Sharif Digital Repository

The depth of anesthesia quantification has been one of the most research interests in the field of EEG signal processing and nonlinear dynamical analysis has emerged as a novel method for the study of complex systems in the past few decades. In this investigation we use the concept of nonlinear time series analysis techniques to reconstruct the attractor of anesthesia from EEG signal which have been obtained from different hypnotic states during surgery to give a characterization of the dimensional complexity of EEG by Correlation Dimension estimation. The dimension of the anesthesia strange attractor can be thought of as a measure of the degrees of freedom or the 'complexity' of the... 

The biophysical and ultrasonographic properties of the skin change in papulosquamous diseases. Aims: To identify biophysical and ultrasonographic properties for the differentiation of five main groups of papulosquamous skin diseases. Methods: Fifteen biophysical and ultrasonographic parameters were measured by multiprobe adapter system and high-frequency ultrasonography in active lesions and normal control skin in patients with chronic eczema, psoriasis, lichen planus, pityriasis rosea and parapsoriasis/mycosis fungoides. Using histological diagnosis as a gold standard, a decision tree analysis was performed based on the mean percentage changes of these parameters [(lesion-control/control)... 

Schizophrenia is a severe brain disease that influences the behaviour and thought of person. These effects may fail in achieving the expected levels of interpersonal, academic, or occupational functioning. Although the underlying mechanism is not yet clear, the early detection of schizophrenia is an attractive and challenging research area. There are differences in brain connections of patients and healthy people. This study presents a new computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) method to diagnose schizophrenia (SZ) patients from normal control (NC) people by using the rest-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (R-fMRI) data. fMRI data has a huge dimension, and extracting efficient features is... 

In this paper, distributed electroencephalographic (EEG) sources in the brain have been mapped with the objective of early diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease (AD). To this end, records from a montage of a high-density EEG from 17 early AD patients and 17 matched healthy control subjects were considered. Subjects were in eyes-closed, resting-state condition. Cortical EEG sources were modeled by the standardized low-resolution brain electromagnetic tomography (sLORETA) method. Relative logarithmic power spectral density values were obtained in the four conventional frequency bands (alpha, beta, delta, and theta) and 12 cortical regions. Results show that in the left brain hemisphere, the theta... 

The most common heart disease is Coronary artery disease (CAD). CAD is one of the main causes of heart attacks and deaths across the globe. Early diagnosis of this disease is therefore, of great importance. A large number of methods have thus far been devised for diagnosing CAD. Most of these techniques have been conducted on the basis of the Irvine dataset (University of California), which not only has a limited number of features but is also full of missing values and thus lacks reliability. The present study was designed to seek a new set, free from missing values, comprising features such as the functional class, dyspnea, Q wave, ST elevation, ST depression, and T inversion. Information... 

One of the main causes of death the world over are cardiovascular diseases, of which coronary artery disease (CAD) is a major type. This disease occurs when the diameter narrowing of one of the left anterior descending, left circumflex, or right coronary arteries is equal to or greater than 50 percent. Angiography is the principal diagnostic modality for the stenosis of heart vessels; however, because of its complications and costs, researchers are looking for alternative methods such as data mining. This study conducts data mining algorithms on the Z-Alizadeh Sani dataset which has been collected from 303 random visitors to Tehran's Shaheed Rajaei Cardiovascular, Medical and Research... 

Since Gram-negative bacteria have a predominant role in nosocomial infections, there are high demands to develop a fast and sensitive method for diagnosis of bacteria in clinical samples. To address this challenge, we designed a novel electrochemical biosensor based on aptamers immobilized in engineered zeolitic imidazolate Framework-8 (ZIFs-8) via EDC-NHS chemistry. Cyclic voltammetry and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy techniques were conducted to monitor the electrochemical characterization. With respect to unique π-πinteractions between aptamer and graphene oxide (GO), the differential pulse voltammetry technique was applied with ferrocene-graphene oxide (Fc-GO) as an... 

Celiac disease is an autoimmune disorder represented by the ingestion of the gluten protein usually found in wheat, barley and rye. To date, ELISA has been the most accurate method for determining the presence of anti-gliadin, which is cumbersome, expensive (compared to a suspension microarray technique), and requires extensive sample preparation. In this study, in order to establish a more accurate assay to identify gliadin at lower concentrations, optical nano biosensors using an indirect immunoassay method for gliadin detection was designed and fabricated. For this, polycaprolactone (PCL) nano- to micro-beads were fabricated as a platform for the gliadin antigen which were optimized and... 

The paper presents an effective algorithm to analyze MR-images in order to recognize Alzheimer's Disease (AD) which appeared in patient's brain. The features of interest are categorized in Features of the Spatial Domain (FSD's) and Features of the Frequency Domain (FFD's) which are based on the first four statistic moments of the wavelet transform. Extracted features have been classified by a multi-layer perceptron Artificial Neural Network (ANN). Before ANN, the number of features is reduced from 44 to 12 to optimize and eliminate any correlation between them. The contribution of this paper is to demonstrate that by using the wavelet transform number of features needed for AD diagnosis has... 

Human parvovirus B19 (B19) is a small, non-enveloped virus and belongs to Parvoviridae family. B19 persists in many tissues such as thyroid tissue and even thyroid cancer. The main aim of this study was to determine the presence of B19, its association with increased inflammation in thyroid tissue, and thus its possible role in thyroid cancer progression. Studies have shown that virus replication in non-permissive tissue leads to overexpression of non-structural protein and results in upregulation of proinflammatory cytokines such as interleukin 6 and tumor necrosis factor alpha. A total of 36 paraffin-embedded thyroid specimens and serum were collected from patients and 12 samples were used... 

