Low-Cost Portable Light Therapy for Alzheimer's Patients

This paper provides an overview of the information and research conducted that ushered the creation and innovation of a low-cost portable light therapy device to help treat Alzheimer’s patients. Alzheimer’s has afflicted over five million people in the U.S., currently has fewer effective treatment options than other diseases, such as cancer. Of all known research, light flickering at 40 Hz at the eyes of patients has proven to be the most effective treatment for the disease. This information was used in creating the Light Therapy boxes.Cockrell School of Engineerin

Thermophoresis effects on non-Darcy MHD mixed convective heat and mass transfer past a porous wedge in the presence of suction/injection

An analysis is presented to investigate the effect of thermophoresis particle deposition and variable viscosity on non-Darcy MHD mixed convective heat and mass transfer of a viscous, incompressible and electrically conducting fluid past a porous wedge in the presence of suction/injection. The wall of the wedge is embedded in a uniform non-Darcian porous medium in order to allow for possible fluid wall suction or injection. The governing partial differential equations of the problem, subjected to their boundary conditions, are solved numerically by applying an efficient solution scheme for local nonsimilarity boundary layer analysis. Numerical calculations are carried out for different values of dimensionless parameter in the problem and an analysis of the results obtained show that the flow field is influenced appreciably by the applied magnetic field. The results are compared with those known from the literature and excellent agreement between the results is obtained

Investigating hookworm genomes by comparative analysis of two Ancylostoma species

Background Hookworms, infecting over one billion people, are the mostly closely related major human parasites to the model nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. Applying genomics techniques to these species, we analyzed 3,840 and 3,149 genes from Ancylostoma caninum and A. ceylanicum. Results Transcripts originated from libraries representing infective L3 larva, stimulated L3, arrested L3, and adults. Most genes are represented in single stages including abundant transcripts like hsp-20 in infective L3 and vit-3 in adults. Over 80% of the genes have homologs in C. elegans, and nearly 30% of these were with observable RNA interference phenotypes. Homologies were identified to nematode-specific and clade V specific gene families. To study the evolution of hookworm genes, 574 A. caninum / A. ceylanicum orthologs were identified, all of which were found to be under purifying selection with distribution ratios of nonsynonymous to synonymous amino acid substitutions similar to that reported for C. elegans / C. briggsae orthologs. The phylogenetic distance between A. caninum and A. ceylanicum is almost identical to that for C. elegans / C. briggsae. Conclusion The genes discovered should substantially accelerate research toward better understanding of the parasites' basic biology as well as new therapies including vaccines and novel anthelmintics

LINVIEW: Incremental View Maintenance for Complex Analytical Queries

Many analytics tasks and machine learning problems can be naturally expressed by iterative linear algebra programs. In this paper, we study the incremental view maintenance problem for such complex analytical queries. We develop a framework, called LINVIEW, for capturing deltas of linear algebra programs and understanding their computational cost. Linear algebra operations tend to cause an avalanche effect where even very local changes to the input matrices spread out and infect all of the intermediate results and the final view, causing incremental view maintenance to lose its performance benefit over re-evaluation. We develop techniques based on matrix factorizations to contain such epidemics of change. As a consequence, our techniques make incremental view maintenance of linear algebra practical and usually substantially cheaper than re-evaluation. We show, both analytically and experimentally, the usefulness of these techniques when applied to standard analytics tasks. Our evaluation demonstrates the efficiency of LINVIEW in generating parallel incremental programs that outperform re-evaluation techniques by more than an order of magnitude.Comment: 14 pages, SIGMO

Melanin-templated rapid synthesis of silver nanostructures

BACKGROUND: As a potent antimicrobial agent, silver nanostructures have been used in nanosensors and nanomaterial-based assays for the detection of food relevant analytes such as organic molecules, aroma, chemical contaminants, gases and food borne pathogens. In addition silver based nanocomposites act as an antimicrobial for food packaging materials. In this prospective, the food grade melanin pigment extracted from sponge associated actinobacterium Nocardiopsis alba MSA10 and melanin mediated synthesis of silver nanostructures were studied. Based on the present findings, antimicrobial nanostructures can be developed against food pathogens for food industrial applications. RESULTS: Briefly, the sponge associated actinobacterium N. alba MSA10 was screened and fermentation conditions were optimized for the production of melanin pigment. The Plackett-Burman design followed by a Box-Behnken design was developed to optimize the concentration of most significant factors for improved melanin yield. The antioxidant potential, reductive capabilities and physiochemical properties of Nocardiopsis melanin was characterized. The optimum production of melanin was attained with pH 7.5, temperature 35°C, salinity 2.5%, sucrose 25 g/L and tyrosine 12.5 g/L under submerged fermentation conditions. A highest melanin production of 3.4 mg/ml was reached with the optimization using Box-Behnken design. The purified melanin showed rapid reduction and stabilization of silver nanostructures. The melanin mediated process produced uniform and stable silver nanostructures with broad spectrum antimicrobial activity against food pathogens. CONCLUSIONS: The melanin pigment produced by N. alba MSA10 can be used for environmentally benign synthesis of silver nanostructures and can be useful for food packaging materials. The characteristics of broad spectrum of activity against food pathogens of silver nanostructures gives an insight for their potential applicability in incorporation of food packaging materials and antimicrobials for stored fruits and foods

Exploration of PET and MRI radiomic features for decoding breast cancer phenotypes and prognosis.

Radiomics is an emerging technology for imaging biomarker discovery and disease-specific personalized treatment management. This paper aims to determine the benefit of using multi-modality radiomics data from PET and MR images in the characterization breast cancer phenotype and prognosis. Eighty-four features were extracted from PET and MR images of 113 breast cancer patients. Unsupervised clustering based on PET and MRI radiomic features created three subgroups. These derived subgroups were statistically significantly associated with tumor grade (p = 2.0 × 10-6), tumor overall stage (p = 0.037), breast cancer subtypes (p = 0.0085), and disease recurrence status (p = 0.0053). The PET-derived first-order statistics and gray level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) textural features were discriminative of breast cancer tumor grade, which was confirmed by the results of L2-regularization logistic regression (with repeated nested cross-validation) with an estimated area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) of 0.76 (95% confidence interval (CI) = [0.62, 0.83]). The results of ElasticNet logistic regression indicated that PET and MR radiomics distinguished recurrence-free survival, with a mean AUC of 0.75 (95% CI = [0.62, 0.88]) and 0.68 (95% CI = [0.58, 0.81]) for 1 and 2 years, respectively. The MRI-derived GLCM inverse difference moment normalized (IDMN) and the PET-derived GLCM cluster prominence were among the key features in the predictive models for recurrence-free survival. In conclusion, radiomic features from PET and MR images could be helpful in deciphering breast cancer phenotypes and may have potential as imaging biomarkers for prediction of breast cancer recurrence-free survival