Objective:To investigate the interrelationship between cardiovascular health awareness,risk perception,behavioural intention,and INTERHEART risk stratification in a middle-aged adult population in Malaysia.Methods:A c...Objective:To investigate the interrelationship between cardiovascular health awareness,risk perception,behavioural intention,and INTERHEART risk stratification in a middle-aged adult population in Malaysia.Methods:A cross-sectional survey with convenience sampling was conducted during November 2022 and January 2023.Participants completed validated questionnaires assessing cardiovascular health awareness,risk perception of cardiovascular diseases,behavioural intention towards adopting healthy habits,and INTERHEART risk stratification score(IHRS)based on established risk factors.A total of 602 respondents were included in the final analysis.Data were analysed with independent t-test/one-way ANOVA or Mann-Whitney/Kruskal-Wallis to test the differences,Pearson correlation or linear regression test to analyze the association of independent and dependent variables.Results:There was a significant positive correlation between medical knowledge related to cardiovascular disease(CVD)and knowledge related to CVD risk prevention,risk perception,behavioural intention and IHRS(P<0.05,Pearson correlation).Notably,individuals with higher IHRS tended to have lower knowledge related to CVD and CVD risk prevention,risk perception,and behavioural intention.Males,laborers,active/former smokers,individuals with lower household income and educational levels,those involved in occupations not related to the healthcare sector,and those who did not receive the CVD health brochure or are unaware of health self-assessment tools are likely to have lower levels of knowledge,risk perception,and poorer behavioural intention regarding cardiovascular health(P<0.05,one-way ANOVA).While educational level,smoking status,awareness about CVD poster,self-assessment tools were repeatedly significantly associated with knowledge related to CVD and CVD risk prevention,risk perception,behavioral intention and/or IHRS(P<0.05,linear regression).Conclusions:These findings underscore the importance of promoting cardiovascular health awareness and risk perception among middle-aged adults to foster positive BI and reduce CVD risk.Tailored interventions targeting specific risk factors identified by INTERHEART may enhance risk stratification accuracy and facilitate targeted preventive strategies.展开更多
For the last two decades,low-cost Global Navigation Satellite System(GNSS)receivers have been used in various applications.These receivers are mini-size,less expensive than geodetic-grade receivers,and in high demand....For the last two decades,low-cost Global Navigation Satellite System(GNSS)receivers have been used in various applications.These receivers are mini-size,less expensive than geodetic-grade receivers,and in high demand.Irrespective of these outstanding features,low-cost GNSS receivers are potentially poorer hardwares with internal signal processing,resulting in lower quality.They typically come with low-cost GNSS antenna that has lower performance than their counterparts,particularly for multipath mitigation.Therefore,this research evaluated the low-cost GNSS device performance using a high-rate kinematic survey.For this purpose,these receivers were assembled with an Inertial Measurement Unit(IMU)sensor,which actively transmited data on acceleration and orientation rate during the observation.The position and navigation parameter data were obtained from the IMU readings,even without GNSS signals via the U-blox F9R GNSS/IMU device mounted on a vehicle.This research was conducted in an area with demanding conditions,such as an open sky area,an urban environment,and a shopping mall basement,to examine the device’s performance.The data were processed by two approaches:the Single Point Positioning-IMU(SPP/IMU)and the Differential GNSS-IMU(DGNSS/IMU).The Unscented Kalman Filter(UKF)was selected as a filtering algorithm due to its excellent performance in handling nonlinear system models.The result showed that integrating GNSS/IMU in SPP processing mode could increase the accuracy in eastward and northward components up to 68.28%and 66.64%.Integration of DGNSS/IMU increased the accuracy in eastward and northward components to 93.02%and 93.03%compared to the positioning of standalone GNSS.In addition,the positioning accuracy can be improved by reducing the IMU noise using low-pass and high-pass filters.This application could still not gain the expected position accuracy under signal outage conditions.展开更多
Blockchain-enabled cybersecurity system to ensure and strengthen decentralized digital transaction is gradually gaining popularity in the digital era for various areas like finance,transportation,healthcare,education,...Blockchain-enabled cybersecurity system to ensure and strengthen decentralized digital transaction is gradually gaining popularity in the digital era for various areas like finance,transportation,healthcare,education,and supply chain management.Blockchain interactions in the heterogeneous network have fascinated more attention due to the authentication of their digital application exchanges.However,the exponential development of storage space capabilities across the blockchain-based heterogeneous network has become an important issue in preventing blockchain distribution and the extension of blockchain nodes.There is the biggest challenge of data integrity and scalability,including significant computing complexity and inapplicable latency on regional network diversity,operating system diversity,bandwidth diversity,node diversity,etc.,for decision-making of data transactions across blockchain-based heterogeneous networks.Data security and privacy have also become the main concerns across the heterogeneous network to build smart IoT ecosystems.To address these issues,today’s researchers have explored the potential solutions of the capability of heterogeneous network devices to perform data transactions where the system stimulates their integration reliably and securely with blockchain.The key goal of this paper is to conduct a state-of-the-art and comprehensive survey on cybersecurity enhancement using blockchain in the heterogeneous network.This paper proposes a full-fledged taxonomy to identify the main obstacles,research gaps,future research directions,effective solutions,andmost relevant blockchain-enabled cybersecurity systems.In addition,Blockchain based heterogeneous network framework with cybersecurity is proposed in this paper tomeet the goal of maintaining optimal performance data transactions among organizations.Overall,this paper provides an in-depth description based on the critical analysis to overcome the existing work gaps for future research where it presents a potential cybersecurity design with key requirements of blockchain across a heterogeneous network.展开更多
AIM:To investigate the stability of the seven housekeeping genes:beta-actin(ActB),glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate dehydrogenase(GAPDH),18s ribosomal unit 5(18s),cyclophilin A(CycA),hypoxanthine-guanine phosphoribosyl trans...AIM:To investigate the stability of the seven housekeeping genes:beta-actin(ActB),glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate dehydrogenase(GAPDH),18s ribosomal unit 5(18s),cyclophilin A(CycA),hypoxanthine-guanine phosphoribosyl transferase(HPRT),ribosomal protein large P0(36B4)and terminal uridylyl transferase 1(U6)in the diabetic retinal tissue of rat model.METHODS:The expression of these seven genes in rat retinal tissues was determined using real-time quantitative reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction(RT-qPCR)in two groups;normal control rats and streptozotocininduced diabetic rats.The stability analysis of gene expression was investigated using geNorm,NormFinder,BestKeeper,and comparative delta-Ct(ΔCt)algorithms.RESULTS:The 36B4 gene was stably expressed in the retinal tissues of normal control animals;however,it was less stable in diabetic retinas.The 18s gene was expressed consistently in both normal control and diabetic rats’retinal tissue.That this gene was the best reference for data normalisation in RT-qPCR studies that used the retinal tissue of streptozotocin-induced diabetic rats.Furthermore,there was no ideal gene stably expressed for use in all experimental settings.CONCLUSION:Identifying relevant genes is a need for achieving RT-qPCR validity and reliability and must be appropriately achieved based on a specific experimental setting.展开更多
