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.
In this study, pebble bed as an absorber and storage material was placed in a south facing, flat plate air-type solar collector at fixed tilt angle of (45°). The effect of this material and differ- ent parameters on collector efficiency has been investigated experimentally and
theoretically. Two operation modes were employed to study the performance of the solar air heater. An inte- grated mode of continuous operation of the system during the period of (11:00 am – 3:00 pm) and non-integrated mode in which the system stored the solar energy through the day then used the stored energy during the period of (3:00 pm – 8:00 pm). The results of parametric study in case of continuous operating showed that the maximum average temperatur
Plantation of humic acid nanoparticles on the inert sand through simple impregnation to obtain the permeable reactive barrier (PRB) for treating of groundwater contaminated with copper and cadmium ions. The humic acid was extracted from sewage sludge which is byproduct of the wastewater treatment plant; so, this considers an application of sustainable development. Batch tests signified that the coated sand by humic acid (CSHA) had removal efficiencies exceeded 98 % at contact time, sorbent dosage, and initial pH of 1 h, 0.25 g/50 mL and 7, respectively for 10 mg/L initial concentration and 200 rpm agitation speed. Results proved that physicosorption was the predominant mechanism for metals-CSHA interaction because the sorption data followed
... Show MoreIn this study, a mercapto-quinazolinone derivative, 3-(4-Bromobenzyl)-2-mercaptoquinazolin-4(3H)-one (compound B), was synthesized and assessed as a corrosion inhibitor for carbon steel (CS45) in 1M hydrochloric acid. The synthesis began with anthranilic acid and involved two main steps: first, the formation of a thiocyanate intermediate, followed by its reaction with anthranilic acid to produce compound B. The chemical structure of the synthesized compound was confirmed using FT-IR, 1H-NMR, and 13C-NMR techniques. The corrosion inhibition performance of compound B was evaluated at different concentrations (0.01, 0.05, 0.1, and 0.3 M) and temperatures (293, 303, and 313 K) in acidic media. Potentiodynamic polarization measu
... Show MoreWireless networks and communications have witnessed tremendous development and growth in recent periods and up until now, as there is a group of diverse networks such as the well-known wireless communication networks and others that are not linked to an infrastructure such as telephone networks, sensors and wireless networks, especially in important applications that work to send and receive important data and information in relatively unsafe environments, cybersecurity technologies pose an important challenge in protecting unsafe networks in terms of their impact on reducing crime. Detecting hacking in electronic networks and penetration testing. Therefore, these environments must be monitored and protected from hacking and malicio
... Show MoreThis work presents a canned-food defect-detection method using the EfficientDet model with four backbones (MobileNet, EfficientNet, Swin-T, and ConvNeXt). The dataset included 8046 images with a resolution of 512 × 512 pixels. The performance criteria in this study accuracy “mAP”, computational cost “FLOPs”, and Frames Per Second “FPS”. The lightweight backbone with EfficientDet achieves a mean Average Precision (mAP) of 90% with MobileNet, while EfficientNet achieves mAP accuracy of 92% and 94%. The heavy backbone for EfficientDet (Swin-T, and ConvNeXt) achieves mAP accuracy of 96% and 98%. The main contribution of this study is to optimize the speed of conveyor belts in industrial production lines to considers the
... Show MoreFinding communities of connected individuals in complex networks is challenging, yet crucial for understanding different real-world societies and their interactions. Recently attention has turned to discover the dynamics of such communities. However, detecting accurate community structures that evolve over time adds additional challenges. Almost all the state-of-the-art algorithms are designed based on seemingly the same principle while treating the problem as a coupled optimization model to simultaneously identify community structures and their evolution over time. Unlike all these studies, the current work aims to individually consider this three measures, i.e. intra-community score, inter-community score, and evolution of community over
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