High brachial artery bifurcation: a report of 2 cases

High division of the brachial artery was observed in two cadavers, during routine dissection of upper extremities. In the first case, the brachial artery of the right upper extremity was divided into its two terminal branches immediately after passing between the lateral and medial roots of the median nerve and just below the origin of the profunda brachii artery. The lateral branch was the radial artery, located in the space normally occupied by the brachial artery and the medial one was the ulnar artery. In the second case, the brachial artery was divided into its two terminal branches just below the origin of the profunda brachii artery. Accurate knowledge of the relationships and course of these major arterial conduits and particularly of their variational patterns, is of considerable practical importance in the conduct of reperative surgery in the arm, forearm and hand.     

Morphological evolution of edge-hillocks on single-crystal films having anisotropic drift-diffusion under the capillary and electromigration forces

The morphological evolution of hillocks at the unpassivated sidewalls of single-crystal metallic thin film interconnects is investigated via computer simulations using the free-moving boundary value problem. The effect of drift-diffusion anisotropy on the development of surface topographical scenarios is fully explored under the action of electromigration and capillary forces, utilizing numerous combinations of the surface texture, the drift-diffusion anisotropy and the direction of the applied electric field. The simulation studies yield analytical relationships for the velocity of the surface solitary waves and the drift velocity of electromigration-induced internal voids as a function of the applied current densities, which contain intrinsic and structural properties of the single-crystal thin films. The threshold value of the applied current density, above which electromigration-induced internal voids can be formed and may cause the catastrophic failure of interconnects by breaching, also appears explicitly in this relationship.     

Towards a comprehensive methodology for KBS development

Abstract: The vitality of effective methods and processes for developing knowledge-based systems (KBS) is examined. The paper discusses what should be expected from a methodology. Have their advocates been getting it all wrong all the way? That is certainly a suggested view put forward. The criticism includes an articulation of the major schools of thought in developing KBS; their implicit assumptions and philosophies, especially the prototyping options, are presented in the light of this paper. After the criticism, the philosophical basis of a new comprehensive KBS development methodology is presented. This breeds the line model of development, which in turn creates what is suspected to be an essential concept of thought in the developer's mind.     

Heat transfer and fluid flow characteristics in flash desalination units

The present work investigates the effects of different operating and geometrical parameters on the flashing efficiency of water in a single stage flashing chamber. This chamber uses a submerged rectangular orifice as flow control area. Experiments were performed to investigate the effects of flow rate, liquid level in the flashing chamber, liquid inlet temperature and flashing range, on the flashing efficiency under various design conditions. These comprise flow with baffle placed in the flashing chamber, and wire meshes placed at the orifice to increase the turbulence level.It was found that the efficiency increased with the increase of the turbulence levels, flashing range and liquid inlet temperature; the efficiency deceased with the increase of the flow rate and liquid level in the flashing chamber. The application of numerical procedure to predict flow pattern and heat transfer in the flashing chamber is introduced as a powerful design tool.     

In Situ Electrical Network Activation and Deactivation in Short Carbon Fiber Composites via 3D Printing

Prior studies on carbon-filler based, conductive polymer composites have mainly investigated how conductive filler morphology and concentration can tailor a material's electrical conductivity and overlooks the effects of filler alignment due to the difficulty to control and quickly quantify the filler alignment. Here, direct ink write 3D printing's unique ability is utilized to control carbon fiber alignment with a single process parameter, velocity ratio, to instantaneously activate or deactivate the electrical network in composites. Maximum electrical conductivity is achieved by randomly aligning carbon fibers that enhances the chance of direct fiber-to-fiber contact and, thus, activating the electrical network. However, aligning the fibers by increasing the velocity ratio disrupts the electrical network by minimizing fiber-to-fiber contact that resulted in a drastic decrease in electrical conductivity by as much as five orders of magnitude in both short and long carbon fiber composites. With this study, this study demonstrates that electrically conductive or insulative composites can be fabricated sequentially with a single ink. This novel ability to instantaneously control the electrical conductivity of carbon fiber reinforced composites allow to directly embed conductive pathways into designs to 3D print multifunctional composites that are capable of localized heating and self-sensing.     