AIM:To compare the vergence mechanisms between good and poor sleepers in university students.METHODS:A total of 64 university students were recruited in this study.The validated Malay version of Pittsburgh Sleep Quali...AIM:To compare the vergence mechanisms between good and poor sleepers in university students.METHODS:A total of 64 university students were recruited in this study.The validated Malay version of Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index questionnaire(PSQI-M)was used to measure the participants’sleep quality over the past month.Participants were categorized as good sleepers(n=32)and poor sleepers(n=32)based on the PSQI-M scores.Heterophoria and fusional vergences were measured at distance and near.Mann-Whitney U test was used to compare heterophoria,negative fusional vergence(NFV),and positive fusional vergence(PFV)at distance and near between good and poor sleepers.Spearman correlation analysis was used to study the relationship between PSQI-M score and PFV at distance.RESULTS:Both distance and near heterophorias were not significantly different between good and poor sleepers(P>0.05).There was a difference in distance PFV(P<0.05)between good and poor sleepers,but not in distance NFV,near NFV,and near PFV(P>0.05).Distance PFV was negatively correlated with PSQI-M score(rs=-0.33,P<0.05).CONCLUSION:University students with poor sleep quality demonstrates a reduced ability to maintain fusion with increasing convergence demand at distance.Sleep quality assessment during binocular vision examination in university students is recommended.展开更多
Human saliva is an indispensable fluid that maintains a healthy oral cavity which otherwise can lead to oral diseases(dental caries and periodontitis).In addition,salivary metabolites and microbiome profile provide ea...Human saliva is an indispensable fluid that maintains a healthy oral cavity which otherwise can lead to oral diseases(dental caries and periodontitis).In addition,salivary metabolites and microbiome profile provide early detection of systemic diseases such as cancer and obesity.Salivary diagnostic has gained popularity due to its non-invasive sampling technique.Fasting(abstinence from food or drink or both)research for weight loss and improve health is common,but studies using fasting saliva are scarce.Some metabolites in fasting saliva have been reported with interesting results,which can be enhanced by considering different confounding factors.For example,fasting saliva contains higher salivary nitrite,which is related to nitric oxide(NO).NO is a vasodilator supporting the healthy function of endothelial cells and its deficiency is connected to many diseases.The timely supply of NO through exogenous and endogenous means is highlighted and the potential advantage of fasting salivary composition changes in relation to COVID-19 infection is speculated.This review aims to provide a general discussion on the salivary composition,properties,and functions of the whole saliva,including the health benefits of fasting.展开更多
Objective: To investigate the presence of trichomoniasis among women attending the Obstetrics and Gynaecology Clinic, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia Medical Centre.Methods: A total of 139 high vaginal swabs were taken...Objective: To investigate the presence of trichomoniasis among women attending the Obstetrics and Gynaecology Clinic, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia Medical Centre.Methods: A total of 139 high vaginal swabs were taken from the subjects and sent to the laboratory in Amies gel transport media. The specimens were examined for the presence of Trichomonas vaginalis using wet mount, Giemsa staining and cultured in Diamond's medium. Sociodemographic characteristics and gynaecological complaints were obtained in private using structured questionnaire applied by one investigator.Results: The median age was 32 years, with an interquartile interval of 9.96. Most of the subjects were Malays(76.9%) and the remaining were Chinese(15.1%), Indians(2.2%)and other ethnic groups(5.8%). One hundred and thirty eight(99.3%) of the women were married and 98.6% had less than 6 children. More than half(75.5%) of the women's last child birth was less than 6 years ago. Forty seven percent of them were involved in supporting administrative work and 64.7% of the women gave a history of previous or current vaginal discharge.Conclusions: The present study reported zero incidence rate of trichomoniasis. The low incidence rate was postulated due to all women who participated in this study were categorized into a low-risk group.展开更多
Objective:To investigate the bone-resorbing effect of demethylbelamcandaquinone B(Dmcq B)extracted from Marantodes pumilum var.alata on osteoclast differentiation in RAW264.7 cells.Methods:RAW264.7 macrophages were di...Objective:To investigate the bone-resorbing effect of demethylbelamcandaquinone B(Dmcq B)extracted from Marantodes pumilum var.alata on osteoclast differentiation in RAW264.7 cells.Methods:RAW264.7 macrophages were differentiated using RANKL into osteoclast-like cells.Then,they were treated with 10μg/mL Marantodes pumilum var.alata crude aqueous extract,5μg/mL dichloromethane fraction,and 0.6μg/mL Dmcq B and 0.06μg/mL estradiol.Tartrate-resistant acid phosphatase 5b(TRACP 5b)as an osteoclast phenotypic marker was determined by TRACP staining and TRACP 5b colometric assay,and bone-resorbing pits were examined.The gene expression of pro-inflammatory cytokines(TNF-αand IL-6)was measured.Moreover,the protein expressions of pro-inflammatory cytokines(TNF-αand IL-6)and estrogen receptors were evaluated.Results:Marantodes pumilum var.alata crude aqueous extract and Dmcq B inhibited RANKL-stimulated osteoclast differentiation as evidenced by size reduction of giant multinucleated osteoclast cells,decreased TRACP 5b activity as well as the subsiding of resorbed pit area compared with normal control.In addition,they reduced the gene and protein expressions of TNF-αand IL-6.Marantodes pumilum var.alata,Dmcq B,and estradiol treatments increased the protein expressions of estrogen receptors alpha and beta in osteoclasts.Conclusions:Marantodes pumilum var.alata and its active compound,Dmcq B can inhibit osteoclast differentiation.展开更多
Amyloid-beta(Aβ)-related alterations,similar to those found in the brains of patients with Alzheimer's disease,have been observed in the retina of patients with glaucoma.Decreased levels of brain-derived neurotro...Amyloid-beta(Aβ)-related alterations,similar to those found in the brains of patients with Alzheimer's disease,have been observed in the retina of patients with glaucoma.Decreased levels of brain-derived neurotrophic factor(BDNF)are believed to be associated with the neurotoxic effects of Aβpeptide.To investigate the mechanism underlying the neuroprotective effects of BDNF on Aβ_(1-40)-induced retinal injury in Sprague-Dawley rats,we treated rats by intravitreal administration of phosphate-buffered saline(control),Aβ_(1-40)(5 nM),or Aβ_(1-40)(5 nM)combined with BDNF(1μg/mL).We found that intravitreal administration of Aβ_(1-40)induced retinal ganglion cell apoptosis.Fluoro-Gold staining showed a significantly lower number of retinal ganglion cells in the Aβ_(1-40)group than in the control and BDNF groups.In the Aβ_(1-40)group,low number of RGCs was associated with increased caspase-3 expression and reduced TrkB and ERK1/2 expression.BDNF abolished Aβ_(1-40)-induced increase in the expression of caspase-3 at the gene and protein levels in the retina and upregulated TrkB and ERK1/2 expression.These findings suggest that treatment with BDNF prevents RGC apoptosis induced by Aβ_(1-40)by activating the BDNF-TrkB signaling pathway in rats.展开更多
