SNc) and is widely used to create animal models of PD. However, to-date, a comprehensive analysis of the MPTP effects on various aspects of PD does not exist. Here, we provide a systematic review and meta-analysis on the MPTP effects on memory and motor functions by analyzing 51 studies on more than one thousand animals mainly including rats and mice. The results showed that in addition to motor functions... 

Over the past few years, visual prostheses (namely, Argus II retinal implant) and gene therapy have obtained FDA approval in treating blindness resulting from retinitis pigmentosa. Compared to gene therapy; Argus II is less costly with a demonstrated favorable outcome, though the vision is yet artificial. To obtain better results, expectation counseling and preoperative retinal assessment are critical. The global experience with Argus II has enrolled no more than 300 cases so far. The first Argus II retinal prosthesis in Iran was successfully implanted in Shiraz (October 2017). To date, Argus II artificial retina is implanted in four patients in Iran. Beside successful surgery and... 

Freezing of gait (FOG) is a debilitating symptom in patients with Parkinson's disease (PD), which may be associated with motor control impairments in tasks other than gait. This study aimed to examine whether symmetric and asymmetric bimanual coordination is impaired in PD with FOG (PD +FOG) patients and whether dual-task and drug phases may affect bimanual coordination in these patients. Twenty PD +FOG patients, 20 PD patients without FOG (PD –FOG) performed symmetric and asymmetric functional bimanual tasks (reach to and pick up a box and open a drawer to press a pushbutton inside it, respectively) under single-task and dual-task conditions. PD patients were evaluated during on- and... 

In this paper, we analyze the capacity region of a communication network where a Multiple Access Channel (MAC) and a point-to-point channel share a same medium and interfere with each other, where the transmitter of the point-to-point channel has cognitive capabilities. We introduce Multiple Access-Cognitive Interference Channel (MA-CIFC), with a two-user MAC as a primary network and a cognitive transmitter-receiver pair in which the cognitive transmitter knows the message being sent by all of the transmitters in a non-causal manner. We obtain an inner bound on the capacity region of MA-CIFC and derive two sets of strong interference conditions under which we establish the capacity regions.... 

One of the main issues in the field of social and cognitive robotics is the robot’s ability to recognize emotional states and emotional interaction between robots and humans. Through effective emotional interaction, robots will be able to perform many tasks in human society. In this research, we have developed a robotic platform and a vision system to recognize the emotional state of the user through its facial expressions, which leads to a more realistic humanrobot interaction (HRI). First, a number of features are extracted according to points detected by a vision system from the face of the user. Then, the emotional state of the user is analyzed with the help of these features. For the... 

Recent studies have revealed that spectrum congestion is due to the inefficient usage of spectrum against the availability. Cognitive radio is viewed as an approach for improving the utilisation of radio spectrum. The spectrally encoded (spread-time) code-division multiple access (SE-CDMA) technique (which is regarded as the dual of spread spectrum CDMA) is considered and its performance in cognitive radio networks is studied. In cognitive network spectrum, overlay and underlay techniques are employed to enable the primary and secondary users to coexist while improving the overall spectrum efficiency. It is shown that SE-CDMA provides considerable flexibility to design overlay and underlay... 

Cognitive radio and cooperative networks are increasingly regarded as revolutionary technologies that utilise the radio spectrum efficiently. In this study, spectrally encoded (spread-time) code division multiple access (SE-CDMA) scheme is proposed as a flexible and adaptable technique for physical layer of cognitive relay networks. All primary and secondary users transmit their signals to a common base station (BS) and then the BS selects one of the cognitive secondary users based on feedback information to relay the primary user's (PU's) data. To study the efficiency of the system, two scenarios are considered. In the first scenario, the secondary users transmit their information using the... 

Music-based therapy is an appropriate tool to facilitate multisystem development in children with autism. The focus of this study is to implement a systematic and hierarchical music-based scenario in order to teach the fundamentals of music to children with autism through a social robot. To this end, we have programmed a NAO robot to play the xylophone and the drum. After running our designed robot-assisted clinical interventions on three high-functioning and one low functioning autistic children, fairly promising results have been observed. We indicated that the high-functioning participants have learned how to play the musical notes, short sentences, and simple rhythms. Moreover, the... 

Soccer model and relation of players and coach has been analyzed by a learning automata-based method, called Soccer Mobility Estimator (SME), who estimates the mobility model of soccer players. During a soccer match, players play according to a certain program designed by coach. The pattern of players' mobility is not stochastic and it can be assumed that they are playing with a certain mobility model. Since knowledge about mobility model of nodes in mobile ad-hoc networks has a substantial effect on its performance evaluation, knowledge about mobility model of soccer players can be useful for coaches and experts for game analysis. In fact the mobility model of players could be an important... 

The effective utilization of the spectrum has become an essential goal in the communications field, which is addressed by the Cognitive Radio (CR) systems. The primary task in a CR system is to sense the spectrum to identify its holes to be exploited by the secondary users. In this paper, we tackle the compressed spectrum sensing problem in a cooperative manner. The CRs distributed in an area take the samples of the signal that has been reached to them through a wireless fading channel. The spectrum has the block-sparse structure. Moreover, the spectrum observed by different CRs in an area share the same block-sparse support. Therefore, we suggest to exploit the joint block-sparsity... 