Fuzzy axiomatic design extension for managing model selection paradigm in decision science

The model selection paradigm is one of the focused themes within decision science. This paper addresses the consistent solution of model selection issue on the basis of the fuzzy axiomatic design (FAD) methodology. Moreover, the developed FAD–based model selection interface (FAD–MSI) is performed over the critical ship management processes in order to assign suitable (multiple criteria decision-making) MCDM techniques even if commonly utilized hybrid approaches. The outcomes of this study encourage the maritime practitioners for the further researches towards analytical modelling of ship management processes.     

Non-Newtonian Fluids in Spout-Fluid Beds: Mass Transfer Coefficient at Low Reynolds Numbers

Following on from the work of Anabtawi et al. (2003), this study examined how the volumetric liquid-phase mass transfer coefficient, k_La, of oxygen in air in three-phase spout-fluid beds was affected by varying the system parameters of bed height, bed diameter, gas velocity, and liquid velocity. The liquid used was 0.1% CMC solution, displaying a pseudo-plastic rheology, with 1.75 mm glass spheres as packing. The values of the Sherwood number were lower than in previous studies (Anabtawi et al., 2003), in the range 9,000-186,000. Gas velocity had a similar effect on k_La as in a bubble column, with results also giving good agreement with previous work on two-phase and three-phase spouted bed systems. The correlation obtained for the effect of liquid velocity on k_La compared well with that of Schumpe et al. (1989). An increase in the height of packing increased k_La to the power of 0.319, with an increase in column diameter also causing an increase in k_La, which is in agreement with the results of Akita and Yoshida (1973).     

CSatDTA: Prediction of Drug–Target Binding Affinity Using Convolution Model with Self-Attention

Drug discovery, which aids to identify potential novel treatments, entails a broad range of fields of science, including chemistry, pharmacology, and biology. In the early stages of drug development, predicting drug–target affinity is crucial. The proposed model, the prediction of drug–target affinity using a convolution model with self-attention (CSatDTA), applies convolution-based self-attention mechanisms to the molecular drug and target sequences to predict drug–target affinity (DTA) effectively, unlike previous convolution methods, which exhibit significant limitations related to this aspect. The convolutional neural network (CNN) only works on a particular region of information, excluding comprehensive details. Self-attention, on the other hand, is a relatively recent technique for capturing long-range interactions that has been used primarily in sequence modeling tasks. The results of comparative experiments show that CSatDTA surpasses previous sequence-based or other approaches and has outstanding retention abilities.     

ENet-6mA: Identification of 6mA Modification Sites in Plant Genomes Using ElasticNet and Neural Networks

N6-methyladenine (6mA) has been recognized as a key epigenetic alteration that affects a variety of biological activities. Precise prediction of 6mA modification sites is essential for understanding the logical consistency of biological activity. There are various experimental methods for identifying 6mA modification sites, but in silico prediction has emerged as a potential option due to the very high cost and labor-intensive nature of experimental procedures. Taking this into consideration, developing an efficient and accurate model for identifying N6-methyladenine is one of the top objectives in the field of bioinformatics. Therefore, we have created an in silico model for the classification of 6mA modifications in plant genomes. ENet-6mA uses three encoding methods, including one-hot, nucleotide chemical properties (NCP), and electron–ion interaction potential (EIIP), which are concatenated and fed as input to ElasticNet for feature reduction, and then the optimized features are given directly to the neural network to get classified. We used a benchmark dataset of rice for five-fold cross-validation testing and three other datasets from plant genomes for cross-species testing purposes. The results show that the model can predict the N6-methyladenine sites very well, even cross-species. Additionally, we separated the datasets into different ratios and calculated the performance using the area under the precision–recall curve (AUPRC), achieving 0.81, 0.79, and 0.50 with 1:10 (positive:negative) samples for F. vesca, R. chinensis, and A. thaliana, respectively.