Virus-capsid mimicking mucus-permeable nanoparticles are promising oral insulin carriers which surmount intestinal mucus barrier.However,the impact of different viruscapsid mimicking structure remains unexplored.In th...Virus-capsid mimicking mucus-permeable nanoparticles are promising oral insulin carriers which surmount intestinal mucus barrier.However,the impact of different viruscapsid mimicking structure remains unexplored.In this study,utilizing biotin grafted chitosan as the main skeleton,virus-mimicking nanoparticles endowed with biologicshell(streptavidin coverage)and polymeric-shell(hyaluronic acid/alginate coating)were designed with insulin as a model drug by self-assembly processes.It was demonstrated that biologic-shell mimicking nanoparticles exhibited a higher intestinal trans-mucus(>80%,10 min)and transmucosal penetration efficiency(1.6–2.2-fold improvement)than polymeric-shell counterparts.Uptake mechanism studies revealed caveolae-mediated endocytosis was responsible for the absorption of biologic-shell mimicking nanoparticles whereas polymeric-shell mimicking nanoparticles were characterized by clathrin-mediated pathway with anticipated lysosomal insulin digestion.Further,in vivo hypoglycemic study indicated that the improved effect of regulating blood sugar levels was virus-capsid structure dependent out of which biologic-shell mimicking nanoparticles presented the best performance(5.1%).Although the findings of this study are encouraging,much more work is required to meet the standards of clinical translation.Taken together,we highlight the external structural dependence of virus-capsid mimicking nanoparticles on the mucopenetrating and uptake mechanism of enterocytes that in turn affecting their in vivo absorption,which should be pondered when engineering virus-mimicking nanoparticles for oral insulin delivery.展开更多
In bilingual translation,attention-based Neural Machine Translation(NMT)models are used to achieve synchrony between input and output sequences and the notion of alignment.NMT model has obtained state-of-the-art perfo...In bilingual translation,attention-based Neural Machine Translation(NMT)models are used to achieve synchrony between input and output sequences and the notion of alignment.NMT model has obtained state-of-the-art performance for several language pairs.However,there has been little work exploring useful architectures for Urdu-to-English machine translation.We conducted extensive Urdu-to-English translation experiments using Long short-term memory(LSTM)/Bidirectional recurrent neural networks(Bi-RNN)/Statistical recurrent unit(SRU)/Gated recurrent unit(GRU)/Convolutional neural network(CNN)and Transformer.Experimental results show that Bi-RNN and LSTM with attention mechanism trained iteratively,with a scalable data set,make precise predictions on unseen data.The trained models yielded competitive results by achieving 62.6%and 61%accuracy and 49.67 and 47.14 BLEU scores,respectively.From a qualitative perspective,the translation of the test sets was examined manually,and it was observed that trained models tend to produce repetitive output more frequently.The attention score produced by Bi-RNN and LSTM produced clear alignment,while GRU showed incorrect translation for words,poor alignment and lack of a clear structure.Therefore,we considered refining the attention-based models by defining an additional attention-based dropout layer.Attention dropout fixes alignment errors and minimizes translation errors at the word level.After empirical demonstration and comparison with their counterparts,we found improvement in the quality of the resulting translation system and a decrease in the perplexity and over-translation score.The ability of the proposed model was evaluated using Arabic-English and Persian-English datasets as well.We empirically concluded that adding an attention-based dropout layer helps improve GRU,SRU,and Transformer translation and is considerably more efficient in translation quality and speed.展开更多
The COVID-19 pandemic has spread globally,resulting in financialinstability in many countries and reductions in the per capita grossdomestic product.Sentiment analysis is a cost-effective method for acquiringsentiment...The COVID-19 pandemic has spread globally,resulting in financialinstability in many countries and reductions in the per capita grossdomestic product.Sentiment analysis is a cost-effective method for acquiringsentiments based on household income loss,as expressed on social media.However,limited research has been conducted in this domain using theLexDeep approach.This study aimed to explore social trend analytics usingLexDeep,which is a hybrid sentiment analysis technique,on Twitter to capturethe risk of household income loss during the COVID-19 pandemic.First,tweet data were collected using Twint with relevant keywords before(9 March2019 to 17 March 2020)and during(18 March 2020 to 21 August 2021)thepandemic.Subsequently,the tweets were annotated using VADER(lexiconbased)and fed into deep learning classifiers,and experiments were conductedusing several embeddings,namely simple embedding,Global Vectors,andWord2Vec,to classify the sentiments expressed in the tweets.The performanceof each LexDeep model was evaluated and compared with that of a supportvector machine(SVM).Finally,the unemployment rates before and duringCOVID-19 were analysed to gain insights into the differences in unemploymentpercentages through social media input and analysis.The resultsdemonstrated that all LexDeep models with simple embedding outperformedthe SVM.This confirmed the superiority of the proposed LexDeep modelover a classical machine learning classifier in performing sentiment analysistasks for domain-specific sentiments.In terms of the risk of income loss,the unemployment issue is highly politicised on both the regional and globalscales;thus,if a country cannot combat this issue,the global economy will alsobe affected.Future research should develop a utility maximisation algorithmfor household welfare evaluation,given the percentage risk of income lossowing to COVID-19.展开更多
Nanoscale medicine confers passive and active targeting potential.The development of nanomedicine is however met with processing,handling and administration hurdles.Excessive solid nanoparticle aggregation and caking ...Nanoscale medicine confers passive and active targeting potential.The development of nanomedicine is however met with processing,handling and administration hurdles.Excessive solid nanoparticle aggregation and caking result in lowproduct yield,poor particle flowability and inefficient drug administration.These are overcome by converting the nanoparticles into a microscale dosage form via agglomeration or compaction techniques.Agglomeration and compaction nonetheless predispose the nanoparticles to risks of losing their nanogeometry,surface composition or chemistry being altered and negating biological performance.This study reviews risk factors faced during agglomeration and compaction that could result in these changes to nanoparticles.The potential risk factors pertain to materials choice in nanoparticle and microscale dosage form development,and their interplay effects with process temperature,physical forces and environmental stresses.To render the physicochemical and biological behaviour of the nanoparticles unaffected by agglomeration or compaction,modes to modulate the interplay effects of material and formulation with processing and environment variables are discussed.展开更多
Malaysia's rapid economic and demographic development have placed negative pressure on its water supplies and the quality of the Juru River, which is close to the nation's capital and its major source of water...Malaysia's rapid economic and demographic development have placed negative pressure on its water supplies and the quality of the Juru River, which is close to the nation's capital and its major source of water. Healthy aquatic ecosystems are supported by physicochemical properties and biological diversity. This study evaluated the anthropogenic impacts on aquatic biodiversity, especially plankton, fish, and macrobenthos, as well as the water quality of the Juru River in the Penang area. Aquatic biodiversity and river water parameters were collected from ten sampling stations along the Juru River. Seven variables were used to assess the physicochemical environment: pH, temperature, total suspended solids (TSS), salinity, dissolved oxygen (DO), biochemical oxygen demand (BOD), and chemical oxygen demand. At each sampling station, the total number of plankton, fish, and macrobenthic taxa were counted and analyzed. The relationships between the physicochemical parameters and aquatic biodiversity were investigated with biotypological analysis, principal component analysis, hierarchical cluster analysis, and linear regression analysis. These analyses showed that the richness and diversity indices were generally influenced by salinity, temperature, TSS, BOD, and pH. The data obtained in this study supported the bioindicator concept. The findings, as they related to scientifically informed conservation, could serve as a model for Juru River management, as well as for river management throughout Malaysia and other tropical Asian countries.展开更多
