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Psychometric properties of the acceptance and action questionnaire (AAQ II) Malay version in cancer patients
No full textPsychological inflexibility has been found as one of the predictor to psychopathology in cancer patient. Cancer patients tend to experience psychological inflexibility as a reaction to cancer diagnosis, prognosis and treatment. Therefore, there is a need to identify psychological inflexibility due to its impact on quality of life among cancer patients. Objectives Acceptance and action questionnaire (AAQ II) is a scale used to assess psychological inflexibility. The aim of this study is to translate AAQ II into Malay language and evaluate the psychometric properties of AAQ II Malay version. Methods The AAQ II which has been translated into Malay language via back translation procedure was distributed to 101 cancer patients and 100 non-cancer patients. The evaluation of psychometric properties in this study included content validity index, internal consistency, parallel reliability, exploratory factor analysis, concurrent validity, sensitivity and specificity of AAQ II Malay version. Results AAQ II Malay version has established good content validity index, acceptable internal consistency with Cronbach’s alpha value of 0.91, excellent parallel reliability and adequate concurrent validity. Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) results demonstrated AAQ II Malay version is a unidimensional factor instrument. The result of sensitivity and specificity of AAQ II Malay version indicated cancer patients who scored more than 17.5 were having significant psychological inflexibility. Conclusion AAQ II Malay version is a reliable and valid instrument to measure psychological inflexibility among cancer patient in Malaysia. © 2019 Shari et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited
A Comparative Study of Activation Functions of NAR and NARX Neural Network for Long-Term Wind Speed Forecasting in Malaysia
No full textSince wind power is directly influenced by wind speed, long-term wind speed forecasting (WSF) plays an important role for wind farm installation. WSF is essential for controlling, energy management and scheduled wind power generation in wind farm. The proposed investigation in this paper provides 30-days-ahead WSF. Nonlinear Autoregressive (NAR) and Nonlinear Autoregressive Exogenous (NARX) Neural Network (NN) with different network settings have been used to facilitate the wind power generation. The essence of this study is that it compares the effect of activation functions (namely, tansig and logsig) in the performance of time series forecasting since activation function is the core element of any artificial neural network model. A set of wind speed data was collected from different meteorological stations in Malaysia, situated in Kuala Lumpur, Kuantan, and Melaka. The proposed activation functions tansig of NARNN and NARXNN resulted in promising outcomes in terms of very small error between actual and predicted wind speed as well as the comparison for the logsig transfer function results. © 2019 Rasel Sarkar et al
Bioassay Directed Isolation, Biological Evaluation and in Silico Studies of New Isolates from Pteris cretica L.
No full textMembers of genus Pteris have their established role in the traditional herbal medicine system. In the pursuit to identify its biologically active constituents, the specie Pteris cretica L. (P. cretica) was selected for the bioassay-guided isolation. Two new maleates (F9 and CB18) were identified from the chloroform extract and the structures of the isolates were elucidated through their spectroscopic data. The putative targets, that potentially interact with both of these isolates, were identified through reverse docking by using in silico tools PharmMapper and ReverseScreen3D. On the basis of reverse docking results, both isolates were screened for their antioxidant, acetylcholinesterase (AChE) inhibition, α-glucosidase (GluE) inhibition and antibacterial activities. Both isolates depicted moderate potential for the selected activities. Furthermore, docking studies of both isolates were also studied to investigate the binding mode with respective targets followed by molecular dynamics simulations and binding free energies. Thereby, the current study embodies the poly-pharmacological potential of P. cretica. © 2019 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland
High-energy Q-switched ytterbium-doped all-fiber laser with tris-(8-hydroxyquinoline) aluminum as saturable absorber
No full textWe have experimentally demonstrated a Q-switched fiber laser operating in the 1 μm region by using tris-(8-hydroxyquinoline) aluminum (Alq3) as a saturable absorber (SA). The Alq3 was fabricated through a drop-casting technique, where the material was embedded into a polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) film so that it can effectively incorporated into a laser cavity. The fiber laser has produced a high pulse energy of 0.8 μJ and peak power of 90mW. When the laser cavity was reduced from 25 m to 5 m, the peak power increased and the pulse energy dropped to 237.62mW and 451.5 nJ, respectively. Additionally, the minimum pulse width was reduced from 9 μs to 1.9 μs. © 2019 Optical Society of America
