Objective: To investigate the effects of 12-weeks neuromuscular electrical stimulation (NMES) program on abdominal muscle strength, abdominal and waist circumference and selected pulmonary function after major abdominal surgery. Design: Randomized controlled trial. Material and methods: Forty five patients participated in the study and were randomized into NMES group and placebo NMES group. NMES group received 12-weeks NMES program 5 times per week 20-45 minutes per session and placebo NMES group received placebo NMES five times per week. Main measures: Isometric abdominal muscle strength, abdominal circumference, waist circumference, forced vital capacity (FVC) and forced expiratory volume in one second (FEV1) were measured at baseline, one month after surgery (midpoint) and after 12-weeks. Results: Patients in the NMES group showed a significant improvement as compared with those in the placebo NMES group. Abdominal strength and percentage of improvement after 12-weeks were 94.47±1.62 Nm (73.02%) for NMES group and 58.04±2.14 Nm (4.57 %) for the placebo NMES group. Abdominal and waist circumference and percentage of improvement were 94.60±2.12 cm (4.30%) and 98.04±1.29 cm (6.28%) for NMES group and 98.13±1.75 cm (1.00%) and 103.64±1.13 cm (0.73%) for the placebo NMES group. FVC and FEV1 and percentage of improvement for the NMES group was 3.75 ± 0.33 liter (26.27 %) and 2.87 ± 0.29 liter (27.82%) and for the control group was 3.25 ± 0.27 liter (10.9 %) and 2.42 ± 0.23 liter (9.35%) respectively. Conclusions: Participation in NMES program is effective for strength gain and improves pulmonary function in rehabilitation of post-surgical patients.

Flexible magnetic nanoparticles decorated with dialdehyde starch (DAS) were developed and used as a novel enzyme support for the covalent conjugation of papain. The analyses of Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy confirmed the preparation of magnetic particles with flexible long molecular chains on their surfaces and conjugation of papain with the Fe3O4-DAS nanoparticles. The measurement of size distributions showed that the size of Fe3O4 nanoparticles had no marked changes after conjugation with papain. Considering that the immobilized papain was found to exhibit better tolerance to the variations of temperature and medium pH, an advantage of easy to magnetic separation and lack of negative effect on biological activity, the kind of flexible magnetic bioconjugate support should be a good immobilized enzyme carrier, and has potential application in textile, leather, food industries.

A software process is a group of activities that are integrated to produce a software system. Software engineering involves the selection of several software architectural alternatives, but there is no definite guidance on which architecture is most suitable in terms of tradeoffs. Software Architecture during the designing process must comply with particular requirements, for the efficiency of the software. The software architecture defines the external properties of the components in a system and the internal relations between them. A major challenge in the software architecture design process is the accurate prediction and improvement of the software performance characteristics in terms of factors such as outage frequency and duration before software delivery. This paper proposes a software architecture for an ATM banking system based on Fuzzy Association Rules (FAR) and reviews some of the Software Architecture Analysis Methods (SAAM), implementation of FAR and a detailed performance analysis of software architecture in terms of reliability, flexibility, adaptability, and security. The software architecture is compared to the proposed ATM banking software architecture with various existing software architectures in terms of performance, reliability, flexibility, adaptability, and security. It is observed that the proposed software architecture performs better when compared to all other existing software architectures.

Introduction and objectives: The aim of this study was to assess the consumption level of plant sterol naturally-occurring in food among adults and its connection with food preferences and food choice factors. \nMaterial and methods: The study population comprised of 817 adults (n=449 of female and n=368 of male) aged 35.8 ±11.3. Anthropometric appraisal included: body height and weight, waist and hip circumferences. Nutritional questionnaire was used to estimate the food preferences of selected food products. Nutritional data were assessed by 24-hours food records., Cluster analysis was applied to identify the similarity of plant sterol naturally-occurring in food and food preferences. \nResults: The mean intake of plant sterols was estimated by level Median = 107.3 mg/day in female and 148.2 mg/day in male. Cluster showed a varied preferences of selected food products which was also related to the level of the phytosterols consumption. Female with higher intake of plant sterols (cluster II) were more likely to pay attention to: quality, flavor, freshness, nutritional value, health aspect of fruits, vegetables and cereals products. Price was the least preferred factor. Similar tendency among males was not observed.\nConclusions: The consumption level of plant sterol naturally-occurring in food was low among studied adults. The highest plants sterols intake was connected with the tendency to choose preferable products that are good sources of phytosterols. Sex differences as relevant chosen factors were observed

