Evaluation of Acute Flaccid Paralysis in Hamadan, Iran from 2002 to 2009

Jalal Poorolajal,Shadi Ghasemi,Leila Nezamabadi Farahani,Atefeh Sadat Hosseini,Seyyed Jalal Bathaei,Ali Zahiri 한국역학회 2011 Epidemiology and Health Vol.33 No.-

OBJECTIVES: To achieve a polio-free certification in Iran, a nationwide active surveillance program for acute flaccid paralysis (AFP) was set up following World Health Organization guidelines. This article describes the results of an eight-year surveillance of AFP in Hamadan, in the west of Iran. METHODS: A standard set of minimum core variables were collected. All cases of non-polio AFP in children aged <15 years old were reported. Two stool specimens were collected within 14 days of the onset of paralysis. RESULTS: During the eight-year survey, 88 AFP cases aged <15 years old were reported. About 40% (35/88) of cases were aged ≤5 years, 56% (49/88) were boys, 19 (21.6%) had fever at the onset of paralysis, 74 (84.0%) had complete paralysis within four days of onset, and 22 (24.7%) had asymmetric paralysis. More than one AFP case was detected per 100,000 children aged <15 years old in all years. The risk of AFP in patients aged <5 years old was almost double that of older patients. Guillain-Barré Syndrome was the major leading cause of AFP (66/88). Adequate stool specimens were collected from 85% of AFP patients. All stool specimens were tested virologically, but no wild polioviruses were detected. CONCLUSION: The active surveillance of non-polio AFP was efficient over the last eight years and exceeded 1.0 case per 100,000 children aged <15 years old. Nonetheless, there was a decreasing trend in the detection of AFP cases during the last two years and should be the focus of the policymakers’ special attention, although AFP cases were still above the target level.

Utilisation of Waste Plastic in Bituminous Mix for Improved Performance of Roads

Jalal J. Jafar 대한토목학회 2016 KSCE JOURNAL OF CIVIL ENGINEERING Vol.20 No.1

The use of waste plastic as a partial aggregate replacement in bituminous mix products often suffers from weak bonding between the plastic surface and the bitumen. This work reports on the use of plastic waste and chemical additives in order to improve the performance of the volumetric and mechanical properties of bituminous mixtures. The selected recycled waste plastics were used as partial aggregate replacement in bituminous mix product. The plastics were treated using a strong oxidising mixture of dichromate and sulphuric acid while the bitumen was treated with a cross linking agent, polyethyleneimine. Three modified bituminous mixtures were prepared and the stiffness results (from Retained Stiffness after Water Immersion Test) were compared with the control bituminous mixture. Over the ten measurement cycles it was observed that the stiffness increased by 10% for the chemically modified bituminous mixtures. This improvement is attributed to an increase in the bonding forces between the aggregates and the bitumen. Furthermore, a mechanism is proposed in order to explain the effect of the chemical additives on the increase in the stiffness of the bituminous mixture.

Are Financial Risks Rewarded with Appropriate Returns in Russian Banks?

Jalal Hafeth Ahmad Abu-Alrop 대한산업공학회 2021 Industrial Engineeering & Management Systems Vol.20 No.4

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the risk efficiency of 85 Russian commercial banks During the period “2008 -2017”. This study uses the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) with financial ratios to evaluate the risk efficiency of Russian banks. The inputs of model DEA are represented by financial risk and leverage, while the outputs are repre-sented by profitability. The study found the impact of credit risk, operational risk, and liquidity risk on performance indicators in Russian banks was positive and important, but the impact of leverage and interest rate risk on perfor-mance indicators in Russian banks was limited and negative. The study also found that the medium Russian banks were the most effective in risk efficiency, while small banks were more efficient than large banks. The study also con-cluded that the leverage recommended by Basel 3 is insufficient to provide stability in banks. The study suggested a model for monitoring Russian banks on the basis of the concept of risk efficiency to improve banking regulation and increase risk efficiency.

