Sharif Digital Repository

Herniation in the lumbar area is one of the most common diseases which results in lower back pain (LBP) causing discomfort and inconvenience in the patients' daily lives. A computer aided diagnosis (CAD) system can be of immense benefit as it generates diagnostic results within a short time while increasing precision of diagnosis and eliminating human errors. We have proposed a new method for automatic diagnosis of lumbar disc herniation based on clinical MRI data. We use T2-W sagittal and myelograph images. The presented method has been applied on 30 clinical cases, each containing 7 discs (210 lumbar discs) for the herniation diagnosis. We employ Otsu thresholding method to extract the... 

Gaining insight into possible vibratory responses of dynamical systems around their stable equilibria is an essential step, which must be taken before their design and application. The results of such a study can significantly help prevent instability in closed-loop stabilized systems by avoiding the excitation of the system in the neighborhood of its resonance. This paper investigates nonlinear oscillations of a rotary inverted pendulum (RIP) with a full-state feedback controller. Lagrange’s equations are employed to derive an accurate 2-DoF mathematical model, whose parameter values are extracted by both the measurement and 3D modeling of the real system components. Although the governing... 

Several methods have been developed in the past for analyzing the porosity and other types of well logs for large-scale porous media, such as oil reservoirs, as well as their permeability distributions. We developed a method for analyzing the porosity logs φ(h) (where h is the depth) and similar data that are often nonstationary stochastic series. In this method one first generates a new stationary series based on the original data, and then analyzes the resulting series. It is shown that the series based on the successive increments of the log y(h)=φ(h+δh)-φ(h) is a stationary and Markov process, characterized by a Markov length scale hM. The coefficients of the Kramers-Moyal expansion for... 

Yeh et al. have recently proposed a mutual authentication protocol based on EPC Class-1 Gen.-2 standard. They claim their protocol is secure against adversarial attacks and also provides forward secrecy. In this paper we show that the proposed protocol does not have cited security features properly. A powerful and practical attack is presented on this protocol whereby the whole security of the protocol is broken. Furthermore, Yeh et al.'s protocol does not assure the untraceabilitiy and backwarduntraceabilitiy attributes. We also will propose our revision to safeguard the Yeh et al.'s protocol against cited attacks  

In this paper, we show how time-sharing method may reduce transmission delay in the dynamic index coding scenario. We propose a novel time-shared dynamic index coding transmission scheme that achieves the maximum index coding gain for a complete bi-directional side information graph and formulate a constrained optimization problem to tune the transmission scheme for the minimum transmission delay. A closed-form solution is presented for the special case of two-user. We also use analytical and simulation results to provide graphical intuition for the obtained results  

This paper suggests methods for improving efficiency of a high step up high efficiency converter based on three state commutation cells. A loss analysis has been performed to identify the source of power loss. Based on this analysis, methods are presented to reduce losses in the most power dissipating elements. These methods include replacing some power diodes with large conduction losses with MOSFETs having small on-state resistance. Efficiency improvement up to %1.25 percent is verified in simulation and experimental results  

Locally multipath adaptive routing (LMAR) protocol, classified as a new reactive distance vector routing protocol for MANETs is proposed in this paper. LMAR can find an ad-hoc path without selfish nodes and wormholes using a random search algorithm in polynomial-time. Also when the primary path fails, it discovers an alternative safe path if network graph remains connected after eliminating selfish/malicious nodes. The main feature of LMAR to seek safe route free of selfish and malicious nodes in polynomial time is its searching algorithm and flooding stage that its generated traffic is equiloaded compared to single-path routing protocols but its ability to bypass the attacks is much better... 

von Willebrand factor (VWF) is a naturally collapsed protein that participates in primary haemostasis and coagulation events. The clotting process is triggered by the adsorption and conformational changes of the plasma VWFs localized to the collagen fibres found near the site of injury. We develop coarse-grained models to simulate the adsorption dynamics of VWF flowing near the adhesive collagen fibres at different shear rates and investigate the effect of factors such as interaction and cooperativity of VWFs on the success of adsorption events. The adsorption probability of a flowing VWF confined to the receptor field is enhanced when it encounters an adhered VWF in proximity to the... 

A general regression neural network technique was applied to design optimization of a liquid-liquid coaxial swirl injector. Phase Doppler Anemometry measurements were used to train the neural network. A general regression neural network was employed to predict droplet velocity and Sauter mean diameter at any axial or radial position for the operating range of a liquid-liquid coaxial swirl injector. The results predicted by neural network agreed satisfactorily with the experimental data. A general performance map of the liquid-liquid coaxial swirl (LLCS) injector was generated by converting the predicted result to actual fuel/oxidizer ratios. © 2008 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA  

Development of Smart Grid and deployment of smart meters in large scale has raised a lot of concerns regarding customers’ privacy. Consequently, several schemes have been proposed to overcome the above mentioned issue. These schemes mainly rely on data aggregation as a method of protecting users’ privacy from the grid operators. However, the main problem with most of these schemes is the fact that they require a large amount of processing power at the meter side. This, together with the fact that smart meters don't usually have a powerful processor, can cause the unavailability of smart meter data at the required time for operators of the grid, and at the same time prevents smart meters from... 