Prediction of machine failure is challenging as the dataset is often imbalanced with a low failure rate.The common approach to han-dle classification involving imbalanced data is to balance the data using a sampling a...Prediction of machine failure is challenging as the dataset is often imbalanced with a low failure rate.The common approach to han-dle classification involving imbalanced data is to balance the data using a sampling approach such as random undersampling,random oversampling,or Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique(SMOTE)algorithms.This paper compared the classification performance of three popular classifiers(Logistic Regression,Gaussian Naïve Bayes,and Support Vector Machine)in predicting machine failure in the Oil and Gas industry.The original machine failure dataset consists of 20,473 hourly data and is imbalanced with 19945(97%)‘non-failure’and 528(3%)‘failure data’.The three independent variables to predict machine failure were pressure indicator,flow indicator,and level indicator.The accuracy of the classifiers is very high and close to 100%,but the sensitivity of all classifiers using the original dataset was close to zero.The performance of the three classifiers was then evaluated for data with different imbalance rates(10%to 50%)generated from the original data using SMOTE,SMOTE-Support Vector Machine(SMOTE-SVM)and SMOTE-Edited Nearest Neighbour(SMOTE-ENN).The classifiers were evaluated based on improvement in sensitivity and F-measure.Results showed that the sensitivity of all classifiers increases as the imbalance rate increases.SVM with radial basis function(RBF)kernel has the highest sensitivity when data is balanced(50:50)using SMOTE(Sensitivitytest=0.5686,Ftest=0.6927)compared to Naïve Bayes(Sensitivitytest=0.4033,Ftest=0.6218)and Logistic Regression(Sensitivitytest=0.4194,Ftest=0.621).Overall,the Gaussian Naïve Bayes model consistently improves sensitivity and F-measure as the imbalance ratio increases,but the sensitivity is below 50%.The classifiers performed better when data was balanced using SMOTE-SVM compared to SMOTE and SMOTE-ENN.展开更多
The tremendous advancement in distributed computing and Internet of Things(IoT)applications has resulted in the adoption of fog computing as today’s widely used framework complementing cloud computing.Thus,suitable a...The tremendous advancement in distributed computing and Internet of Things(IoT)applications has resulted in the adoption of fog computing as today’s widely used framework complementing cloud computing.Thus,suitable and effective applications could be performed to satisfy the applications’latency requirement.Resource allocation techniques are essential aspects of fog networks which prevent unbalanced load distribution.Effective resource management techniques can improve the quality of service metrics.Due to the limited and heterogeneous resources available within the fog infrastructure,the fog layer’s resources need to be optimised to efficiently manage and distribute them to different applications within the IoT net-work.There has been limited research on resource management strategies in fog networks in recent years,and a limited systematic review has been done to compile these studies.This article focuses on current developments in resource allocation strategies for fog-IoT networks.A systematic review of resource allocation techniques with the key objective of enhancing QoS is provided.Steps involved in conducting this systematic literature review include developing research goals,accessing studies,categorizing and critically analysing the studies.The resource management approaches engaged in this article are load balancing and task offloading techniques.For the load balancing approach,a brief survey of recent work done according to their sub-categories,including stochastic,probabilistic/statistic,graph theory and hybrid techniques is provided whereas for task offloading,the survey is performed according to the destination of task offloading.Efficient load balancing and task-offloading approaches contribute significantly to resource management,and tremendous effort has been put into this critical topic.Thus,this survey presents an overview of these extents and a comparative analysis.Finally,the study discusses ongoing research issues and potential future directions for developing effective management resource allocation techniques.展开更多
Burkholderia pseudomallei is a causative agent of melioidosis that can infect humans and animals in endemic countries,specifically in Southeast Asia and tropical Australia.A fundamental component for the pathogenesis ...Burkholderia pseudomallei is a causative agent of melioidosis that can infect humans and animals in endemic countries,specifically in Southeast Asia and tropical Australia.A fundamental component for the pathogenesis of Burkholderia pseudomallei is the capability of the bacterium to enter,survive,replicate,and cause disease in a host cell by inducing the host cell fusion.Cell fusion results in multinucleated-giant cell formation,thus enabling the dissemination of Burkholderia pseudomallei intracellularly.cGAS reacts to Burkholderia pseudomallei infection by activating the cGAS-STING pathway and subsequently limiting host's aberrant cell division and cellular replication by inducing autophagic cell death.In this review,we discuss the host-pathogen interactions between the typeⅥsecretion system 5(T6SS-5)of Burkholderia pseudomallei and human cGAS pathway in melioidosis infections.Since T6SS-5 is a main virulent factor in Burkholderia pseudomallei and the c GAS pathway is vital for host immune response,elucidating their functions is important for better understanding the pathogenesis of Burkholderia pseudomallei.展开更多
The depth adjustment factor for bending strength stated in Eurocode 5(EC5)is only applicable to timbers having a characteristic density below 700 kg/m^(3).However,most Malaysian timbers are hardwood,some with a charac...The depth adjustment factor for bending strength stated in Eurocode 5(EC5)is only applicable to timbers having a characteristic density below 700 kg/m^(3).However,most Malaysian timbers are hardwood,some with a characteristic density reaching above 700 kg/m^(3).Therefore,the objective of this study was to examine whether the depth adjustment factor stipulated in EC5 is valid for Malaysian hardwood timbers.Six timber species were selected for this study,namely Kapur(Dryobalanops C.F.Gaertn.),Kempas(Koompassia Maingay ex Benth.),Keruing(Dipterocarpus C.F.Gaertn.),Light red meranti(Shorea Roxb.ex C.F.Gaertn.),Geronggang(Cratoxylum Blume)and Balau(Shorea Roxb.ex C.F.Gaertn.).The determination of bending strength and characteristic density was conducted according to BS EN 408:2010 and BS EN 384:2016,respectively.A graph for mean bending strength vs.(150/h)was plotted for each timber species.The power function was selected to analyze the relationship between the two variables.The power of the regression equations varied depending on the characteristic density of the timber species.For species with a characteristic density below 700 kg/m^(3),such as Kapur,Keruing,and Light red meranti,the power was between 0.16 to 0.17.In contrast,for species having a characteristic density above 700 kg/m^(3),namely Kempas and Balau,the power was higher at 0.23 and 0.24,respectively.Geronggang was an exception to this pattern.These values are close to the depth adjustment factor given in EC5,which is 0.2.Based on the results,it can be suggested that the adjustment factor of 0.2 is also applicable to Malaysian hardwood timbers with a characteristic density above 700 kg/m^(3).展开更多
目的:评价一种中药植物鞭檐犁头尖(T.flagelliforme)作为抗癌药物的临床前研究的系统综述。方法:对Scopus、PubMed、Web of Science、ScienceDirect、LILACS、EBSCO Medline、Mendeley等7个数据库进行全面检索,检索时间截止到2023年9月...目的:评价一种中药植物鞭檐犁头尖(T.flagelliforme)作为抗癌药物的临床前研究的系统综述。方法:对Scopus、PubMed、Web of Science、ScienceDirect、LILACS、EBSCO Medline、Mendeley等7个数据库进行全面检索,检索时间截止到2023年9月8日。排除了临床试验和非原创的同行评议报告后,鞭檐犁头尖的提取物,组成,或分离化合物的体内外研究且经过同行评审的英文文献均被纳入。本研究定性评估了鞭檐犁头尖对不同肿瘤细胞、肿瘤大小和作用机制的有效性。证据质量由三名独立评估人员使用ToxRTool进行评估,并验证其一致性。结果:检索后共纳入27项研究:22项体外研究,4项体内研究,1项体内外研究。结果发现鞭檐犁头尖对白血病、乳腺癌、结直肠癌和肺癌有效。大多数研究的评估为“有限制的可靠”。鞭檐犁头尖通过阻断细胞周期、活化caspase-3/-9、分解PARP、裂解DNA、减少生存素含量、降低ROS表达、抑制COX-2和HSP70表达和抑制NF-kB通路等来诱导细胞凋亡。当与干扰素联合使用时,其能阻碍血管生成。结论:尽管鞭檐犁头尖具有良好的抗癌活性,但其作为单独抗癌药物的疗效尚不确定。它似乎更适合用于癌症的补充或联合治疗。研究设计不理想,报告不完整,以及在多篇文章中没有纳入适当的阳性对照和统计分析可能是本研究缺乏结论性证据的原因。展开更多
基金This work was supported by the Ministry of Higher Education(MOHE),Malaysia,through Fundamental Research Grant Scheme(FRGS/1/2022/SKK10/UTAR/02/1)Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman,Malaysia,through UTAR-Research Grant(IPSR/RMC/UTARRF/2021-C2/L08)MBBS Community Health Project(2022/2023),UTAR.
