Survey of denoising,segmentation and classification of magnetic resonance imaging for prostate cancer

Multimedia Tools and Applications - Prostate cancer (PCa) has become the second most dreadful cancer in men after lung cancer. Traditional approaches used for treatment of PCa were manual, time...     

The relationship between oil prices and US economy revisited

The authors revisit the relationship between US economic growth and crude oil prices considering Industrial Production Index and West Texas Intermediate crude oil spot prices as respective proxies for a period spanning over January 1986 to June 2017. To capture the asymmetric and time-varying relationship, the authors employ maximum overlap discrete wavelet transform (MODWT)-based quantile regression (QR) analysis. Interestingly, MODWT-based QR analysis provides evidence of supply-driven link between crude oil prices and economic growth in the short run. However, in the medium to long run a demand-driven link is dominant. In addition, the QR results without MODWT also advocate a demand-driven link. Overall, the result of this study adds a new dimension to the literature on the relationship between crude oil prices and economic growth by focusing upon the time-frequency varying business cycle fluctuations.     

Targeted SLNs for management of HIV-1 associated dementia

Context: HIV-1 associated dementia (HAD) is an evolving disease in the category of neurological disorders.

Objective: Nifedipine-loaded solid lipid nanoparticles (SLNs) were developed and coated with Tween 80 to facilitate enhanced brain drug delivery for the treatment of HAD.

Materials and methods: SLNs were prepared using solvent injection method. Lipids consisted of tristearin, hydrogenated soya phosphatidylcholine (HSPC) (1.5:1 w/w). Nifedipine was model drug in this study. Tween 80 (0.5% v/v) was taken as key modulator. SLNs were characterized for particle shape, size, zeta potential, entrapment efficiency, in vitro drug release, DNA fragmentation, cytotoxicity potential and in vivo studies.

Results: The SLNs (plain and coated) were found to be in nanometric in size (～120?nm) with more than 70% entrapment efficiency. In vitro drug release profile reflected sustained release up to 48?h. Tween 80-coated SLNs showed higher percentage of DNA fragmentation in vitro and enhanced cell viability in sulforhodamine assay (rat cortical cells) as compared to plain drug and uncoated SLNs due to facilitated uptake of SLNs and reversal of P-gp efflux by virtue of Tween 80. Biodistribution study performed on vital organs, i.e. brain, heart, liver, spleen, lungs and kidney showed increased accumulation of Tween 80-coated SLNs in the brain.

Discussion and conclusion: Tween 80 enhanced localization of SLNs in the brain as compared to uncoated SLNs. This approach can be employed effectively to transport chemotherapeutics across the BBB for management of HIV-1 associated dementia and other ailments.     

MicroRNAs as Modulators of Oral Tumorigenesis—A Focused Review

Oral cancers constitute the majority of head and neck tumors, with a relatively high incidence and poor survival rate in developing countries. While the five-year survival rates of the oral cancer patients have increased to 65%, the overall survival for advanced stages has been at 27% for the past ten years, emphasizing the necessity for further understanding the etiology of the disease, diagnosis, and formulating possible novel treatment regimens. MicroRNAs (miRNAs), a family of small non-coding RNA, have emerged as master modulators of gene expression in various cellular and biological process. Aberrant expression of these dynamic molecules has been associated with many human diseases, including oral cancers. The deregulated miRNAs have been shown to control various oncogenic processes, including sustaining proliferative signaling, evading growth suppressors, resisting cell death activating invasion and metastasis, and inducing angiogenesis. Hence, the aberrant expression of miRNAs associated with oral cancers, makes them potential candidates for the investigation of functional markers, which will aid in the differential diagnosis, prognosis, and development of novel therapeutic regimens. This review presents a holistic insight into our understanding of the role of miRNAs in regulating various hallmarks of oral tumorigenesis.     

An optimization framework for cost effective design of refueling station infrastructure for alternative fuel vehicles

Historically, gasoline and diesel fuels have been used for transportation, but the possible decline of oil supplies in the future is forcing nations to consider alternative fuels. Most technically and economically feasible alternative fuels have a lower energy density than gasoline, which results in a shorter range for these vehicles. This necessitates a greater need for convenient access to refueling facilities for alternative fuel vehicles. Since infrastructure development is expensive, there is a need to direct investments towards the establishment of refueling facilities in areas which result in maximum impact. This can be addressed by locating facilities at sites which service as many vehicles as possible. This work deals with the use of mathematical programming for determining the best locations for establishing alternative transportation fuel stations. The objective was to site the refueling stations at locations which maximize the number of vehicles served, while staying within budget constraints. The model used here is a modified form of the flow interception facility location model. For the case study we used the transportation network of Alexandria, Virginia, as a test bed for our model. Origin-destination travel demand data for this city is simulated through a transportation simulator to determine the routes taken by individual vehicles. The results are then compared with the service level offered by conventional gasoline refueling stations already located in the city. This work integrates the use of transportation modeling with mathematical programming for the solution of a complex large-scale problem on a real-life transportation network.     

Code Transformations for TLB Power Reduction

The Translation Look-aside Buffer (TLB) is a very important part in the hardware support for virtual memory management implementation of high performance embedded systems. The TLB though small is frequently accessed, and therefore not only consumes significant energy, but also is one of the important thermal hot-spots in the processor. Recently, several circuit and microarchitectural implementations of TLBs have been proposed to reduce TLB power. One simple, yet effective TLB design for power reduction is the Use-Last TLB architecture proposed in IEEE J Solid State Circuits, 1190–1199, (2004). The Use-Last TLB architecture reduces the power consumption when the last page is accessed again. In this work, we develop code transformation techniques to reduce the page switchings in data cache accesses and propose an efficient page-aware code placement technique to enhance the energy reduction capabilities achieved by the Use-Last TLB architecture for instruction cache accesses. Our comprehensive page switch reduction algorithm results in an average of 39% reduction in the data-TLB page switching, and our code placement heuristic results in an average of 76% reduction in the instrucion-TLB page switchings with negligible impact on the performance on benchmarks from MiBench, Multimedia, DSPStone and BDTI suites. The reduced page switch count through our techniques achieves an equivalent power savings, above and beyond the reduction achieved by the Use-Last TLB architecture implementation.