A Deep Dive into Understanding Tumor Foci Classification using Multiparametric MRI Based on Convolutional Neural Network

Deep learning models have had a great success in disease classifications using large data pools of skin cancer images or lung X-rays. However, data scarcity has been the roadblock of applying deep learning models directly on prostate multiparametric MRI (mpMRI). Although model interpretation has been heavily studied for natural images for the past few years, there has been a lack of interpretation of deep learning models trained on medical images. This work designs a customized workflow for the small and imbalanced data set of prostate mpMRI where features were extracted from a deep learning model and then analyzed by a traditional machine learning classifier. In addition, this work contributes to revealing how deep learning models interpret mpMRI for prostate cancer patients stratification

Preliminary Implementation of the Next Generation Cannulation Simulator

© 2019 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation (ECMO) is a highly complex/critical lifesaving procedure known to support patients with cardiac and respiratory issues. Patients on ECMO are monitored 24/7 by a team of highly trained ECMO team comprising nurses, physicians, respiratory therapists, and perfusionists promptly intervening to any potential emergency situation. Simulation-Based Training (SBT) allows clinicians to experience and practice realistic hands-on procedures and scenarios without any risk. In ECMO, cannulation is a critical procedure performed to externally reroute the blood flow so it can be re-oxygenated by the ECMO machine before being recirculated through the patient's body. In a close collaboration with Hamad Medical Corporation (HMC), this project aims to develop a cost effective, realistic, and user-friendly ECMO simulator focusing on the venous and arterial cannulation procedure, The main features of this simulator include cannulation emergencies caused by low pressure flow, excessive force, recirculation, or mispositioned wire/cannula. Therefore, the ECMO cannulation simulator will not only greatly contribute to the initial and ongoing local training of HMC ECMO clinicians but also contribute to improving patient care by lowering the risks associated with the cannulation process

A new fair marker algorithm for DiffServ networks

Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has proposed many new technologies to cover the new real time applications which have become very important in today's Internet demands. One such technology is Differentiated Services (DiffServ). DiffServ routers provide Per Hop Behaviors (PHBs) to aggregate traffic for different level of services. There is an unfairness problem that occur in a DiffServ networks. In this paper an improved version of the time sliding window three color marker is proposed and analyzed. The proposed algorithm is based on the adaptability concept of changing the constant value in the previous version of the algorithm (ItswTCM), in other words, changing the limit for the constant value without affecting the simplicity of the algorithm. The paper design and implement the algorithm with extensive simulations using NS-2 simulator to compare the proposed algorithm with previous algorithms. Results show that our new marker performs better than previous algorithms such as srTCM, trTCM, tswWTCM and ItswTCM in terms of fairness and number of yellow packets injected to the network in proportion to the committed rate

The continuous p-centre problem: An investigation into variable neighbourhood search with memory

A VNS-based heuristic using both a facility as well as a customer type neighbourhood structure is proposed to solve the p-centre problem in the continuous space. Simple but effective enhancements to the original Elzinga-Hearn algorithm as well as a powerful ‘locate-allocate’ local search used within VNS are proposed. In addition, efficient implementations in both neighbourhood structures are presented. A learning scheme is also embedded into the search to produce a new variant of VNS that uses memory. The effect of incorporating strong intensification within the local search via a VND type structure is also explored with interesting results. Empirical results, based on several existing data set (TSP-Lib) with various values of p, show that the proposed VNS implementations outperform both a multi-start heuristic and the discrete-based optimal approach that use the same local search

SNR-Based OLSR Routing Protocol for Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) consist of a collection of mobile and fixed nodes that form a network. Nodes are capable of communicating with each other either with infrastructure, or infrastructureless, or in a hybrid mode. The major advantages of WMNs over the other wireless networks are the low-cost, self organization, self configuration, last mile internet solution, scalability, and reliability. These advantages have attracted the researcher over the last five years. WMNs technology is gaining an increased attention from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) community. This led the IEEE organization to emerge a special working group (IEEE 802.11s) in charge of the issues deriving from a completely wireless distribution system used to interconnect different Basic Service Sets (BSSs) through secure and performing links. In a multi-hop networks, like WMN, one of the main factors that influences the performance is the routing protocol. Generally speaking, routing protocols can be classified based-on the routing metric to 1) hop count-based routing protocols, like Adhoc on demand distance vector (AODV) where the optimum path is defined as the path that goes through the minimum number of nodes, 2) the link quality-based routing protocols, like OLSR where some metrics such as the bandwidth and the packet error rate are considered to define the optimum path to the destination. In this work the performances of a three commonly used routing protocols are compared. The main goal of this stag is to study the influence of different routing protocols in WMNs. The comparison is conducted with two scenarios of networks; a high mobility network and a low mobility network. (Open network) OPNET 11.5 modeler is used to build the WMNs. The performance of the network and the routing protocols has been studied in means of network throughput, End-to-End delay, routing protocol overhead and the mobility. The obtained results show that the Optimized link state routing protocol (OLSR) has the highestthroughput overDSR andAODVrouting protocols in WMNs. The unpredictable behavior of the wireless medium in WMNs environment demands the need for a routing protocol that is aware of the link conditions. Unfortunately the routing protocols used such as AODV and Dynamic source routing (DSR) are hop count-based; where the routing algorithm uses the number of nodes to determine the optimum path to the destination. In the second stage of this work a new routing technique for WMNs based-on Signal to noise ratio (SNR) as a new metric for OLSR routing protocol, is developed. The new metric has been implemented on the OLSR routing protocol module using OPNET simulator. The modified OLSR routing protocol is implemented in the comparison scenarios. The obtained results show that, when SNR is used as a routing metric in the OLSR routing protocol, the OLSR is getting the significantly higher network throughput over the DSR and AODV routing protocols. In the same time, the modified OLSR implemented with the SNR metric is showing a high improvement over the OLSR with the traditional hop-count metric. This thesis also studies the affect of different amounts of mobility in WMNs performance. VI

