Abstract

Unde rstan din g th e relationship betwee n phys ica l characte ristics an d acti vit y to kinemati c properties of th e spin e ha s impl ication s fo r sports , occupational tasks, clin ica l diagnosi s an d prognosis. This stud y aime d to ca t egorize spin e kinema tic s from flexion, la teral -bend , an d twis t exercise s by examinin g th e co rrelation s to body -mass inde x (BMI), wais t -to -hi p rati o (WHR), an d phys ica l acti vit y le vel s in health y youn g adults . Th e data wa s co llected from a marker -base d optoelectronic motion ca pture setu p an d a marker -less motion ca pture with th e RG B ca m - er a of a standard mobile phone. Co mpa rin g th e accuracies of th e tw o techniques on th e same data se t is impo r - tant to develo p inexpe nsive (RGB ca mera) diagno stics . Sixt y -tw o pa rti c ipant s (4 0 Male , 22 female ) pa rti c ipate d in th e study. Th e angula r di splac ement of th e spin e fo r each exercise wa s extracte d by ve cto r anal ysi s usin g a si n - gl e re ference node /marker . Th e anal ysi s showed no si gni ficant co rrelation s of angula r di splac ement s va lue s fo r th e thre e movement s with BM I or WHR. Th e phys ica l acti vit y leve l of male pa rti c ipant s is si gni ficantly co rrelate d with angula r di splac ement s fo r th e flexio n (p < 0.001) an d la teral -bend (p -valu e ranges from 0.00 1 to 0.04 ) an d weakly co rrelate d (but no t si gni ficant ) fo r twis t exercises. Th e phys ica l acti vit y leve l show s a si gni ficant co rrela - tion fo r only flexio n (p < 0.001) in female pa rti c ipants. Th e findings emph asize th e crit ica l role of phys ica l acti v - it y on mu sculoskel eta l flex ibi lit y in young, health y adults . Th e angles estimate d usin g both techniques were co m - parabl e an d si gni ficantly co rrelate d across pa rti c ipant s an d exercises.

Abstract

Micropumps are one of the most widely used components in lab-on-a-chip devices and other biomedical applications as they can manipulate fluid flow in a very small footprint. In this study, a flexible nozzle-diffuser planar micropump was fabricated using polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS). The pump was fabricated using a two-layer structure: bottom layer with molded channels and chamber encapsulated by a planar top layer. The use of PDMS as the structural material for both layers imparts flexibility and transparency to the complete pump assembly. The micropump was characterized by counting the number of compression cycles required for a known volume of fluid, here water, to flow from the inlet to the outlet. A similar characterization was performed while bending the pump at bending radii of 71 cm and 45 cm. The pump produced a flow rate per compression cycle of 5.53 µl on flat surface and that of 4µl, 3.6 µl when placed on surfaces of bending radii of 71cm and 45 cm respectively. The transparency of the pump and biocompatability of PDMS make it an excellent material for biomedical and colorimetric applications.

Abstract

GPCRs are the most prominent family of membrane proteins that serve as major targets for one-third of the drugs produced. A detailed understanding of the molecular mechanism of drug-induced activation and inhibition of GPCRs is crucial for the rational design of novel therapeutics. The binding of the neurotransmitter adrenaline to the β2-adrenergic receptor (β2AR) is known to induce a flight or fight cellular response, but much remains to be understood about binding-induced dynamical changes in β2AR and adrenaline. In this article, we examine the potential of mean force (PMF) for the unbinding of adrenaline from the orthosteric binding site of β2AR and the associated dynamics using umbrella sampling and molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. The calculated PMF reveals a global energy minimum, which corresponds to the crystal structure of β2AR-adrenaline complex, and a metastable state in which the adrenaline is moved slightly deeper into the binding pocket with a different orientation compared to that in the crystal structure. The orientational and conformational changes in adrenaline during the transition between these two states and the underlying driving forces of this transition are also explored. Based on clustering of MD configurations and machine learning-based statistical analyses of time series of relevant collective variables, the structures and stabilizing interactions of these two states of the β2AR-adrenaline complex are also investigated.