文摘Objective:To investigate the interrelationship between cardiovascular health awareness,risk perception,behavioural intention,and INTERHEART risk stratification in a middle-aged adult population in Malaysia.Methods:A cross-sectional survey with convenience sampling was conducted during November 2022 and January 2023.Participants completed validated questionnaires assessing cardiovascular health awareness,risk perception of cardiovascular diseases,behavioural intention towards adopting healthy habits,and INTERHEART risk stratification score(IHRS)based on established risk factors.A total of 602 respondents were included in the final analysis.Data were analysed with independent t-test/one-way ANOVA or Mann-Whitney/Kruskal-Wallis to test the differences,Pearson correlation or linear regression test to analyze the association of independent and dependent variables.Results:There was a significant positive correlation between medical knowledge related to cardiovascular disease(CVD)and knowledge related to CVD risk prevention,risk perception,behavioural intention and IHRS(P<0.05,Pearson correlation).Notably,individuals with higher IHRS tended to have lower knowledge related to CVD and CVD risk prevention,risk perception,and behavioural intention.Males,laborers,active/former smokers,individuals with lower household income and educational levels,those involved in occupations not related to the healthcare sector,and those who did not receive the CVD health brochure or are unaware of health self-assessment tools are likely to have lower levels of knowledge,risk perception,and poorer behavioural intention regarding cardiovascular health(P<0.05,one-way ANOVA).While educational level,smoking status,awareness about CVD poster,self-assessment tools were repeatedly significantly associated with knowledge related to CVD and CVD risk prevention,risk perception,behavioral intention and/or IHRS(P<0.05,linear regression).Conclusions:These findings underscore the importance of promoting cardiovascular health awareness and risk perception among middle-aged adults to foster positive BI and reduce CVD risk.Tailored interventions targeting specific risk factors identified by INTERHEART may enhance risk stratification accuracy and facilitate targeted preventive strategies.
基金funded by the project scheme of the Publication Writing-IPR Incentive Program(PPHKI)2022Directorate of Research and Community Service(DRPM)Institut Teknologi Sepuluh Nopember(ITS)Surabaya,Indonesia for the financial supports。
文摘For the last two decades,low-cost Global Navigation Satellite System(GNSS)receivers have been used in various applications.These receivers are mini-size,less expensive than geodetic-grade receivers,and in high demand.Irrespective of these outstanding features,low-cost GNSS receivers are potentially poorer hardwares with internal signal processing,resulting in lower quality.They typically come with low-cost GNSS antenna that has lower performance than their counterparts,particularly for multipath mitigation.Therefore,this research evaluated the low-cost GNSS device performance using a high-rate kinematic survey.For this purpose,these receivers were assembled with an Inertial Measurement Unit(IMU)sensor,which actively transmited data on acceleration and orientation rate during the observation.The position and navigation parameter data were obtained from the IMU readings,even without GNSS signals via the U-blox F9R GNSS/IMU device mounted on a vehicle.This research was conducted in an area with demanding conditions,such as an open sky area,an urban environment,and a shopping mall basement,to examine the device’s performance.The data were processed by two approaches:the Single Point Positioning-IMU(SPP/IMU)and the Differential GNSS-IMU(DGNSS/IMU).The Unscented Kalman Filter(UKF)was selected as a filtering algorithm due to its excellent performance in handling nonlinear system models.The result showed that integrating GNSS/IMU in SPP processing mode could increase the accuracy in eastward and northward components up to 68.28%and 66.64%.Integration of DGNSS/IMU increased the accuracy in eastward and northward components to 93.02%and 93.03%compared to the positioning of standalone GNSS.In addition,the positioning accuracy can be improved by reducing the IMU noise using low-pass and high-pass filters.This application could still not gain the expected position accuracy under signal outage conditions.
基金The authors would like to acknowledge the Institute for Big Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence(IBDAAI),Universiti TeknologiMARA and the Ministry of Higher Education,Malaysia for the financial support through Fundamental Research Grant Scheme(FRGS)Grant No.FRGS/1/2021/ICT11/UITM/01/1.
文摘Blockchain-enabled cybersecurity system to ensure and strengthen decentralized digital transaction is gradually gaining popularity in the digital era for various areas like finance,transportation,healthcare,education,and supply chain management.Blockchain interactions in the heterogeneous network have fascinated more attention due to the authentication of their digital application exchanges.However,the exponential development of storage space capabilities across the blockchain-based heterogeneous network has become an important issue in preventing blockchain distribution and the extension of blockchain nodes.There is the biggest challenge of data integrity and scalability,including significant computing complexity and inapplicable latency on regional network diversity,operating system diversity,bandwidth diversity,node diversity,etc.,for decision-making of data transactions across blockchain-based heterogeneous networks.Data security and privacy have also become the main concerns across the heterogeneous network to build smart IoT ecosystems.To address these issues,today’s researchers have explored the potential solutions of the capability of heterogeneous network devices to perform data transactions where the system stimulates their integration reliably and securely with blockchain.The key goal of this paper is to conduct a state-of-the-art and comprehensive survey on cybersecurity enhancement using blockchain in the heterogeneous network.This paper proposes a full-fledged taxonomy to identify the main obstacles,research gaps,future research directions,effective solutions,andmost relevant blockchain-enabled cybersecurity systems.In addition,Blockchain based heterogeneous network framework with cybersecurity is proposed in this paper tomeet the goal of maintaining optimal performance data transactions among organizations.Overall,this paper provides an in-depth description based on the critical analysis to overcome the existing work gaps for future research where it presents a potential cybersecurity design with key requirements of blockchain across a heterogeneous network.
基金Supported by grant from Fundamental Research Grant Scheme by Ministry of Higher Education(MoHE)600-IRMI/FRGS 5/3(101/2019).
文摘AIM:To investigate the stability of the seven housekeeping genes:beta-actin(ActB),glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate dehydrogenase(GAPDH),18s ribosomal unit 5(18s),cyclophilin A(CycA),hypoxanthine-guanine phosphoribosyl transferase(HPRT),ribosomal protein large P0(36B4)and terminal uridylyl transferase 1(U6)in the diabetic retinal tissue of rat model.METHODS:The expression of these seven genes in rat retinal tissues was determined using real-time quantitative reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction(RT-qPCR)in two groups;normal control rats and streptozotocininduced diabetic rats.The stability analysis of gene expression was investigated using geNorm,NormFinder,BestKeeper,and comparative delta-Ct(ΔCt)algorithms.RESULTS:The 36B4 gene was stably expressed in the retinal tissues of normal control animals;however,it was less stable in diabetic retinas.The 18s gene was expressed consistently in both normal control and diabetic rats’retinal tissue.That this gene was the best reference for data normalisation in RT-qPCR studies that used the retinal tissue of streptozotocin-induced diabetic rats.Furthermore,there was no ideal gene stably expressed for use in all experimental settings.CONCLUSION:Identifying relevant genes is a need for achieving RT-qPCR validity and reliability and must be appropriately achieved based on a specific experimental setting.
