Incidence of Active HCV infection amongst Blood Donors of Mardan District, Pakistan

Karim, Fawad,Nasar, Abu,Alam, Ibrar,Alam, Iftikhar,Hassan, Said,Gul, Rahmat,Ullah, Sana,Rizwan, Muhammad Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention 2016 Asian Pacific journal of cancer prevention Vol.17 No.1

Hepatitis C is an ailment of liver caused by hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection. About 3% of the world population is infected by this virus. HCV infection is a leading reason for liver cirrhosis and therefore a major source of hepatocellular carcinoma. The study focused on the incidence of active HCV infection in blood donors of Mardan district of KPK, Pakistan. A total of 5318 blood donors were inspected for the presence of anti-HCV antibodies and HCV-RNA using ICT (immune-chromatographic test), ELISA and RT-PCR at Mardan Medical Complex (MMC), Mardan. Out of these, 157 (2.95%) were positive by ICT, 60 (1.12%) by ELISA and 56 (1.05%) for HCV-RNA. The frequency of active HCV infectivity amongst the blood donors from district Mardan, KPK Pakistan was 1.05 %. Application of strict measures during blood donor selection and use of proper screening assays such as ELISA in place of ICT devices can give a more accurate picture so that the incidence of this viral infection in HCV negative blood recipients can be reduced.

Experimental and numerical study about seismic retrofitting of corrosion-damaged reinforced concrete columns of bridge using combination of FRP wrapping and steel profiles

Hassan Afshin,Mohammad R. Nouri Shirazi,Karim Abedi 국제구조공학회 2019 Steel and Composite Structures, An International J Vol.30 No.3

In the present study, a numerical and experimental investigation has been carried out on the seismic behavior of RC columns of a bridge which damaged under corrosive environments and retrofitted by various techniques including combined application of CFRP sheets and steel profiles. A novel hybrid retrofitting procedure, including the application of inner steel profiles and outer peripheral CFRP sheets, has been proposed for strengthening purpose. Seven large-scale RC columns of a Girder Bridge have been tested in the laboratory under the influence of simultaneous application of constant axial load and the lateral cyclic displacements. Having verified the finite element modeling, using ABAQUS software, the effects of important parameters such as the corrosion percentage of steel rebars and the number of CFRP layers have been evaluated. Based on the results, retrofitting of RC columns of the bridge with the proposed technique was effective in improving some measures of structural performance such as lateral strength degradation and higher energy absorption capability. However, the displacement ductility was not considerably improved whereas the elastic stiffness of the specimens has been increased.

Inhibitory Effects of Apium graveolens on Xanthine Oxidase Activity and Serum Uric Acid Levels in Hyperuricemic Mice

Karim Dolati,Hassan Rakhshandeh,Mohsen Golestani,Fatemeh Forouzanfar,Roya Sadeghnia,Hamid R. Sadeghnia 한국식품영양과학회 2018 Preventive Nutrition and Food Science Vol.23 No.2

Celery (Apium graveolens) is traditionally used to treat rheumatism and cardiovascular disorders. Hyperuricemia is considered as a predisposing factor for gout and is also suggested to be associated with coronary artery disease. In the present study, the effect of hydroalcoholic extracts from A. graveolens (AGE) against potassium oxonate (PO)-induced hyperuricemia was investigated in mice. AGE (250, 500, and 1,000 mg/kg) or allopurinol (5 mg/kg, as positive control) were orally administrated 1 h after PO injection (250 mg/kg, ip) for two weeks. After that, the serum uric acid level and hepatic xanthine dehydrogenase (XDH) and xanthine oxidase (XO) activities were measured. In addition, the antioxidant activity of AGE was determined by assessment of hepatic lipid peroxidation, in vivo and the ferric reducing/antioxidant power assay, in vitro. The extract exhibited good capacity to reduce ferric ion to ferrous ion with mean value of 63.8±8.5 μmol/g. The data also showed that oxonate treatment produced a significant increase in serum uric acid level (4.6 vs. 2.3 mg/ dL, P<0.001), liver XO/XDH activities (P<0.01 and P<0.001, respectively), and hepatic lipid peroxides levels (about two fold, P<0.01), compared to the healthy mice. AGE significantly decreased the serum uric acid level, hepatic XO/XDH activities, and lipid peroxidation, in a dose-dependent manner. Oral administration of 1,000 mg/kg AGE for two weeks reversed the elevated serum uric acid level (2.7 vs. 4.6 mg/dL, P<0.001) and significantly inhibited liver XO/XDH activities (P<0.001) and diminished hepatic lipid peroxidation (0.45 vs. 0.82 nmol/mg protein, P<0.05), compared with hyperuricemic mice. AGE (1,000 mg/kg) per se did not significantly modify these parameters. Our results demonstrated that AGE could reduce the serum uric acid level via inhibition of hepatic XDH/XO and indicated its potential utility as an effective hypouricemic bioactive agent or functional food.