Abstract

—With Cardiovascular Diseases on the rise around the world, Electrocardiograms (ECGs) play a crucial role in their diagnosis owing to their non-invasive nature and simplicity. Medical professionals typically use 12-lead ECGs for medical analysis but gathering 12-lead ECG data is an arduous task outside clinical setting. Modern wearables can collect an ECG with fewer leads than the standard 12 leads. However, medical professionals and conventional ECG analysis software find this reduced lead set data challenging to interpret. By using the reduced lead set data to create standard 12-lead ECG data, ECG reconstruction can solve this issue. This paper proposes a novel single-lead to multi-lead ECG reconstruction solution using a modified Attention U-net framework. Using only the lead II of ECG, our model is able to reproduce the other 11 leads of conventional 12-lead ECG with a Pearson correlation, Mean square error and R-squared error of 0.805, 0.0122 and 0.639, respectively. Further, a single combined model is used to reconstruct all 11 leads simultaneously, improving performance and simultaneously reducing the computational resources needed for training compared to current literature in the field. In comparison to previous works, which only reconstruct small ECG segments, our model is trained to reconstruct longer 10-second ECG signals. We demonstrate our model’s ability for real-life utilisation using a cardiovascular disease classification task. A deep learning model was trained for multi-disease classification on actual 12-lead ECG data and was tested on both original and reconstructed 12-lead ECG signals. The classification accuracies for the original and reconstructed signals were comparable, portraying that our reconstruction model can preserve diagnostically relevant artefacts in its reconstructed signals. This work provides a new promising solution in the field of single-lead ECG reconstruction, taking us a step closer to bridging the divide between reduced lead set data and existing 12-lead ECG end users like clinicians and automatic ECG classifiers. Index Terms—Healthcare, Cardiology, Electrocardiograms, Machine Learning, Neural Networks

Abstract

A significant cause of air pollution in urban areas worldwide is the high volume of road traffic. Long-term exposure to severe pollution can cause serious health issues. One approach towards tackling this problem is to design a pollution-aware traffic routing policy that balances multiple objectives of i) avoiding extreme pollution in any area ii) enabling short transit times, and iii) making effective use of the road capacities. We propose a novel sampling-based approach for this problem. We provide the first construction of a Markov Chain that can sample integer max flow solutions of a planar graph, with theoretical guarantees that the probabilities depend on the aggregate transit length. We designed a traffic policy using diverse samples and simulated traffic on real-world road maps using the SUMO traffic simulator. We observe a considerable decrease in areas with severe pollution when experimented with maps of large cities across the world compared to other approaches.

Abstract

Cognitive Internet of Things (CIoT) supports the organizations to learn from the information (data) arriving from various connected devices, sensors, machines and other sources, and at the same time it inspires intelligence into different business operations, products, customer experiences, and people. Data poising attacks are very serious concerns because they may play a significant factor for businesses and organizations for both financial terms and damaging their reputations, when the Big data analytics on the analyzed data is itself corrupted. To mitigate this issue, in this paper, we suggest a blockchain-based Artificial Intelligence(AI)/Machine Learning(ML)-enabled Big data analytics mechanism for CIoT environment. The comprehensive experimental results have been provided under two circumstances: (1) performance of the ML model under data poisoning attacks and (2) performance of the ML model without data poisoning attacks. In the first case, we show how the data poison attacks can effect the ML model when the data is on some cloud storage (i.e. not in the blockchains), whereas in the second case we show the effect when the data is in the blockchains (i.e., without data poisoning attacks). The experimental results demonstrate that we have significant gains in performance in terms of accuracy, recall, precision and F1 score when there are no data poisoning attacks on the data. Moreover, a detailed blockchain simulation has carried out to demonstrate the practical aspects of the proposed security framework.

Abstract

The authenticated key agreement is one of the major security services that can be used to secure an Internet of Things (IoT) environment, where the devices collect the data and the data is then aggregated at the cloud server, and then a user needs to access the data stored at the server(s) securely. For this purpose, after a mutual authentication performed between a user and the accessed server, a session key needs to be established among them for secure communication. In this article, we design an efficient lattice-based authenticated key exchange protocol using ring-based version of learning with errors assumption for the IoT-enabled smart devices. The proposed protocol is basically a key exchange that uses the reconciliation mechanism. The detailed security analysis under the standard model has been performed along with the informal security analysis to show that the proposed protocol is robust against different attacks. We then simulate the proposed protocol under the NS-3 simulator to measure the network performance parameters like network throughput and latency. A comparative analysis shows that the proposed protocol has superior security, less computational cost, and comparable communication cost when compered these parameters with the other competing schemes.