Robust human activity recognition from depth video using spatiotemporal multi-fused features

Jalal, A.,Kim, Y.H.,Kim, Y.J.,Kamal, S.,Kim, D. Pergamon Press 2017 Pattern recognition Vol.61 No.-

The recently developed depth imaging technologies have provided new directions for human activity recognition (HAR) without attaching optical markers or any other motion sensors to human body parts. In this paper, we propose novel multi-fused features for online human activity recognition (HAR) system that recognizes human activities from continuous sequences of depth map. The proposed online HAR system segments human depth silhouettes using temporal human motion information as well as it obtains human skeleton joints using spatiotemporal human body information. Then, it extracts the spatiotemporal multi-fused features that concatenate four skeleton joint features and one body shape feature. Skeleton joint features include the torso-based distance feature (DT), the key joint-based distance feature (DK), the spatiotemporal magnitude feature (M) and the spatiotemporal directional angle feature (θ). The body shape feature called HOG-DDS represents the projections of the depth differential silhouettes (DDS) between two consecutive frames onto three orthogonal planes by the histogram of oriented gradients (HOG) format. The size of the proposed spatiotemporal multi-fused feature is reduced by a code vector in the code book which is generated by vector quantization method. Then, it trains the hidden Markov model (HMM) with the code vectors of the multi-fused features and recognizes the segmented human activity by the forward spotting scheme using the trained HMM-based human activity classifiers. The experimental results on three challenging depth video datasets such as IM-DailyDepthActivity, MSRAction3D and MSRDailyActivity3D demonstrate that the proposed online HAR method using the proposed multi-fused features outperforms the state-of-the-art HAR methods in terms of recognition accuracy.

The Impact of Financial Risks on the Performance of Russian Banks

Jalal Hafeth Ahmad Abu-Alrop 대한산업공학회 2020 Industrial Engineeering & Management Systems Vol.19 No.4

This study uses multiple regression analysis with financial ratios to determine the impact of financial risks and financial leverage on the financial performance of Russian commercial banks in the period 2008-17. This study involves 85 Russian banks, whose total assets comprise 87% of the total assets of the Russian banking sector. The study used six indicators to measure five types of financial risks and an indicator to measure the financial leverage: interest rate risk, foreign exchange risk, liquidity risk, credit risk, operational risk, and financial leverage risk. The study also used three indicators to measure bank performance: Net Interest Margin, Return on Assets, and Return on Equity. The study found that Over the 10 years of the study, the risk contributed to the formation of net interest margin by 87%, return on equity by 50%, and return on assets by 53%. The impact of credit risk, operational risk, and liquidity risks on performance indicators in Russian banks were very positive and significant. The effect of leverage and interest rate risk on performance indicators was negative and very limited. The foreign exchange risks had no effect on performance indicators. The study also found that the other variables (without risk and leverage) had a positive effect on the net interest margin, but their effect on the return on assets, and the return on equity was negative and significant. The study concluded It is important for Russian banks to search for these factors, which led to the negative impact, Russian banks should study these factors and correct their positions.

Using the capture-recapture method to estimate the human immunodeficiency virus-positive population

Jalal Poorolajal,Younes Mohammadi,Farzad Farzinara 한국역학회 2017 Epidemiology and Health Vol.39 No.-

OBJECTIVES: The capture-recapture method was applied to estimate the number of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)-positive individuals not registered with any data sources. METHODS: This cross-sectional study was conducted in Lorestan Province, in the west of Iran, in 2016. Three incomplete sources of HIV-positive individuals, with partially overlapping data, were used, including: (a) transfusion center, (b) volunteer counseling and testing centers (VCTCs), and (c) prison. The 3-source capture-recapture method, using a log-linear model, was applied for data analysis. The Akaike information criterion and the Bayesian information criterion were used for model selection. RESULTS: Of the 2,456 HIV-positive patients registered in these 3 data sources, 1,175 (47.8%) were identified in transfusion center, 867 (35.3%) in VCTCs, and 414 (16.8%) in prison. After the exclusion of duplicate entries, 2,281 HIV-positive patients remained. Based on the capture-recapture method, 14,868 (95% confidence interval, 9,923 to 23,427) HIV-positive individuals were not identified in any of the registries. Therefore, the real number of HIV-positive individuals was estimated to be 17,149, and the overall completeness of the 3 registries was estimated to be around 13.3%. CONCLUSIONS: Based on capture-recapture estimates, a huge number of HIV-positive individuals are not registered with any of the provincial data sources. This is an urgent message for policymakers who plan and provide health care services for HIV-positive patients. Although the capture-recapture method is a useful statistical approach for estimating unknown populations, due to the assumptions and limitations of the method, the population size may be overestimated as it seems possible in our results.

