Protection of electronic health records (EHRs) in cloud.

EHR technology has come into widespread use and has attracted attention in healthcare institutions as well as in research. Cloud services are used to build efficient EHR systems and obtain the greatest benefits of EHR implementation. Many issues relating to building an ideal EHR system in the cloud, especially the tradeoff between flexibility and security, have recently surfaced.

Steganography-based access control to medical data hidden in electrocardiogram.

Steganographic techniques allow secret data to be embedded inside another host data such as an image or a text file without significant changes to the quality of the host data. In this research, we demonstrate how steganography can be used as the main mechanism to build an access control model that gives data owners complete control to their sensitive cardiac health information hidden in their own Electrocardiograms. Our access control model is able to protect the privacy of users, the confidentiality of medical data, reduce storage space and make it more efficient to upload and download large amount of data.

Preference based load balancing as an outpatient appointment scheduling aid.

Load balancing is a performance improvement aid in various applications of distributed systems. In this paper we propose a preference based load balancing strategy as a scheduling aid in an outpatient clinic of an online medical consultation system. The performance objectives are to maximizing throughout and minimizing waiting time.

Load-sensitive dynamic workflow re-orchestration and optimisation for faster patient healthcare.

Hospital waiting times are considerably long, with no signs of reducing any-time soon. A number of factors including population growth, the ageing population and a lack of new infrastructure are expected to further exacerbate waiting times in the near future. In this work, we show how healthcare services can be modelled as queueing nodes, together with healthcare service workflows, such that these workflows can be optimised during execution in order to reduce patient waiting times.

Wavelet-Based ECG Steganography for Protecting Patient Confidential Information in Point-of-Care Systems.

With the growing number of aging population and a significant portion of that suffering from cardiac diseases, it is conceivable that remote ECG patient monitoring systems are expected to be widely used as point-of-care (PoC) applications in hospitals around the world. Therefore, huge amount of ECG signal collected by body sensor networks from remote patients at homes will be transmitted along with other physiological readings such as blood pressure, temperature, glucose level, etc., and diagnosed by those remote patient monitoring systems.

Safe trajectory estimation at a pedestrian crossing to assist visually impaired people.

The aim of this paper is to present a service for blind and people with low vision to assist them to cross the street independently. The presented approach provides the user with significant information such as detection of pedestrian crossing signal from any point of view, when the pedestrian crossing signal light is green, the detection of dynamic and fixed obstacles, predictions of the movement of fellow pedestrians and information on objects which may intersect his path. Our approach is based on capturing multiple frames using a depth camera which is attached to a user's headgear.

MM-MTA for direct pulp capping: a histologic comparison with ProRoot MTA in rat molars.

Aim: To compare the histomorphological response of rat dental pulps capped with MM-MTA and ProRoot MTA at 1, 2 and 4 weeks postoperatively.

Materials And Methods: Direct pulp capping with MM-MTA and ProRoot MTA, overlaid with light-cured composite resin, was performed on right and left maxillary first molars of 20 Wistar rats. Animals were killed at 1, 2 and 4 weeks postoperatively.

Biomimetic synthesis of thiaplidiaquinones A and B.

A biomimetic synthesis of the biologically active ascidian metabolites thiaplidiaquinones A and B is described. Reaction of geranylbenzoquinone with Et(3)N in CH(2)Cl(2) yielded two isomeric quinones, comprising the benzo[c]chromene-7,10-dione core of the natural products. Subsequent reaction with hypotaurine yielded the title compounds and their dioxothiazino regioisomers.

Enhancement of low sampling frequency recordings for ECG biometric matching using interpolation.

Electrocardiogram (ECG) based biometric matching suffers from high misclassification error with lower sampling frequency data. This situation may lead to an unreliable and vulnerable identity authentication process in high security applications. In this paper, quality enhancement techniques for ECG data with low sampling frequency has been proposed for person identification based on piecewise cubic Hermite interpolation (PCHIP) and piecewise cubic spline interpolation (SPLINE).

Physicochemical and antioxidant properties of Bangladeshi honeys stored for more than one year.

Background: There is no available information on physicochemical and antioxidant properties on Bangladeshi honey. We investigated five different monofloral and three different multifloral honey samples collected from different parts of Bangladesh.

Methods: The levels of phenolics, flavonoids, ascorbic acid, ascorbic acid equivalent antioxidant content (AEAC), proline, protein and antioxidants were determined in the honey samples using ferric reducing antioxidant power (FRAP) and 1,1-diphenyl-2-picrylhydrazyl (DPPH) assays.

An adaptive OFDMA-based MAC protocol for underwater acoustic wireless sensor networks.

Underwater acoustic wireless sensor networks (UAWSNs) have many applications across various civilian and military domains. However, they suffer from the limited available bandwidth of acoustic signals and harsh underwater conditions. In this work, we present an Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA)-based Media Access Control (MAC) protocol that is configurable to suit the operating requirements of the underwater sensor network.

Physicochemical and antioxidant properties of Algerian honey.

The aim of the present study was to characterize the physical, biochemical and antioxidant properties of Algerian honey samples (n = 4). Physical parameters, such as pH, moisture content, electrical conductivity (EC), total dissolved solids (TDS), color intensity, total sugar and sucrose content were measured. Several biochemical and antioxidant tests were performed to determine the antioxidant properties of the honey samples.