Characterization of Prime and Maximal Ideals of Product Rings by 𝓕 - lim

Mouadi, Hassan,Karim, Driss Department of Mathematics 2021 Kyungpook mathematical journal Vol.61 No.4

Let {R_i}_i∈I be an infinite family of rings and R = ∏_i∈I R_i their product. In this paper, we investigate the prime spectrum of R by 𝓕-limits. Special attention is paid to relationship between the elements of Spec(R_i) and the elements of Spec(∏_i∈I R_i) use 𝓕-lim, also we give a new condition so that ∏_i∈I R_i is a zero dimensional ring.

Orbital Metastatic Angiosarcoma

Souhail Hassane,Elasri Fouad,Iferkhass Said,Reda Karim,Naoumi Asmae,Chana Houcine,Oubaaz Abdelbar 대한안과학회 2010 Korean Journal of Ophthalmology Vol.24 No.6

We report a case of a 48-year-old man who developed metastatic angiosarcoma in her left orbit. A 48-year-old man was first sent to us for a check up of proptosis of the left eye. A left orbital tumor was recognized on orbital computed tomography scans. The open biopsy showed angiosarcoma. Chest X-ray films and thoracic computed tomography showed an abnormal mass in the left inferior lung field. Angiosarcoma was confirmed by transbronchial lung biopsy. In summary, we believed that the orbital tumour was an initial symptom of the metastasis ensuing from the lung angiosarcoma.

Evaluation of Noise Environment and Noise Mapping with ArcGIS in Chittagong City, Bangladesh

Md. Abdul Aziz,Ahasanul Karim,Md. Mehedi Hassan Masum,Kazi Kader Newaz 대한환경공학회 2021 대한환경공학회지 Vol.43 No.4

Objectives : Noise pollution in Chittagong City of Bangladesh is a big concern because of huge population growth and urbanization. The objective of the study was to evaluate and mapping the noise levels in twelve locations of this city at different periods. Methods : Noise level data were collected at various locations by a precision grade sound level meter and the noise pollution parameters (Lmin, LAeq,2h and Lmax) were calculated. Furthermore, the noise pollution maps of Chittagong City were developed using geographical information system to address the locations which are prone to the environmental hazards. Results and discussion : The study revealed that the average noise levels were 64.6, 76.9, and 75.5 ㏈(A) for residential, commercial and silence zones, respectively. The interpolated noise maps showed that noise environment of this city was unsatisfactory, especially, in the areas of New Market, Nasirabad, and Bawa School & College were exposed to high noise pollutions. The afternoon and evening periods were experiencing higher noise pollution in the commercial and silence zones than the morning period of the day. Conclusions : The study suggests that the noise levels are above the acceptable limit and hence urgent measures should be taken into consideration to control the level of noise pollution in the city.

Arabic Handwriting Text Recognition Based on Efficient Segmentation, DCT and HOG Features

Mustafa S. Kadhm,Alia Karim Abdul Hassan 보안공학연구지원센터 2016 International Journal of Multimedia and Ubiquitous Vol.11 No.10

Writing in its different forms, printed and manuscript has always been a tool essential in human communication, and as ubiquitous in most areas of its operations. It is used to store and archive knowledge. Thereby, human has always developed techniques for sustainability across generations. Indeed, with the advent of new information technologies and electronics computers, and further increase the power of machines, automated processing. Besides, one of the important system is the handwriting recognition. Handwriting text recognition system based on efficient segmentation, DCT and HOG Features is proposed. The proposed system depends on the segmentation of the text into words only. Moreover, the system achieved best recognition accuracy 96.317% based on the used methods and SVM classifier.