Mobile ad-hoc networks are becoming more popular as the use of mobile computers are increasing. The biggest challenge facing such networks is continuous and random change in the network topology. In order to identify the best topology routes in multi-hop mobile network, it is necessary to minimize the hop-count based on finding the shortest path between nodes, and this becomes an important factor in the previous research. Expected Transmission Time (ETT) is a bandwidth-adjusted Expected Transmission Count, it is more efficient in many related research works. ETT metric incorporates the effects of link loss ratios, asymmetry in the loss ratios between the two sides, and interference among the successive links of a path. In contrast, the minimum hop-count metric chooses instinctively among the different paths of the same minimum length, regardless of the large differences in throughput among those paths, and ignoring the possibility that a longer path may perform higher throughput. This paper describes the design and implementation of ETT as a link quality metric for finding high-throughput route in ad hoc network, as well as modifications to DSR which allow it to use ETT. We analyze and compare the performance through simulation using aspects of throughput and end-to-end delay. We apply ETT as routing metric in the Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) protocol which it is an reactive routing protocol in OPNET simulator. Through simulation analysis, the modified ETT-DSR protocol has higher throughput than the original DSR protocol throughout the simulation experiments.

Background/ Ethnopharmacological Relevance\nAyurveda, the system of traditional medicine native to the India and a form of alternative medicine, emphasizes the use of cow’s urine as an effective medicine against various skin diseases, over the centuries. A complete biochemical analysis of cow’s urine was done in this research, to understand its biochemical constituents, including tests to confirm the presence of phenols, flavonoids, antioxidants and steroids.\nMaterials and Methods\nA set of quantitative and qualitative tests that baselined methodologies/ estimations using Gallic acid for phenols, vanillin-catechol for flavonoids, 2,4-dinitrophenyl hydrazine (DNPH) for antioxidants, etc. were applied. The antioxidant activity was assessed by hydroxyl radical scavenging activity using DNPH reagent. Diastase enzyme activity was calculated in terms of maltose equivalent using DNS reagent estimation method. HPLC analysis was done using Gallic acid standard. Hydrocortisone steroid estimation using 2,4-dinitrophenyl hydrazine was also done successfully.\nResults\nThe research highlights cow’s urine as a substantial source of natural antioxidant, helpful in preventing the progress of various oxidative stresses. Hydrocortisone estimation confirms cow’s urine to be an excellent natural source of steroids too, and ascertains its wide array of medical applications as a natural source of antioxidants, steroids, and other enzymes.\nConclusions\nThis research ascertains the pharmaceutical applications of cow’s urine, being a natural source of significant bioconstituents with no harmful side-effects and cost-effectively cheaper in extraction/ purification processes.

A hybrid model for the Automatic Segmentation of the blood vessels of the Coronary Angiogram image is proposed, which involves various stages such as Pre-processing, Image Enhancement, and Segmentation using discrete wavelet transform and watershed transform along with Morphological operations. Pre-processing is done to remove the noise using the bicubic interpolation method followed by Daubechies 4 discrete wavelet transform and Weiner filtering. Further, Image Enhancement is done to improve the quality of the image using the histogram equalization technique. Auto Thresholding is done to segment the edges of the blood vessel accurately and efficiently using distance and watershed transforms followed by normalization and median filtering. Finally, Morphological operations are performed to remove the noise due to segmentation. Superiority of the proposed hybrid model is evaluated using fractional true positive, fractional false negative, the total computational time and mean parameters against the existing methods in the literature. Thus, it is proved that the proposed hybrid method is efficient and improved.

Web mining has stretched its boundary for mining large data repositories for the purpose of generating the accurate responses for the user defined queries. Subsequently there is a lack of heterogeneity in structure of web data there needed for the evolution of web mining. Similar to behavior of data mining and text mining, Web content mining differs on appending the amount of data/information on the web that is hurriedly increasing day by day. The significant issues with respect to web content mining are the critical decision-making process. The previous research works are focused on the prime demerits in which first top two ranking sentences are taken to be considered for retrieval of information; consequently due to the redundancy fact clustering accuracy was to bare minimum level. In our proposed work, Semantic Based Proximity Enclosure (SBPE) mechanism applied deals on calculating the semantic based proximity score for predicting several document constraints, and then follows the document resemblance matrix construction, finally the documents are clustered applying the RABC algorithm according to the resemblance matrix generated. Resultantly User pertinent documents are retrieved based on query weighting methodology. The simulation results portrays that our proposed mechanism facilitates effectively when applied with large set of documents moreover illustrates superior optimization results in terms of accuracy too.