文摘AIM:To compare the vergence mechanisms between good and poor sleepers in university students.METHODS:A total of 64 university students were recruited in this study.The validated Malay version of Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index questionnaire(PSQI-M)was used to measure the participants’sleep quality over the past month.Participants were categorized as good sleepers(n=32)and poor sleepers(n=32)based on the PSQI-M scores.Heterophoria and fusional vergences were measured at distance and near.Mann-Whitney U test was used to compare heterophoria,negative fusional vergence(NFV),and positive fusional vergence(PFV)at distance and near between good and poor sleepers.Spearman correlation analysis was used to study the relationship between PSQI-M score and PFV at distance.RESULTS:Both distance and near heterophorias were not significantly different between good and poor sleepers(P>0.05).There was a difference in distance PFV(P<0.05)between good and poor sleepers,but not in distance NFV,near NFV,and near PFV(P>0.05).Distance PFV was negatively correlated with PSQI-M score(rs=-0.33,P<0.05).CONCLUSION:University students with poor sleep quality demonstrates a reduced ability to maintain fusion with increasing convergence demand at distance.Sleep quality assessment during binocular vision examination in university students is recommended.
文摘Human saliva is an indispensable fluid that maintains a healthy oral cavity which otherwise can lead to oral diseases(dental caries and periodontitis).In addition,salivary metabolites and microbiome profile provide early detection of systemic diseases such as cancer and obesity.Salivary diagnostic has gained popularity due to its non-invasive sampling technique.Fasting(abstinence from food or drink or both)research for weight loss and improve health is common,but studies using fasting saliva are scarce.Some metabolites in fasting saliva have been reported with interesting results,which can be enhanced by considering different confounding factors.For example,fasting saliva contains higher salivary nitrite,which is related to nitric oxide(NO).NO is a vasodilator supporting the healthy function of endothelial cells and its deficiency is connected to many diseases.The timely supply of NO through exogenous and endogenous means is highlighted and the potential advantage of fasting salivary composition changes in relation to COVID-19 infection is speculated.This review aims to provide a general discussion on the salivary composition,properties,and functions of the whole saliva,including the health benefits of fasting.
基金Supported by the UKMMC Fundamental Research Grant(Grant No.FF-165-2011)from Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia
文摘Objective: To investigate the presence of trichomoniasis among women attending the Obstetrics and Gynaecology Clinic, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia Medical Centre.Methods: A total of 139 high vaginal swabs were taken from the subjects and sent to the laboratory in Amies gel transport media. The specimens were examined for the presence of Trichomonas vaginalis using wet mount, Giemsa staining and cultured in Diamond's medium. Sociodemographic characteristics and gynaecological complaints were obtained in private using structured questionnaire applied by one investigator.Results: The median age was 32 years, with an interquartile interval of 9.96. Most of the subjects were Malays(76.9%) and the remaining were Chinese(15.1%), Indians(2.2%)and other ethnic groups(5.8%). One hundred and thirty eight(99.3%) of the women were married and 98.6% had less than 6 children. More than half(75.5%) of the women's last child birth was less than 6 years ago. Forty seven percent of them were involved in supporting administrative work and 64.7% of the women gave a history of previous or current vaginal discharge.Conclusions: The present study reported zero incidence rate of trichomoniasis. The low incidence rate was postulated due to all women who participated in this study were categorized into a low-risk group.
基金supported by NKEA Research Grant Scheme(NRGS)(NH1113D018-2)。
文摘Objective:To investigate the bone-resorbing effect of demethylbelamcandaquinone B(Dmcq B)extracted from Marantodes pumilum var.alata on osteoclast differentiation in RAW264.7 cells.Methods:RAW264.7 macrophages were differentiated using RANKL into osteoclast-like cells.Then,they were treated with 10μg/mL Marantodes pumilum var.alata crude aqueous extract,5μg/mL dichloromethane fraction,and 0.6μg/mL Dmcq B and 0.06μg/mL estradiol.Tartrate-resistant acid phosphatase 5b(TRACP 5b)as an osteoclast phenotypic marker was determined by TRACP staining and TRACP 5b colometric assay,and bone-resorbing pits were examined.The gene expression of pro-inflammatory cytokines(TNF-αand IL-6)was measured.Moreover,the protein expressions of pro-inflammatory cytokines(TNF-αand IL-6)and estrogen receptors were evaluated.Results:Marantodes pumilum var.alata crude aqueous extract and Dmcq B inhibited RANKL-stimulated osteoclast differentiation as evidenced by size reduction of giant multinucleated osteoclast cells,decreased TRACP 5b activity as well as the subsiding of resorbed pit area compared with normal control.In addition,they reduced the gene and protein expressions of TNF-αand IL-6.Marantodes pumilum var.alata,Dmcq B,and estradiol treatments increased the protein expressions of estrogen receptors alpha and beta in osteoclasts.Conclusions:Marantodes pumilum var.alata and its active compound,Dmcq B can inhibit osteoclast differentiation.
基金supported by the Ministry of Higher Education,Government of Malaysia,No.FRGS/2/2014/SG03/UITM/02/2 UiTM IRMI file No.600-RMI/FRGS 5/3(111/2014),toⅡYayasan Penyelidikan Otak,Minda dan Neurosains Malaysia(YPOMNM),No.YPOMNM/2019-04(2)UiTM IRMI No.100-IRMI/PRI 16/6/2(010/2019),to MAML。
文摘Amyloid-beta(Aβ)-related alterations,similar to those found in the brains of patients with Alzheimer's disease,have been observed in the retina of patients with glaucoma.Decreased levels of brain-derived neurotrophic factor(BDNF)are believed to be associated with the neurotoxic effects of Aβpeptide.To investigate the mechanism underlying the neuroprotective effects of BDNF on Aβ_(1-40)-induced retinal injury in Sprague-Dawley rats,we treated rats by intravitreal administration of phosphate-buffered saline(control),Aβ_(1-40)(5 nM),or Aβ_(1-40)(5 nM)combined with BDNF(1μg/mL).We found that intravitreal administration of Aβ_(1-40)induced retinal ganglion cell apoptosis.Fluoro-Gold staining showed a significantly lower number of retinal ganglion cells in the Aβ_(1-40)group than in the control and BDNF groups.In the Aβ_(1-40)group,low number of RGCs was associated with increased caspase-3 expression and reduced TrkB and ERK1/2 expression.BDNF abolished Aβ_(1-40)-induced increase in the expression of caspase-3 at the gene and protein levels in the retina and upregulated TrkB and ERK1/2 expression.These findings suggest that treatment with BDNF prevents RGC apoptosis induced by Aβ_(1-40)by activating the BDNF-TrkB signaling pathway in rats.