Real-time applications play a significant role in the area of VANET, and are mainly required for these kinds of networks. On the other hand, when the number of messages received by vehicles increases in the network, then the applied computation load becomes extremely high and consequently, delay on the message authentication process significantly increases. This paper is presented with the aim of introducing a novel cooperative message authentication (CMA) scheme for VANET, the main purpose of which is alleviating the computation load on vehicles while verifying messages by using two-part identity-based signature. The scheme enables vehicles to verify only a limited number of the total... 

A general regression neural network technique is applied for design optimization of liquid-liquid coaxial swirl injectors. Phase Doppler Anemometry measurements for velocity and SMD distributions for various Reynolds numbers are used to train the neural network to generate the injector's performance map. Excellent agreement between the predicted values and the measurements is obtained. It is observed that by reducing the number of randomly selected training samples to about one third of the number of prediction points, one may reconstruct the velocity field in the extrapolation regime with an accuracy of 93%. Copyright © 2005 by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Inc.... 

A general regression neural network technique is proposed for design optimization of pressure-swirl injectors. Phase doppler anemometry measurements for velocity distributions are used to train the neural network. An overall optimized value for the width of the probability is determined. The velocity field in the extrapolation regime is reconstructed with an accuracy of 93%. Excellent agreement between the predicted values and the measurements is obtained. The results indicate that the capability of performing designand optimization studies for pressure-swirl injectors with sufficient accuracy exists by applying modest amount of data in conjunction with an overall optimized value for the... 

Hybrid bioactive inorganic-organic carbon-based nanocomposites of reduced graphene oxide (rGO) nanosheets enlarged with multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs) were decorated to provide a suitable space forin situgrowth of CoNi2S4and green-synthesized ZnO nanoparticles. The ensuing nanocarrier supplied π-π interactions between the DOX drug and a stabilizing agent derived from leaf extracts on the surface of ZnO nanoparticles and hydrogen bonds; gene delivery of (p)CRISPR was also facilitated by chitosan and alginate renewable macromolecules. Also, these polymers can inhibit the potential interactions between the inorganic parts and cellular membranes to reduce the potential cytotoxicity.... 

Assessment of respiratory volume is widely used in clinical application in order to assess the case of respiratory illness, and the progression of the respiratory syndrome. Respiratory plethysmography is used to determine the changes of chest volume to monitor the breathing. A wearable respiration measuring system has been introduced for detection of volume variations of chest. The system consists of a flexible sensor, stretchable cloth and electrical board. The flexible sensor, whose electrical voltage is produced by body movements, is installed inside the shirt and closely contacts the chest. The low frequency components of body movements recorded by the sensor are mainly generated by... 

An experimental investigation of the flow field of pressure swirl atomizers for different pressure drops is performed. Two experimental methods are employed. For low injection pressures, a visual study is conducted while for higher pressures the velocity components and size of the droplets are measured by using Phase Doppler Anemometer. The spray formation, spray cone angle, and breakup length are visually investigated. Velocity and size of the droplets are measured on a plane of measurement along the axis of the spray so that the properties are carried out in a radial direction as a function of both pressure drop and axial distance from the nozzle. Self-similar mean axial velocity profiles... 

Solute-solvent and solvent-solvent interactions were investigated for binary mixtures of an ionic liquid (IL) 2-hydroxy ethylammonium formate as with methanol, ethylene glycol and glycerol. The physicochemical properties of the solvent mixtures at 25 °C, over the whole range of mole fractions, were determined using solvatochromic probes. High normal polarity (ETN) in the alcohol-rich region confirms solute-solvent interactions in this medium. Dipolarity/polarizability (π *) show a different trend to ETN with a positive deviation from ideal behavior in IL-glycerol mixtures. However, these deviations for other solvent mixtures are insignificant. Contrary to what is observed for E TN and π*,... 

In this study, Yittria Stabilized Zirconia/Titania powders synthesized via air plasma spray (APS) method such as morphology changes and phase transformations of core-shell structure characterized. Phase analysis of powders was performed by XRD. The crystallite size and lattice strain of YSZ/TiO2 core-shell structure was calculated by Williamson-Hall method. Morphology was observed with scanning electron microscope. EDS and map analysis were used for core-shell characterization. Results revealed that all TiO2 nano particles were melted around YSZ powders with the thickness between 1 up to 5 μm. After spraying the YSZ/TiO2 mixture in water, strain values increased but crystallite size... 

In cloud storage services, public auditing mechanisms allow a third party to verify integrity of the outsourced data on behalf of data owners without the need to retrieve data from the cloud server. In some applications, the identity of data users should be kept private from the third party auditor. Oruta is a privacy preserving public auditing scheme for shared data in the cloud which exploits ring signatures to protect the identity privacy. In this paper, we propose two attacks and demonstrate that the scheme is insecure and a dishonest server can arbitrarily tamper the outsourced data without being detected by the auditor. We also propose a solution to remedy this weakness with the...