Early diagnosis of lung cancer is very important in improving patients life expectancies. Due to the high number of Computed Tomography (CT) images, fast and accurate diagnosis is difficult for radiologists. Therefore, there is an increasing demand for Computer-Aid Diagnosis (CAD) lung cancer. The core of all lung cancer detection systems is the distinction between cancer and non-cancerous tissues. This operation is performed in the false positive reduction phase, which is one of the most critical part of the lung cancer detection systems. The primary objective of this paper is to present a new method based on 3D Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) that can reduce the false positives rate... 

This paper presents the design process and construction of a mobile social robot companion "Arash" for educational and therapeutic intervention for children with chronic diseases; one which is based on their interests and needs. This study concentrates on children with cancer who suffer from physical pain caused by both the disease and its treatment. Moreover, cancer treatment causes emotional distress, which can reduce the efficiency of medications. Using social robots to interact with ill children in a hospital environment could decrease their distress, thereby improving the efficiency of the treatment. Arash is a 15 degrees-of-freedom cost effective humanoid mobile robot companion,... 

The separation of cancer cells from a heterogeneous biological sample such as blood plays a vital role in cancer study and future treatments. In this paper, we designed and investigated two microfluidic devices for cancer cell separation, including a serpentine inertial device and an integrated inertial-magnetophoretic device. Firstly, numerical modeling was carried out to study the fluid flow, particles’ trajectories in the inertial device. Then the device was fabricated using soft photolithography and suspension of two types of microparticles with the size of 10 and 15 µm were injected into the microchannel separately to investigate the particles’ trajectories and focusing behavior at... 

The separation of cancer cells from a heterogeneous biological sample such as blood plays a vital role in cancer study and future treatments. In this paper, we designed and investigated two microfluidic devices for cancer cell separation, including a serpentine inertial device and an integrated inertial-magnetophoretic device. Firstly, numerical modeling was carried out to study the fluid flow, particles’ trajectories in the inertial device. Then the device was fabricated using soft photolithography and suspension of two types of microparticles with the size of 10 and 15 µm were injected into the microchannel separately to investigate the particles’ trajectories and focusing behavior at... 

Since the injection of the oncolytic viruses in the virotherapy process reduces the toxicity and drug resistance inherent in the chemotherapy; chemovirotherapy as a novel combination therapy has become an efficient cancer treatment. The primary purpose of this paper is to design a robust optimal control strategy for the chemovirotherapy through which the tumor density decreases to its stable condition with limited drug and virus delivery. This desired treatment should be responsive in the presence of input disturbances and parametric uncertainties. In this regard, an ODE (Ordinary Differential Equation) mathematical model of the chemovirotherapy process presenting the connection between the... 

Formation of the amyloid beta (Aβ) peptide aggregations represents an indispensable role in appearing and progression of Alzheimer disease. β-sheet breaker peptides can be designed and modified with different amino acids in order to improve biological properties and binding affinity to the amyloid beta peptide. In the present study, three peptide sequences were designed based on the hopeful results of LIAIMA peptide and molecular docking studies were carried out onto the monomer and fibril structure of amyloid beta peptide using AutoDock Vina software. According to the obtained interactions and binding energy from docking, the best-designed peptide (D-GABA-FPLIAIMA) was chosen and... 

Background: Human amniotic membrane grafting could be potentially useful in ocular surface complications due to tissue similarity and the presence of factors that reduce inflammation, vascu-larization, and scarring. However, considerations like donor-derived infectious risk and the requirement of an invasive surgery limit the clinical application of such treatments. Moreover, the quick depletion of bioactive factors after grafting reduces the efficacy of treatments. Therefore, in the current study, the possibility of nano delivery of the bioactive factors extracted from the human amniotic membrane to the ocular surface was investigated. Materials and Methods: Nanoparticles were prepared... 

Acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), also called COVID-19, is one of the most contagious viruses resulting in a progressive pandemic. Since specific antiviral treatments have not been developed yet and its fatal rate is almost high, early and fast detection is critical for controlling the outbreak. In this study, a piezoelectric microcantilever biosensor has been designed for detecting COVID-19 samples directly without requiring preparation steps. The biosensor acts as a transducer and is coated with the related antibody. When the SARS-CoV-2 antigens adsorbed on the microcantilever top surface through their spike proteins, a surface stress due to the mass change would be... 

Circulating tumor cells (CTCs) isolation from a blood sample plays an important role in cancer diagnosis and treatment. Microfluidics offers a great potential for cancer cell separation from the blood. Among the microfluidic-based methods for CTC separation, the inertial method as a passive method and magnetic method as an active method are two efficient well-established methods. Here, we investigated the combination of these two methods to separate CTCs from a blood sample in a single chip. Firstly, numerical simulations were performed to analyze the fluid flow within the proposed channel, and the particle trajectories within the inertial cell separation unit were investigated to... 

Gene proliferation is vital for infectious and genetic diseases diagnosis from a blood sample, even before birth. In addition, DNA sequencing, genetic finger-print analyzing, and genetic mutation detecting can be mentioned as other procedures requiring gene reproduction. Polymerase chain reaction, briefly known as PCR, is a convenient and effective way to accomplish this task; where the DNA containing sample faces three temperature phases alternatively. These phases are known as denaturation, annealing, and elongation/extension which in this study -regarding the type of the primers and the target DNA sequence- are set to occur at 95, 58, and 72 degrees of Celsius. In this study, a PCR device...