基金financial support from National Natural Science Foundation of China(grant no.31870987)
文摘Virus-capsid mimicking mucus-permeable nanoparticles are promising oral insulin carriers which surmount intestinal mucus barrier.However,the impact of different viruscapsid mimicking structure remains unexplored.In this study,utilizing biotin grafted chitosan as the main skeleton,virus-mimicking nanoparticles endowed with biologicshell(streptavidin coverage)and polymeric-shell(hyaluronic acid/alginate coating)were designed with insulin as a model drug by self-assembly processes.It was demonstrated that biologic-shell mimicking nanoparticles exhibited a higher intestinal trans-mucus(>80%,10 min)and transmucosal penetration efficiency(1.6–2.2-fold improvement)than polymeric-shell counterparts.Uptake mechanism studies revealed caveolae-mediated endocytosis was responsible for the absorption of biologic-shell mimicking nanoparticles whereas polymeric-shell mimicking nanoparticles were characterized by clathrin-mediated pathway with anticipated lysosomal insulin digestion.Further,in vivo hypoglycemic study indicated that the improved effect of regulating blood sugar levels was virus-capsid structure dependent out of which biologic-shell mimicking nanoparticles presented the best performance(5.1%).Although the findings of this study are encouraging,much more work is required to meet the standards of clinical translation.Taken together,we highlight the external structural dependence of virus-capsid mimicking nanoparticles on the mucopenetrating and uptake mechanism of enterocytes that in turn affecting their in vivo absorption,which should be pondered when engineering virus-mimicking nanoparticles for oral insulin delivery.
基金This work was supported by the Institute for Big Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence(IBDAAI),Universiti Teknologi Mara,Shah Alam,Selangor.Malaysia.
文摘In bilingual translation,attention-based Neural Machine Translation(NMT)models are used to achieve synchrony between input and output sequences and the notion of alignment.NMT model has obtained state-of-the-art performance for several language pairs.However,there has been little work exploring useful architectures for Urdu-to-English machine translation.We conducted extensive Urdu-to-English translation experiments using Long short-term memory(LSTM)/Bidirectional recurrent neural networks(Bi-RNN)/Statistical recurrent unit(SRU)/Gated recurrent unit(GRU)/Convolutional neural network(CNN)and Transformer.Experimental results show that Bi-RNN and LSTM with attention mechanism trained iteratively,with a scalable data set,make precise predictions on unseen data.The trained models yielded competitive results by achieving 62.6%and 61%accuracy and 49.67 and 47.14 BLEU scores,respectively.From a qualitative perspective,the translation of the test sets was examined manually,and it was observed that trained models tend to produce repetitive output more frequently.The attention score produced by Bi-RNN and LSTM produced clear alignment,while GRU showed incorrect translation for words,poor alignment and lack of a clear structure.Therefore,we considered refining the attention-based models by defining an additional attention-based dropout layer.Attention dropout fixes alignment errors and minimizes translation errors at the word level.After empirical demonstration and comparison with their counterparts,we found improvement in the quality of the resulting translation system and a decrease in the perplexity and over-translation score.The ability of the proposed model was evaluated using Arabic-English and Persian-English datasets as well.We empirically concluded that adding an attention-based dropout layer helps improve GRU,SRU,and Transformer translation and is considerably more efficient in translation quality and speed.
基金funded by the Deanship of Scientific Research at Princess Nourah bint Abdulrahman University,through the Research Groups Program Grant no.(RGP-1443-0045).
文摘The COVID-19 pandemic has spread globally,resulting in financialinstability in many countries and reductions in the per capita grossdomestic product.Sentiment analysis is a cost-effective method for acquiringsentiments based on household income loss,as expressed on social media.However,limited research has been conducted in this domain using theLexDeep approach.This study aimed to explore social trend analytics usingLexDeep,which is a hybrid sentiment analysis technique,on Twitter to capturethe risk of household income loss during the COVID-19 pandemic.First,tweet data were collected using Twint with relevant keywords before(9 March2019 to 17 March 2020)and during(18 March 2020 to 21 August 2021)thepandemic.Subsequently,the tweets were annotated using VADER(lexiconbased)and fed into deep learning classifiers,and experiments were conductedusing several embeddings,namely simple embedding,Global Vectors,andWord2Vec,to classify the sentiments expressed in the tweets.The performanceof each LexDeep model was evaluated and compared with that of a supportvector machine(SVM).Finally,the unemployment rates before and duringCOVID-19 were analysed to gain insights into the differences in unemploymentpercentages through social media input and analysis.The resultsdemonstrated that all LexDeep models with simple embedding outperformedthe SVM.This confirmed the superiority of the proposed LexDeep modelover a classical machine learning classifier in performing sentiment analysistasks for domain-specific sentiments.In terms of the risk of income loss,the unemployment issue is highly politicised on both the regional and globalscales;thus,if a country cannot combat this issue,the global economy will alsobe affected.Future research should develop a utility maximisation algorithmfor household welfare evaluation,given the percentage risk of income lossowing to COVID-19.
文摘Nanoscale medicine confers passive and active targeting potential.The development of nanomedicine is however met with processing,handling and administration hurdles.Excessive solid nanoparticle aggregation and caking result in lowproduct yield,poor particle flowability and inefficient drug administration.These are overcome by converting the nanoparticles into a microscale dosage form via agglomeration or compaction techniques.Agglomeration and compaction nonetheless predispose the nanoparticles to risks of losing their nanogeometry,surface composition or chemistry being altered and negating biological performance.This study reviews risk factors faced during agglomeration and compaction that could result in these changes to nanoparticles.The potential risk factors pertain to materials choice in nanoparticle and microscale dosage form development,and their interplay effects with process temperature,physical forces and environmental stresses.To render the physicochemical and biological behaviour of the nanoparticles unaffected by agglomeration or compaction,modes to modulate the interplay effects of material and formulation with processing and environment variables are discussed.
文摘Malaysia's rapid economic and demographic development have placed negative pressure on its water supplies and the quality of the Juru River, which is close to the nation's capital and its major source of water. Healthy aquatic ecosystems are supported by physicochemical properties and biological diversity. This study evaluated the anthropogenic impacts on aquatic biodiversity, especially plankton, fish, and macrobenthos, as well as the water quality of the Juru River in the Penang area. Aquatic biodiversity and river water parameters were collected from ten sampling stations along the Juru River. Seven variables were used to assess the physicochemical environment: pH, temperature, total suspended solids (TSS), salinity, dissolved oxygen (DO), biochemical oxygen demand (BOD), and chemical oxygen demand. At each sampling station, the total number of plankton, fish, and macrobenthic taxa were counted and analyzed. The relationships between the physicochemical parameters and aquatic biodiversity were investigated with biotypological analysis, principal component analysis, hierarchical cluster analysis, and linear regression analysis. These analyses showed that the richness and diversity indices were generally influenced by salinity, temperature, TSS, BOD, and pH. The data obtained in this study supported the bioindicator concept. The findings, as they related to scientifically informed conservation, could serve as a model for Juru River management, as well as for river management throughout Malaysia and other tropical Asian countries.
基金supported under the research Grant(PO Number:920138936)from the Institute of Technology PETRONAS Sdn Bhd,32610,Bandar Seri Iskandar,Perak,Malaysia.