Terms-based discriminative information space for robust text classification

Junejo, K.N.,Karim, A.,Hassan, M.T.,Jeon, M. North-Holland [etc ; Elsevier Science Ltd 2016 Information sciences Vol.372 No.-

<P>With the popularity of Web 2.0, there has been a phenomenal increase in the utility of text classification in applications like document filtering and sentiment categorization. Many of these applications demand that the classification method be efficient and robust, yet produce accurate categorizations by using the terms in the documents only. In this paper, we propose a novel and efficient method using terms-based discriminative information space for robust text classification. Terms in the documents are assigned weights according to the discrimination information they provide for one category over the others. These weights also serve to partition the terms into category sets. A linear opinion pool is adopted for combining the discrimination information provided by each set of terms to yield a feature space (discriminative information space) having dimensions equal to the number of classes. Subsequently, a discriminant function is learned to categorize the documents in the feature space. This classification methodology relies upon corpus information only, and is robust to distribution shifts and noise. We develop theoretical parallels of our methodology with generative, discriminative, and hybrid classifiers. We evaluate our methodology extensively with five different discriminative term weighting schemes on six data sets from different application areas. We give a side-by-side comparison with four well-known text classification techniques. The results show that our methodology consistently outperforms the rest, especially when there is a distribution shift from training to test sets. Moreover, our methodology is simple and effective for different application domains and training set sizes. It is also fast with a small and tunable memory footprint. (C) 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.</P>

Distributed Gateway Selection for M2M Communication in Cognitive 5G Networks

Naeem, Muhammad,Ejaz, Waleed,Karim, L.,Ahmed, Syed Hassan,Anpalagan, A.,Jo, Minho,Song, Houbing IEEE 2017 IEEE network Vol.31 No.6

<P>M2M communication is an important component for future wireless networks. M2M systems consist of a large number of devices that can operate with minimum or no human intervention. However, spectrum demand rises exponentially with the increase in the number of connected devices. Cognitive 5G networks are key to address the issue of spectrum scarcity. Further, use of multiple gateways in cognitive 5G networks for M2M communication can increase system throughput, coverage, and energy efficiency. Nevertheless, using multiple gateways for the secondary M2M devices may cause interference to the primary M2M devices. Existing gateway selection protocols for cognitive M2M communication mostly use single channel CSMA, and thus are not efficient in terms of reducing the interference. Thus, in this article, we propose a DGAP based on multi-channel CSMA for M2M communication in 5G networks. Further, we propose a Lo-DGAP, where each gateway transmits only the worst primary M2M device information rather than transmitting all neighboring primary M2M device information. The proposed Lo-DGAP increases the throughput of the system by reducing the message header payload and is also energy-efficient. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed schemes in terms of network lifetime and energy consumption.</P>

Neoadjuvant chemoradiotherapy versus immediate surgery for resectable and borderline resectable pancreatic cancer: Meta-analysis and trial sequential analysis of randomized controlled trials

Shahab Hajibandeh,Shahin Hajibandeh,Christina Intrator,Karim Hassan,Mantej Sehmbhi,Jigar Shah,Eshan Mazumdar,Ambareen Kausar,Thomas Satyadas 한국간담췌외과학회 2023 Annals of hepato-biliary-pancreatic surgery Vol.27 No.1

We aimed to compare resection and survival outcomes of neoadjuvant chemoradiotherapy (CRT) and immediate surgery in patients with resectable pancreatic cancer (RPC) or borderline resectable pancreatic cancer (BRPC). In compliance with the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses statement standards, a systematic review of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) was conducted. Random effects modeling was applied to calculate pooled outcome data. Likelihood of type 1 or 2 errors in the meta-analysis model was assessed by trial sequential analysis. A total of 400 patients from four RCTs were included. When RPC and BRPC were analyzed together, neoadjuvant CRT resulted in a higher R0 resection rate (risk ratio [RR]: 1.55, p = 0.004), longer overall survival (mean difference [MD]: 3.75 years, p = 0.009) but lower overall resection rate (RR: 0.83, p = 0.008) compared with immediate surgery. When RPC and BRPC were analyzed separately, neoadjuvant CRT improved R0 resection rate (RR: 3.72, p = 0.004) and overall survival (MD: 6.64, p = 0.004) of patients with BRPC. However, it did not improve R0 resection rate (RR: 1.18, p = 0.13) or overall survival (MD: 0.94, p = 0.57) of patients with RPC. Neoadjuvant CRT might be beneficial for patients with BRPC, but not for patients with RPC. Nevertheless, the best available evidence does not include contemporary chemotherapy regimens. Patients with RPC and those with BRPC should not be combined in the same cohort in future studies.