Postcolonial children's literature: songs of innocence and experience with reference Tomarina Budhos' Ask me no questions (2007), and Cathryn Clinton's A stone in my hand (2002)

The purpose of this paper is to show how psychological trauma resulted from conflicts such as colonialism, immigration, racism, wars and invasion; and even gender discrimination makes its way into postcolonial children's literature. For example, some contemporary writers of children's literature depict the painful experience of young immigrants who are living under constant stress and tension. Others try to depict how the Middle East conflicts and turmoil affect children living under occupation. In all of these cases, children are highly at risk of psychological trauma. This paper is going to discuss two contemporary children's novels which address the issues of immigration and war conflicts: Marina Budhos' Ask Me no questions (2007), and Cathryn Clinton's A Stone in my Hand (2002). They were chosen to reflect not only the variety of children's literature available, but also the unique struggles faced by young female protagonists living in two different cultural and political environments. The common thread running through these two novels is the experience of emotional trauma that young protagonists go through. The study of such trauma is at the core of the discussion of both novels. The paper will show how the protagonists of the two novels suffer "a double or triple trauma for children, who may witness the forcible removal of the parent, suddenly lose their caregiver, and/or abruptly lose their familiar home environment" (McLeigh

Variation Orders in Building Projects in Khartoum State-Sudan: The Causes and the Impact on Projects Performance

"Occurrence of variation orders (VOs) is a common phenomenon in building projects and a challenging feature. Opinions and feedback of the stakeholders of building projects at Khartoum State – Sudan were investigated to identify and rank the key factors that cause VOs and evaluate their consequent impact on projects’ performance. 10 projects were thoroughly analyzed to determine how their performance was affected by the occurrence of VOs and in conjunction with this an industry wide survey that was conducted to determine the frequency of occurrence of a previously compiled list of factors. 130 respondents -contractors, consultants, projects’ owners and project managers-took part in the survey. Considering the frequency of occurrence and the strength of their impact, the relative importance index from the participants’ feedback was calculated allowing the ranking of the factors causing VOs. It was found that the main causes for VOs emerged from the owners’ side and are mainly attributed to changing his needs or scope of work. It was also confirmed that there is a significant relationship between the occurrence of VOs and projects’ time extension (by 22-200%) and cost overrun (by 2.67-42.86).

The Prognostic Significance of the Depth of Cervical Stromal Invasion in Women with FIGO Stage II Uterine Endometrioid Carcinoma

Purpose/Objective(s): To explore the prognostic significance of the depth of cervical stromal invasion (CSI) on survival endpoints in women with FIGO stage II uterine endometrioid adenocarcinoma. Materials/Methods: A total of 117 patients were included in this retrospective review. Between 1990 and 2021, all patients with FIGO stage II endometrial cancer (EC) underwent hysterectomy and oophorectomy at our institution, with or without lymph node dissection. Patients with synchronous ovarian or breast cancer, as well as those who had undergone adjuvant systemic chemotherapy for EC, were excluded from the study. Pathologic slides were retrieved for these patients and were reviewed by a gynecologic pathologist to determine stromal thickness and the depth of CSI. The depth of CSI was then measured as a percentage of invasion (% CSI) and used in the analysis as a continuous or dichotomous variable (\u3c 50% vs \u3e = 50%). Patients\u27 demographics, pathologic, and treatment characteristics were analyzed using univariate and multivariate analysis to calculate recurrence-free (RFS) and disease-specific (DSS) rates. Results: The median age for the study cohort was 65 years (range, 34–96), and the median follow-up was 131 months (range, 9–334). A total of 90 patients (77%) had lymph node dissection, with a median of 8 examined lymph nodes (range 0-18). Adjuvant radiation therapy (RT) with pelvic or vaginal cuff HDR brachytherapy, or a combination of the two, was completed in 92 patients (79 percent). The median % CSI was 27% (range, 1-100) with 68% of patients having ≥ 50% CSI. While there was a trend for a worse 5-year RFS and DSS for women with ≥ 50% CSI (69% vs. 83%, p = 0.093) and (78% vs. 91%, p = 0.034), respectively, the depth of CSI was not statistically significant as an independent predictor of 5-year RFS, DSS, or OS. The depth of CSI was not associated with a difference in the recurrence pattern (vaginal cuff, pelvic, paraaortic, or distant). In multivariate analysis, FIGO grade was the only predictor of 5-year OS. FIGO grade and the presence of lympho-vascular space invasion (LVSI) were independent predictors of 5-year RFS and DSS. Conclusion: Deep cervical stromal invasion does not appear to be an independent predictive factor for survival endpoints in women with stage II uterine endometroid cancer, according to our findings. The presence of LVSI and tumor grade were both independent predictors of recurrence-free and disease-specific survival. Pooled data analysis may be needed to validate our study findings