文摘Prediction of machine failure is challenging as the dataset is often imbalanced with a low failure rate.The common approach to han-dle classification involving imbalanced data is to balance the data using a sampling approach such as random undersampling,random oversampling,or Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique(SMOTE)algorithms.This paper compared the classification performance of three popular classifiers(Logistic Regression,Gaussian Naïve Bayes,and Support Vector Machine)in predicting machine failure in the Oil and Gas industry.The original machine failure dataset consists of 20,473 hourly data and is imbalanced with 19945(97%)‘non-failure’and 528(3%)‘failure data’.The three independent variables to predict machine failure were pressure indicator,flow indicator,and level indicator.The accuracy of the classifiers is very high and close to 100%,but the sensitivity of all classifiers using the original dataset was close to zero.The performance of the three classifiers was then evaluated for data with different imbalance rates(10%to 50%)generated from the original data using SMOTE,SMOTE-Support Vector Machine(SMOTE-SVM)and SMOTE-Edited Nearest Neighbour(SMOTE-ENN).The classifiers were evaluated based on improvement in sensitivity and F-measure.Results showed that the sensitivity of all classifiers increases as the imbalance rate increases.SVM with radial basis function(RBF)kernel has the highest sensitivity when data is balanced(50:50)using SMOTE(Sensitivitytest=0.5686,Ftest=0.6927)compared to Naïve Bayes(Sensitivitytest=0.4033,Ftest=0.6218)and Logistic Regression(Sensitivitytest=0.4194,Ftest=0.621).Overall,the Gaussian Naïve Bayes model consistently improves sensitivity and F-measure as the imbalance ratio increases,but the sensitivity is below 50%.The classifiers performed better when data was balanced using SMOTE-SVM compared to SMOTE and SMOTE-ENN.
基金The project was funded under Grant of the Fundamental Research Grant Scheme Malaysia Higher Education:FRGS/1/2019/ICT03/UITM/03/1.
文摘The tremendous advancement in distributed computing and Internet of Things(IoT)applications has resulted in the adoption of fog computing as today’s widely used framework complementing cloud computing.Thus,suitable and effective applications could be performed to satisfy the applications’latency requirement.Resource allocation techniques are essential aspects of fog networks which prevent unbalanced load distribution.Effective resource management techniques can improve the quality of service metrics.Due to the limited and heterogeneous resources available within the fog infrastructure,the fog layer’s resources need to be optimised to efficiently manage and distribute them to different applications within the IoT net-work.There has been limited research on resource management strategies in fog networks in recent years,and a limited systematic review has been done to compile these studies.This article focuses on current developments in resource allocation strategies for fog-IoT networks.A systematic review of resource allocation techniques with the key objective of enhancing QoS is provided.Steps involved in conducting this systematic literature review include developing research goals,accessing studies,categorizing and critically analysing the studies.The resource management approaches engaged in this article are load balancing and task offloading techniques.For the load balancing approach,a brief survey of recent work done according to their sub-categories,including stochastic,probabilistic/statistic,graph theory and hybrid techniques is provided whereas for task offloading,the survey is performed according to the destination of task offloading.Efficient load balancing and task-offloading approaches contribute significantly to resource management,and tremendous effort has been put into this critical topic.Thus,this survey presents an overview of these extents and a comparative analysis.Finally,the study discusses ongoing research issues and potential future directions for developing effective management resource allocation techniques.
基金supported by the Ministry of Higher Education Malaysia for Fundamental Research Grant Scheme with Project Code:FRGS/1/2019/SKK11/USM/02/5。
文摘Burkholderia pseudomallei is a causative agent of melioidosis that can infect humans and animals in endemic countries,specifically in Southeast Asia and tropical Australia.A fundamental component for the pathogenesis of Burkholderia pseudomallei is the capability of the bacterium to enter,survive,replicate,and cause disease in a host cell by inducing the host cell fusion.Cell fusion results in multinucleated-giant cell formation,thus enabling the dissemination of Burkholderia pseudomallei intracellularly.cGAS reacts to Burkholderia pseudomallei infection by activating the cGAS-STING pathway and subsequently limiting host's aberrant cell division and cellular replication by inducing autophagic cell death.In this review,we discuss the host-pathogen interactions between the typeⅥsecretion system 5(T6SS-5)of Burkholderia pseudomallei and human cGAS pathway in melioidosis infections.Since T6SS-5 is a main virulent factor in Burkholderia pseudomallei and the c GAS pathway is vital for host immune response,elucidating their functions is important for better understanding the pathogenesis of Burkholderia pseudomallei.
基金funded by Geran Penyelidikan Khas(GPK),(600-RMC/GPK 5/3(071/2020)).
文摘The depth adjustment factor for bending strength stated in Eurocode 5(EC5)is only applicable to timbers having a characteristic density below 700 kg/m^(3).However,most Malaysian timbers are hardwood,some with a characteristic density reaching above 700 kg/m^(3).Therefore,the objective of this study was to examine whether the depth adjustment factor stipulated in EC5 is valid for Malaysian hardwood timbers.Six timber species were selected for this study,namely Kapur(Dryobalanops C.F.Gaertn.),Kempas(Koompassia Maingay ex Benth.),Keruing(Dipterocarpus C.F.Gaertn.),Light red meranti(Shorea Roxb.ex C.F.Gaertn.),Geronggang(Cratoxylum Blume)and Balau(Shorea Roxb.ex C.F.Gaertn.).The determination of bending strength and characteristic density was conducted according to BS EN 408:2010 and BS EN 384:2016,respectively.A graph for mean bending strength vs.(150/h)was plotted for each timber species.The power function was selected to analyze the relationship between the two variables.The power of the regression equations varied depending on the characteristic density of the timber species.For species with a characteristic density below 700 kg/m^(3),such as Kapur,Keruing,and Light red meranti,the power was between 0.16 to 0.17.In contrast,for species having a characteristic density above 700 kg/m^(3),namely Kempas and Balau,the power was higher at 0.23 and 0.24,respectively.Geronggang was an exception to this pattern.These values are close to the depth adjustment factor given in EC5,which is 0.2.Based on the results,it can be suggested that the adjustment factor of 0.2 is also applicable to Malaysian hardwood timbers with a characteristic density above 700 kg/m^(3).
文摘目的:评价一种中药植物鞭檐犁头尖(T.flagelliforme)作为抗癌药物的临床前研究的系统综述。方法:对Scopus、PubMed、Web of Science、ScienceDirect、LILACS、EBSCO Medline、Mendeley等7个数据库进行全面检索,检索时间截止到2023年9月8日。排除了临床试验和非原创的同行评议报告后,鞭檐犁头尖的提取物,组成,或分离化合物的体内外研究且经过同行评审的英文文献均被纳入。本研究定性评估了鞭檐犁头尖对不同肿瘤细胞、肿瘤大小和作用机制的有效性。证据质量由三名独立评估人员使用ToxRTool进行评估,并验证其一致性。结果:检索后共纳入27项研究:22项体外研究,4项体内研究,1项体内外研究。结果发现鞭檐犁头尖对白血病、乳腺癌、结直肠癌和肺癌有效。大多数研究的评估为“有限制的可靠”。鞭檐犁头尖通过阻断细胞周期、活化caspase-3/-9、分解PARP、裂解DNA、减少生存素含量、降低ROS表达、抑制COX-2和HSP70表达和抑制NF-kB通路等来诱导细胞凋亡。当与干扰素联合使用时,其能阻碍血管生成。结论:尽管鞭檐犁头尖具有良好的抗癌活性,但其作为单独抗癌药物的疗效尚不确定。它似乎更适合用于癌症的补充或联合治疗。研究设计不理想,报告不完整,以及在多篇文章中没有纳入适当的阳性对照和统计分析可能是本研究缺乏结论性证据的原因。