Abstract

Google Earth (GE) has been very popular since 2005 amongst remote-sensing science enthusiasts as well as administrators for its ease of use and the large archive of multiresolution temporal data covering the entire globe. With time, Google Earth has evolved to publish layers of imagery with spatial resolution estimated to be better than 30 centimeters(since GE does not publish any information related to accuracy of the imagery). Many scholars have studied the positional accuracy of Google Earth imagery from 2008 till 2018. Improvements in the positional accuracy(absolute as well as relative) were reported by many.In this study,it was attempted to understand if the CRS of Google Earth(GE) is contributing to positional inaccuracies when its imagery is assessed using reliable satellite reference data or GPS surveyed data. Relative assessment of GE location coordinates of ground check points was done using Sentinel-2B satellite imagery. Test imagery over regions of Africa, Canada, India and Australia were used and RMSE values were reported. The radial RMSE for the image check points was computed as 12.5 metres; min-max values in Easting direction were [-23.48 m,8.26 m] while min-max values in Northing direction were [-5.77m, 17.26m]. The paper focuses on planimetric mislocation/accuracy between Google Earth and Sentinel-2B and explores direct or indirect relationship between increasing UTM zone numbers and mislocation values. The paper attempts to emphasize that there is a need for the end-user/consumer to understand that, though Google Earth is undeniably the best go-to-resource with open access and high usability rating , it has its own quality issues and should be used with caution in applications where quality and reliability are at stake. GE is indeed an excellent source of ancillary information but it is expected that the end-user be aware of inherent accuracy issues of Google Earth imagery when consuming in applications ranging from as small as a geo-spatial survey by a school community to larger projects requiring high accuracy and precision like mapping, autonomous navigation, control point surveying or satellite calibration. Index Terms—Google Earth, Sentinel -2B, UTM Zone, Relative Planimetric Accuracy , Reliability , High Precision Applications

Abstract

In this paper, we present online algorithm called {it Delaytron} for learning multi class classifiers using delayed bandit feedbacks. The sequence of feedback delays ${d_t}_{t=1}^T$ is unknown to the algorithm. At the $t$-th round, the algorithm observes an example $mathbf{x}_t$ and predicts a label $tilde{y}_t$ and receives the bandit feedback $mathbb{I}[tilde{y}_t=y_t]$ only $d_t$ rounds later. When $t+d_t>T$, we consider that the feedback for the $t$-th round is missing. We show that the proposed algorithm achieves regret of $mathcal{O}left(sqrt{frac{2 K}{gamma}left[frac{T}{2}+left(2+frac{L^2}{R^2Vert WVert_F^2}right)sum_{t=1}^Td_tright]}right)$ when the loss for each missing sample is upper bounded by $L$. In the case when the loss for missing samples is not upper bounded, the regret achieved by Delaytron is $mathcal{O}left(sqrt{frac{2 K}{gamma}left[frac{T}{2}+2sum_{t=1}^Td_t+vert mathcal{M}vert Tright]}right)$ where $mathcal{M}$ is the set of missing samples in $T$ rounds. These bounds were achieved with a constant step size which requires the knowledge of $T$ and $sum_{t=1}^Td_t$. For the case when $T$ and $sum_{t=1}^Td_t$ are unknown, we use a doubling trick for online learning and proposed Adaptive Delaytron. We show that Adaptive Delaytron achieves a regret bound of $mathcal{O}left(sqrt{T+sum_{t=1}^Td_t}right)$. We experimentally show that the proposed approach can learn efficient classifiers even with delayed bandit feedbacks and the accuracy does not degrade much due to delays in feedbacks.

Abstract

The management and regulation of the waste generated from coal-based power plants have been a key issue throughout the world. There is a need for the voluminous utilization of coal ash in India. The bulk utilization of the industrial waste materials like coal ash can control the exploitation of the natural resources like soil in diferent aspects. Here, it has been attempted to evaluate the potential use of coal ash as a foundation/fll material. In addition, physical, geotechnical, morphological, and chemical characterization of the pond ash has been done. Then, fnite element modeling of the vibratory roller compaction was simulated using PLAXIS3D software for the recommendation of the pond ash as a construction material in place of soil. Also, the reduction in CO2 emission with pond ash was compared with that of the soil. The reduction in CO2 emission was found to be about 15% considering several factors like distance from the source station to the test site, types of coal ash used, types of construction equipment employed, etc. The utilization of pond ash as fll material was found to be economical, and its utilization saves around INR 32 to INR 399 per cubic meter. Keywords Coal ash · Foundation/fll material · Finite element modeling · Vibratory roller compaction · CO2 emission