In this paper, we focus on a cognitive network scenario, comprised of a WLAN overlaid on a network with time-scheduled primary users. WiMAX is an example of such primary networks. For time-scheduled primary users simple On-Off traffic model with exponential durations is not valid anymore. In this scenario, the cognitive nodes (CNs) hear downlink map (DL-MAP) and thus, know the frequency and time locations of all allocated slots at each frame. Then, cognitive nodes contend with each other in order to transmit their fixed size packets based on IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol. Since the number of empty slots at each frame is variable each packet transmission in cognitive network prolongs a random... 

This paper presents a fragmented-spectrum synchronous OFDM-CDMA modulation and utilize it as secondary users modulation in a cognitive radio-based network to provide high data rate by efficiently exploiting available spectrum bands in a target spectral range while simultaneously offering multiple-access capability. In particular, given preexisting communications in the spectrum where the system is operating, a channel sensing and estimation method is used to obtain information of subcarrier availability. Given this information, some three-level codes are provided for emerging new cognitive radio users. Furthermore, analytical results of the system performance in a typical cognitive radio... 

In this paper, we investigate the resource allocation in an underlay cognitive radio network when multiple primary and secondary users are served via multi-carrier non-orthogonal multiple access (MC-NOMA) scheme. Our main objective is to maximize the sum rate subject to a minimum guaranteed rate for the primary users. The performance of the system is highly affected by the power allocation and subchannel assignment for all users. Hence, our optimization problem is formulated as a nonconvex mixed integer non-linear program whose global optimum can be found through a computationally infeasible exhaustive search. To overcome this challenge, we propose an efficient iterative algorithm to jointly... 

There is a unanimous agreement that "systems thinking" helps both individuals and organizations make more intelligent and more effective decisions. On the other hand, the unsatisfactory rate of systems thinking evolution among managers, collegians, students and other stratums raises this question that, why such a useful, discriminating and tasteful concept in theory, does not spread with the desirable pace in practice. Where exactly does the problem originate from? The tragedy is more sensible when noting the fact that even those who know the concept methodically do not apply it in action and in their decisions. Unfortunately, despite relatively numerous literatures on changing beliefs,... 

We propose a novel inverse method that utilizes a set of data to construct a simple equation that governs the stochastic process for which the data have been measured, hence enabling us to reconstruct the stochastic process. As an example, we analyze the stochasticity in the beat-to-beat fluctuations in the heart rates of healthy subjects as well as those with congestive heart failure. The inverse method provides a novel technique for distinguishing the two classes of subjects in terms of a drift and a diffusion coefficients which behave completely differently for the two classes of subjects, hence potentially providing a novel diagnostic tool for distinguishing healthy subjects from those... 

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is an irreversible neurological disorder that progresses gradually and can cause severe cognitive and behavioral impairments. This disease is currently considered a social and economic incurable issue due to its complicated and multifactorial characteristics. Despite decades of extensive research, we still lack definitive AD diagnostic and effective therapeutic tools. Consequently, one of the most challenging subjects in modern medicine is the need for the development of new strategies for the treatment of AD. A large body of evidence indicates that amyloid-β (Aβ) peptide fibrillation plays a key role in the onset and progression of AD. Recent studies have reported... 

Achieving higher transmission rate while reducing transmission power and induced interference on neighboring receivers is deemed necessary for the advancement of future generation networks and is particularly challenging, since these directions could be conflicting in nature. This letter adopts a multiobjective optimization (MOOP) approach to settle the tradeoffs between these three conflicting objectives in orthogonal frequency-division multiple access-based cognitive radio networks. Besides, unlike most of the work in the literature that studied the imperfect channel side information (CSI) of the link between the secondary transmitter and the primary receiver to evaluate ergodic capacity,... 

One of the most challenging problems in Opportunistic Spectrum Access (OSA) is to design channel sensing-based protocol in multi secondary users (SUs) network. Quality of Service (QoS) requirements for SUs have significant implications on this protocol design. In this paper, we propose a new method to find joint policies for SUs which not only tries to guarantee QoS requirements but also maximize network throughput. We use Decentralized Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (Dec-POMDP) to formulate interactions between SUs. Meanwhile, a tractable approach for Dec-POMDP is utilized to extract sub-optimum joint policies for large horizons. Among these policies, the QoS-aware joint... 

Abnormalities in the topology of brain networks may be an important feature and etiological factor for psychogenic non-epileptic seizures (PNES). To explore this possibility, we applied a graph theoretical approach to functional networks based on resting state EEGs from 13 PNES patients and 13 age- and gender-matched controls. The networks were extracted from Laplacian-transformed time-series by a cross-correlation method. PNES patients showed close to normal local and global connectivity and small-world structure, estimated with clustering coefficient, modularity, global efficiency, and small-worldness metrics, respectively. Yet the number of PNES attacks per month correlated with a... 

As concerning with water insecurity driven by water scarcity threatens the lives and livelihoods of humanity worldwide, urban water demand management is focused on promoting residential water conservation behaviors (WCBs) as a critical policy response to water scarcity. However, urban water conservation initiatives cannot be successful unless households involve in residential WCBs voluntarily by adopting water curtailment and/or water-efficiency actions. Thus, understanding motivations and mechanisms underlying accepting these two types of WCBs and interpreting their distinctions are primary policy considerations to make sustainable water consumption behaviors. Hence, the purpose of this...