Premature separation of centromere and aneuploidy: an indicator of high risk in unaffected individuals from familial breast cancer families?

OBJECTIVES: Injury is the leading cause of death in the male working population of Brazil. An important fraction of these deaths are work related. Very few cohort studies of steel workers, and none from developing countries, have reported on mortality from injuries. This paper analyses mortality from work and non-work related injuries among Brazilian steel workers. METHODS: Deaths during employment from 1 January 1977 to 30 November 1992 were analysed in a cohort of 21,816 male steel workers. Mortality rates specific for age and calendar year among the workers were compared with those of the male population of the state where the plant is located. Work related injuries were analysed by comparing the mortality rates for different subgroups of the cohort. RESULTS: The number of deaths (391) was less than half that expected based on death rates of the general population. Over 60% (242) of deaths were due to injuries. Mortality from most causes was substantially below that in the general population, but that from unintentional injury, was 50% above that of the general population. Standardised mortality ratios (SMRs) were highest for the youngest and the oldest employees and for labourers and clerical workers. Mortality from motor vehicle injury was twice that expected from population rates (SMR = 209, 95% confidence interval (95% CI) 176-244). There was a 67% fall in the age adjusted mortality from occupational injuries in the study period. CONCLUSION: The healthy worker effect in this cohort was greater than that commonly found in studies of occupational groups in developed countries, probably because of a greater socioeconomic gap between employed and unemployed populations in Brazil, and unequal distribution of health care resources. Mortality was especially high for motor vehicle injuries. The fall in mortality from occupational injuries during the study period was probably due to improvement in safety standards, increased automation, and better medical care. There is a need to investigate risk factors for unintentional injuries among steel workers, especially those due to motor vehicle injuries. Prevention of occupational and nonoccupational injuries should be a main priority in Brazil.     

MODELING AND PREDICTIVE CONTROL OF MIMO NONLINEAR SYSTEMS USING WIENER-LAGUERRE MODELS

In this work, a Weiner-type nonlinear black box model was developed for capturing dynamics of open loop stable MIMO nonlinear systems with deterministic inputs. The linear dynamic component of the model was parameterized using orthogonal Laguerre filters while the nonlinear state output map was constructed either using quadratic polynomial functions or artificial neural networks. The properties of the resulting model, such as open loop stability and steady-state behavior, are discussed in detail. The identified Weiner-Laguerre model was further used to formulate a nonlinear model predictive control (NMPC) scheme. The efficacy of the proposed modeling and control scheme was demonstrated using two benchmark control problems: (a) a simulation study involving control of a continuously operated fermenter at its optimum (singular) operating point and (b) experimental verification involving control of pH at the critical point of a neutralization process. It was observed that the proposed Weiner-Laguerre model is able to capture both the dynamic and steady-state characteristics of the continuous fermenter as well as the neutralization process reasonably accurately over wide operating ranges. The proposed NMPC scheme achieved a smooth transition from a suboptimal operating point to the optimum (singular) operating point of the fermenter without causing large variation in manipulated inputs. The proposed NMPC scheme was also found to be robust in the face of moderate perturbation in the unmeasured disturbances. In the case of experimental verification using the neutralization process, the proposed control scheme was found to achieve much faster transition to a set point close to the critical point when compared to a conventional gain-scheduled PID controller.     

Production of agrochemical from waste polyesters

In this study, agrochemical was produced from waste polyesters. Reactions of waste polyesters [poly (ethylene terephthalate) (PET) and poly (butylene terephthalate) (PBT)] powder with ethylene glycol (EG) in the presence of tetrahydrofurane (THF) using 0.003 mol lead acetate as a catalyst were carried out in a batch reactor at 470 K and at atmospheric pressure conditions. Reactions were undertaken with various particle size ranges from 50 to 512.5 μm, and reaction time from 30 to 70 min for reactions of polyesters. Low molecular weight product of polyester was obtained during this process. In the next stage, hydroxylamine hydrochloride (HAHC), cyclohexylamine (CHA), and potasium hydroxide (KOH) solution were introduced to convert low molecular weight product of polyester into terephthalohydroxamic acid (TPHA) by introduction of HCl (Hydrochloric Acid) as per stoichiometric requirement. TPHA can be used as an agrochemical (insecticide) with appreciable efficiency. To increase the polyester conversion rate, external catalyst (0.003 mol lead acetate) was introduced during the reaction. The product was deposited on the surface of unreacted polyester, which was removed from the surface by introducing dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO). To accelerate the reaction rate, DMSO, CHA, and THF were introduced during the reaction, which has an industrial significance. Depolymerization of polyester was proportional to the reaction time. Depolymerization of polyester was inversely proportional to the particle size of polyester. Analyses of value‐added product (TPHA) and byproducts [EG and BD (1,4‐butanediol)] as well as polyesters were undertaken. A kinetic model is developed, and experimental data simulated with it, which was consistent with the model. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci 100: 2504–2510, 2006     

A data mining approach to characterize road accident locations

Data mining has been proven as a reliable technique to analyze road accidents and provide productive results. Most of the road accident data analysis use data mining techniques, focusing on identifying factors that affect the severity of an accident. However, any damage resulting from road accidents is always unacceptable in terms of health, property damage and other economic factors. Sometimes, it is found that road accident occurrences are more frequent at certain specific locations. The analysis of these locations can help in identifying certain road accident features that make a road accident to occur frequently in these locations. Association rule mining is one of the popular data mining techniques that identify the correlation in various attributes of road accident. In this paper, we first applied k-means algorithm to group the accident locations into three categories, high-frequency, moderate-frequency and low-frequency accident locations. k-means algorithm takes accident frequency count as a parameter to cluster the locations. Then we used association rule mining to characterize these locations. The rules revealed different factors associated with road accidents at different locations with varying accident frequencies. The association rules for high-frequency accident location disclosed that intersections on highways are more dangerous for every type of accidents. High-frequency accident locations mostly involved two-wheeler accidents at hilly regions. In moderate-frequency accident locations, colonies near local roads and intersection on highway roads are found dangerous for pedestrian hit accidents. Low-frequency accident locations are scattered throughout the district and the most of the accidents at these locations were not critical. Although the data set was limited to some selected attributes, our approach extracted some useful hidden information from the data which can be utilized to take some preventive efforts in these locations.

