It is widely accepted that early diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease (AD) makes it possible for patients to gain access to appropriate health care services and would facilitate the development of new therapies. AD starts many years before its clinical manifestations and a biomarker that provides a measure of changes in the brain in this period would be useful for early diagnosis of AD. Given the rapid increase in the number of older people suffering from AD, there is a need for an accurate, low-cost and easy to use biomarkers that could be used to detect AD in its early stages. Potentially, the electroencephalogram (EEG) can play a vital role in this but at present, no reliable EEG biomarker exists for early diagnosis of AD. The gradual slowing of brain activity caused by AD starts from the back of the brain and spreads out towards other parts. Consequently, determining the brain regions that are first affected by AD may be useful in its early diagnosis. Higuchi fractal dimension (HFD) has characteristics which make it suited to capturing region-specific neural changes due to AD. The aim of this study is to investigate the potential of HFD of the EEG as a biomarker which is associated with the brain region first affected by AD. Mean HFD value was calculated for all channels of EEG signals recorded from 52 subjects (20-AD and 32-normal). Then, p-values were calculated between the two groups (AD and normal) to detect EEG channels that have a significant association with AD. k-nearest neighbor (KNN) algorithm was used to compute the distance between AD patients and normal subjects in the classification. Our results show that AD patients have significantly lower HFD values in the parietal areas. HFD values for channels in these areas were used to discriminate between AD and normal subjects with a sensitivity and specificity values of 100% and 80%, respectively.
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) have high performance in the fields of object recognition and classification. The strength of CNNs comes from the fact that they are able to extract information from raw-pixel content and learn features automatically. Feature extraction and classification algorithms can be either hand-crafted or Deep Learning (DL) based. DL detection approaches can be either two stages (region proposal approaches) detector or a single stage (non-region proposal approach) detector. Region proposal-based techniques include R-CNN, Fast RCNN, and Faster RCNN. Non-region proposal-based techniques include Single Shot Detector (SSD) and You Only Look Once (YOLO). We are going to compare the speed and accuracy of Faster RCNN,
... Show MoreNearly a century and a half has passed since Sarah Orne Jewett published her much anthologized short story “A White Heron” (1886), but commentators on the tale missed one of the most important points in the text. It is the story’s similarity to the traditional Euro-centric fairy tale of “Little Red Riding Hood”. As an author, writing at the end of the ninetieth century, a time that witnessed the demise of the Romantic movement in America and the beginning of the age of Realism, Jewett did not romanticize her characters, despite the idyllic landscape in which “A White Heron” is set. Her story can be analyzed as a text that aims at disseminating ecological awareness among her young readers. This study focuses on Jewett
... Show MoreThe current research aims to determine the requirements of Trends of International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS 2019) and to find out the extent to which the content of science textbooks for grades (1-4) in the Sultanate of Oman includes the requirements of (TIMSS 2019). Only the content dimension has been taken into account when conducting the content analysis. The study population includes all science books from the first to the fourth grade for the academic year 2021-2022. The study identified and organized the requirements in the study tool, which is a list of requirements of (TIMSS 2019). The results showed a general deficiency in all grades (1-4) in the content dimension including many main topics, subtopics, and objectives
... Show MoreA recently reported Nile red (NR) dye conjugated with benzothiadiazole species paves the way for the development of novel organic-based sensitizers used in solar cells whose structures are susceptible to modifications. Thus, six novel NR structures were derived from two previously developed structures in laboratories. In this study, density functional theory (DFT) calculations and time-dependent DFT (TD-DFT) were used to determine the optoelectronic properties of the NR-derived moieties such as absorption spectra. Various linkers were investigated in an attempt to understand the impact of π-linkers on the optoelectronic properties. According to the findings, the presence of furan species led to the planarity of the molecule and a reduction
... Show MoreThis work presents a simple method for determination of the neutron reflection coefficient (n) as a function of different neutron reflector materials.A laboratory neutron source (Am-Be) with activity of 16 ci is employed with a (BF3) neutron detector. Am-BeThree types of reflector materials are used as samples, the thickness of each sample is (5cm).It is found that( ?7) is: -For polyethlyene = 0.818
Calcareous nannofossils were documented from the upper part of the Cretaceous Balambo Formation in northern Iraq with the aim of determining an evidence for the Oceanic Anoxic Event. A detailed investigation of the calcareous nannofossils led to the identification of twenty-four species. Regarding these data, Discolithus litterarius (Górka, 1957) was identified at the studied interval with the age of Early Aptian.
Early Aptian assemblages are dominated by nannoconids that drop sharply within the D. litterarius nannofossil zone, which may be related to the nannoconid crisis recorded in the Early Aptian in the other parts of the world. This event is coincided by a decrease in CaCO3<
... Show MoreHarold Pinter’s The Caretaker(1959) clearly portrays a lack of communication among the characters of the play which refers to the condition of modern man. This failure of communication led Harold Pinter to use a lot of pauses and silences in all the plays he wrote instead of words. Samuel Beckett preceded Pinter in doing so in his plays and one way to express the bewilderment of modern man during the 20th century is through the use of no language in the dramatic works. Language is no more important to modern man; instead, he uses silence to express his feelings. Silence is more powerful than the words themselves. That’s why long and short pauses can be seen throughout all Pinter’s plays.
In this play, th
... Show MoreEvolutionary algorithms are better than heuristic algorithms at finding protein complexes in protein-protein interaction networks (PPINs). Many of these algorithms depend on their standard frameworks, which are based on topology. Further, many of these algorithms have been exclusively examined on networks with only reliable interaction data. The main objective of this paper is to extend the design of the canonical and topological-based evolutionary algorithms suggested in the literature to cope with noisy PPINs. The design of the evolutionary algorithm is extended based on the functional domain of the proteins rather than on the topological domain of the PPIN. The gene ontology annotation in each molecular function, biological proce
... Show MoreSevere periodontitis is ranked as the sixth most prevalent disease affecting humankind, with an estimated 740 million people affected worldwide. The diagnosis of periodontal diseases mainly relies upon assessment of conventional clinical parameters. However, these parameters reflect past, rather than current, clinical status or future disease progression and, likely, outcome of periodontal treatment. Specific and sensitive biomarkers for periodontal diseases have been examined widely to address these issues and some biomarkers have been translated as point-of-care (PoC) tests. The aim of this review was to provide an update on PoC tests for use in the diagnosis and management of periodontal diseases. Among the PoC tests developed so
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