Prediction of User's Web-Browsing Behavior: Application of Markov Model.

Web prediction is a classification problem in which we attempt to predict the next set of Web pages that a user may visit based on the knowledge of the previously visited pages. Predicting user's behavior while serving the Internet can be applied effectively in various critical applications. Such application has traditional tradeoffs between modeling complexity and prediction accuracy.

Yeast vaginitis during pregnancy: susceptibility testing of 13 antifungal drugs and boric acid and the detection of four virulence factors.

A higher prevalence of vulvovaginal candidiasis (VVC) is seen in pregnant women compared with those who are not pregnant. Recurrence is also more common in pregnant women, and therapeutic responses are reduced. In this investigation, 207 vaginal yeast isolates recovered from pregnant women were tested for susceptibility to 13 antifungal drugs and boric acid and through these studies four virulence factors were also determined.

Real-time wearable telecardiology from representative signals.

Electrocardiograms and other similar techniques (e.g. Photoplethysmograph) are very effective tools for the detection of cardiac abnormalities.

Person identification in irregular cardiac conditions using electrocardiogram signals.

This paper presents a person identification mechanism in irregular cardiac conditions using ECG signals. A total of 30 subjects were used in the study from three different public ECG databases containing various abnormal heart conditions from the Paroxysmal Atrial Fibrillation Predicition Challenge database (AFPDB), MIT-BIH Supraventricular Arrthymia database (SVDB) and T-Wave Alternans Challenge database (TWADB). Cross correlation (CC) was used as the biometric matching algorithm with defined threshold values to evaluate the performance.

ECG biometric using multilayer perceptron and radial basis function neural networks.

This paper proposes a new method to identify people using Electrocardiogram (ECG), particularly the QRS complex which has been proven to be stable against heart rate variability and convenient to be used alone as a biometric feature. 324 QRS complexes are extracted from ECGs of 18 subjects in Physionet's MIT-BIH Normal Sinus Rhythm Database (NSRDB). Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) and Radial Basis Function (RBF) neural networks are used to classify those QRS complexes.

TFE3 Translocation-Associated Renal Cell Carcinoma Presenting as Avascular Necrosis of the Femur in a 19-Year-Old Patient: Case Report and Review of the Literature.

In the United States, renal cell carcinoma (RCC) accounts for approximately 3% of adult malignancies and 90-95% of all neoplasms arising from the kidney. According to the National Cancer Institute, 58 240 new cases and 13 040 deaths from renal cancer will occur in 2010. RCC usually occurs in older adults between the ages of 50 and 70 and is rare in young adults and children.

Octaarginine- and pH sensitive fusogenic peptide-modified nanoparticles for liver gene delivery.

We previously reported that octaarginine peptide modified liposomes (R8-liposomes) largely accumulated in the liver after intravenous administration and that this is dependent on the R8-density. We report herein on the development of a Multifunctional Envelope-type Nano Device modified with R8 and GALA, as a pH-sensitive fusogenic peptide (R8-GALA-MEND) for liver gene delivery. An R8-MEND encapsulating pDNA prepared using two different cores (negatively or positively charged pDNA/polyethylene imine condensed particles) failed to produce a high gene expression in the liver.

Development of ELISA-based methods to measure the anti-malarial drug chloroquine in plasma and in pharmaceutical formulations.

Background: In Central and South America and Eastern and Southern Africa, Plasmodium vivax infections accounts for 71-81% and 5% of malaria cases, respectively. In these areas, chloroquine (CQ) remains the treatment of choice for P. vivax malaria.

Cell penetrating peptide-mediated systemic siRNA delivery to the liver.

The cell-penetrating peptide (CPP) is one of the most attractive tools for efficiently delivering biomolecules to a target organelle. Here, we describe the use of octaarginine (R8)-modified lipid nanoparticles for the efficient and targeted in vivo delivery of siRNA to the liver. In this study, SR-BI (a scavenger receptor class B, member 1) was targeted by this nanoparticle.

Drug susceptibility pattern of Mycobacterium tuberculosis isolates against conventional anti-tuberculosis drugs in Dhaka, Bangladesh.

Objective: To investigate the drug susceptibility pattern of isolated Mycobacterium tuberculosis (M. tuberculosis) against conventional anti-tuberculosis drugs in Dhaka, Bangladesh.

Methods: Sputum samples from 101 suspected new and previously treated patients were collected and M.

Causal modeling using network ensemble simulations of genetic and gene expression data predicts genes involved in rheumatoid arthritis.

Tumor necrosis factor α (TNF-α) is a key regulator of inflammation and rheumatoid arthritis (RA). TNF-α blocker therapies can be very effective for a substantial number of patients, but fail to work in one third of patients who show no or minimal response. It is therefore necessary to discover new molecular intervention points involved in TNF-α blocker treatment of rheumatoid arthritis patients.

Prevalence and treatment of cardiovascular risk factors in outpatients with atherothrombosis in the Middle East.

Objective: To characterise the risk-factor profile and treatment gaps among patients with, or at risk for, cardiovascular disease in the Middle East.

Design: Secondary analysis of a prospective observational study.

Setting: International multicentre study (Reduction of Atherothrombosis for Continued Health).