     

Semi-Supervised Deep Learning for Multi-Tissue Segmentation from Multi-Contrast MRI

Journal of Signal Processing Systems - Segmentation of thigh tissues (muscle, fat, inter-muscular adipose tissue (IMAT), bone, and bone marrow) from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans is useful...     

Machine Learning-Informed Predictive Design and Analysis of Electrohydrodynamic Printing Systems

Electrohydrodynamic (EHD) processes are promising techniques for manufacturing nanoscopic products with different shapes (such as thin films, nanofibers, 2D/3D nanostructures, and nanoparticles) and materials at a low cost using simple equipment. A key challenge in their adoption by nonexperts is the requirement of enormous time and resources in identifying the optimum design/process parameters for the underlying material and EHD system. Machine learning (ML) has made exciting advancements in predictive modeling of different processes, provided it is trained on high-quality datasets at appropriate volumes. This article extends the suitability of such ML-enabled approaches to a new technological domain of EHD spraying and drop-on-demand printing. Different ML models like ridge regression, random forest regression, support vector regression, gradient boosting regression, and multilayer perceptron are trained and their performance using evaluation metrics like RMSE and R2_score is examined. Tree-based algorithms like gradient boosting regression are found to be the most suitable technique for modeling EHD processes. The trained ML models show substantially higher accuracy (average error < 5%) in replicating these nonlinear processes as compared to previously reported scaling laws (average error ≈ 42%) and are well suited for predictive modeling/analysis of the underlying EHD system and process.     

Chaos in fractional ordered Liu system

Present paper deals with fractional version of a dynamical system introduced by C. Liu, L. Liu and T. Liu [C. Liu, L. Liu, T. Liu, A novel three-dimensional autonomous chaos system, Chaos Solitons Fractals 39 (4) (2009) 1950–1958]. Numerical investigations on the dynamics of this system have been carried out. Properties of the system have been analyzed by means of Lyapunov exponents. Furthermore the minimum effective dimensions have been identified for chaos to exist in commensurate and incommensurate orders. It is noteworthy that the results obtained are consistent with the analytical conditions given in the literature.     

Stability of a class of discrete-time nonlinear recursive observers

This work provides a framework for nominal and robust stability analysis for a class of discrete-time nonlinear recursive observers (DNRO). Given that the system has linear output mapping, local observability and Jacobian matrices satisfying certain conditions, the nominal and robust stability of the DNRO is defined by the property of estimation error dynamics and is analyzed using Lyapunov theory. Moreover, a simultaneous state and parameter estimation scheme is shown to be Input-to-State Stable (ISS), and adaptively reduce plant-model mismatch on-line. Three design strategies of the DNRO that satisfy the stability results are given as examples, including the widely used extended Kalman filter, extended Luenberger observer, and the fixed gain observer.     

Unknown input modeling and robust fault diagnosis using black box observers

A key issue that needs to be addressed while performing fault diagnosis using black box models is that of robustness against abrupt changes in unknown inputs. A fundamental difficulty with the robust FDI design approaches available in the literature is that they require some a priori knowledge of the model for unmeasured disturbances or modeling uncertainty. In this work, we propose a novel approach for modeling abrupt changes in unmeasured disturbances when innovation form of state space model (i.e. black box observer) is used for fault diagnosis. A disturbance coupling matrix is developed using singular value decomposition of the extended observability matrix and further used to formulate a robust fault diagnosis scheme based on generalized likelihood ratio test. The proposed modeling approach does not require any a priori knowledge of how these faults affect the system dynamics. To isolate sensor and actuator biases from step jumps in unmeasured disturbances, a statistically rigorous method is developed for distinguishing between faults modeled using different number of parameters. Simulation studies on a heavy oil fractionator example show that the proposed FDI methodology based on identified models can be used to effectively distinguish between sensor biases, actuator biases and other soft faults caused by changes in unmeasured disturbance variables. The fault tolerant control scheme, which makes use of the proposed robust FDI methodology, gives significantly better control performance than conventional controllers when soft faults occur. The experimental evaluation of the proposed FDI methodology on a laboratory scale stirred tank temperature control set-up corroborates these conclusions.     

Ubiquitous computing: connecting Pervasive computing through Semantic Web

Ubiquitous computing refers to building a global computing environment where seamless and invisible access to computing resources is provided to the user. Pervasive computing deals with acquiring context knowledge from the environment and providing dynamic, proactive and context-aware services to the user. A Ubiquitous computing environment is created by sharing knowledge and information between Pervasive computing environments. In this paper we propose a framework that uses the potential of the Semantic Web to weave Pervasive computing environments into a Ubiquitous computing environment. We discuss how the collaboration of these Pervasive environments can create an effective Ubiquitous computing environment referred herein as the Integrated Global Pervasive Computing Framework (IGPF). We test the effectiveness of the Ubiquitous environment through a small scenario from a prototype system that we have implemented over this framework to handle medical emergency scenario.