Menadione-Modified Anodes for Power Enhancement in Single Chamber Microbial Fuel Cells

Jalal Ahmed,김성현 대한화학회 2013 Bulletin of the Korean Chemical Society Vol.34 No.12

As anode fabrication with different materials has been proven to be a successful alternative for enhancing power generation in the microbial fuel cells, a new approach to improved performance of MFCs with the use of menadione/carbon powder composite-modified carbon cloth anode has been explored in this study. Menadione has formal potential to easily accept electrons from the outer membrane cytochromes of electroactive bacteria that can directly interact with the solid surface. Surface bound menadione was able to maintain an electrical wiring with the trans-membrane electron transfer pathways to facilitate extracellular electron transfer to the electrode. In a single chamber air cathode MFC inoculated with aerobic sludge, maximum power density of 1250 ± 35 mWm−2 was achieved, which was 25% higher than that of an unmodified anode. The observed high power density and improved coulomb efficiency of 61% were ascribed to the efficient electron shuttling via the immobilized menadione.

Thermally induced mechanical analysis of temperature-dependent FG-CNTRC conical shells

Jalal Torabi,Reza Ansari 국제구조공학회 2018 Structural Engineering and Mechanics, An Int'l Jou Vol.68 No.3

A numerical study is performed to investigate the impacts of thermal loading on the vibration and buckling of functionally graded carbon nanotube-reinforced composite (FG-CNTRC) conical shells. Thermo-mechanical properties of constituents are considered to be temperature-dependent. Considering the shear deformation theory, the energy functional is derived, and applying the variational differential quadrature (VDQ) method, the mass and stiffness matrices are obtained. The shear correction factors are accurately calculated by matching the shear strain energy obtained from an exact three-dimensional distribution of the transverse shear stresses and shear strain energy related to the first-order shear deformation theory. Numerical results reveal that considering temperature-dependent material properties plays an important role in predicting the thermally induced vibration of FG-CNTRC conical shells, and neglecting this effect leads to considerable overestimation of the stiffness of the structure.

Evaluation of electro-coagulation method for decolorization and degradation of organic dyes in aqueous solutions

Jalal Basiri Parsa,Farideh Nabizadeh Chianeh 한국화학공학회 2012 Korean Journal of Chemical Engineering Vol.29 No.11

This research has two parts: at first part electro coagulation (EC) method was used to remove the dye Direct Black 22 (DB22 (in aqueous media. All experiments were done in a 2 liter reactor with two electrodes made of steel (SS-304) as cathodes and one aluminum electrode as anode. Parameters affecting the process, such as anode material,electrolyte concentration, current density, initial pH of solution and the initial dye concentration, were investigated. Total amount of consumed energy was used for determination of optimal conditions. According to the results obtained for DB22 at optimized conditions, color and COD removal percentage were 92% and 85%, respectively. In addition,the current efficiency for aluminum anode in removal of DB22 was 90%. At the second part of the research work, color removal by EC for six different dyes was evaluated. The results showed that dye structure and anode type are very important factors on performance of the process.

Synthesis of Needle-Shape ZnO-ZnS Core-Shell Heterostructures and Their Optical and Field Emission Properties

Jalal Rouhi,C. H. Raymond Ooi,Shahrom Mahmud,Mohamad Rusop Mahmood 대한금속·재료학회 2015 ELECTRONIC MATERIALS LETTERS Vol.11 No.6

Well-aligned ZnO-ZnS core-shell nano-needle arrays were synthesized using a simple aqueous solution approach to investigate the optical and field emission properties of heterostructure materials. The photoluminescence of the coreshell nano-needles exhibits a distinct enhancement compared with that of uncoated ZnO nano-needles. The UV-vis spectra show that the ZnS shell layer enhances the optical absorption of ZnO nano-needles by decreasing the interface band gap, which indicates the potential application of heterostructures in photovoltaic and solar cells. The core-shell nano-needles exhibit a remarkably high field enhancement factor of 3.74 × 103, a low turn-on field of 2.31 V/μm, and a high time stability. These findings show that the construction of core-shell heterostructure can efficiently improve the field emission performance of ZnO nano-needles, which is a promising route for the development of novel nanoemitters with controllable morphology and as suitable shell materials for heterostructures.