Children’s agency in accessing for spaces of play in an urban high-rise community in Malaysia
No full textThis research explores children’s agency in negotiating for play spaces in Malaysia within the context of an urban high-rise community. Fieldwork was conducted with 31 children between the ages of four to 12 years old. A qualitative, child-centered approach to data collection was employed using participatory research methods. The study reveals how children gain access to play spaces and details their innovative strategies in maximizing play opportunities in a community with limited infrastructural and social support. It highlights how children claim the use of communal spaces within the housing compound, reinvent designated play spaces, resist adult rules around restricted spaces and embrace elements of global culture for meaningful play opportunities. The paper argues that children exercise agency in accessing play spaces, and by so doing, extend and expand their lived geographies which are not just spatial, temporal and social but also invented and imagined. © 2019, © 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
Wide-band multiwavelength Brillouin–Raman fiber laser based on feedback optimization
No full textA multiwavelength Brillouin–Raman fiber laser (BRFL) with a 51-nm wide bandwidth is proposed and demonstrated. The BRFL is configured in a half-open cavity (HOC) design with a variable optical attenuator in the cavity. The BRFL exhibits a 60 % improvement in tunability as compared to a conventional half-open BRFL structure. At a Raman pump power of 1.2 W and 1525 nm Brillouin pump power of 12 dBm, 652 uniform Stokes lines with an average optical signal to noise ratio (OSNR) higher than 40 dB are produced. The generated channels have a total output power of 14.5 dBm and a power fluctuation of 0.5 dB over a period of one hour. In contrast, the conventional HOC shows a lower performance in terms of tuning range, OSNR and Stokes lines count. The 51 nm bandwidth using a single Raman pump laser is, to the best of our knowledge, the widest yet reported. © 2019 Elsevier B.V
Investigation of Boldine as a Potential Telomerase Inhibitor by Downregulation of hTERT/hTERC in HCT 116 Human Colon Carcinoma Cells
No full textTelomerase, a ribonucleoprotein (RNP) complex, is a type of RNA-dependent DNA polymerase that synthesises telomeric DNA repeats (TTAGGG) at the 3' end of chromosomes. Most of the cancer cells express high level of telomerase which results in cellular immortality. The high telomerase activity in cancer cells can be detected via expression of human TERT (hTERT), the catalytic protein subunit of telomerase, and expression of human TERC (hTERC), the RNA component in telomerase. Boldine, a natural alkaloid compound, was shown to have anticancer properties on various types of cancer cells, but the anti-telomerase property was poorly understood. This study was carried out to investigate the ability of boldine in targeting telomerase on the human colon cancer cell line, HCT 116, by analyzing the expression of hTERT and hTERC. Boldine was shown to have a time- and dose-dependent cytotoxic effect on HCT 116 cell line in SRB assay. The protein expression of hTERT was assessed through Western blot where it was observed to be down-regulated upon boldine treatment compared to control. The cells treated with boldine also exhibited a down-regulation of mRNA expression for both hTERT and hTERC in Real Time PCR (qRT-PCR). The down-regulation of hTERT protein expression correlated with the reduced hTERC mRNA expression in qRT-PCR. The observations on the down-regulation of protein and mRNA expressions of telomerase related genes, hTERT and hTERC, in this study suggested that boldine might become a significant candidate for telomerase-targeted anti-cancer therapy. © 2019 Penerbit Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. All rights reserved
A geometric and fractional entropy-based method for family photo classification
No full textDue to the power and impact of social media, unsolved practical issues such as human trafficking, kinship recognition, and clustering family photos from large collections have recently received special attention from researchers. In this paper, we present a new idea for family and non-family photo classification. Unlike existing methods that explore face recognition and biometric features, the proposed method explores the strengths of facial geometric features and texture given by a new fractional-entropy approach for classification. The geometric features include spatial and angle information of facial key points, which give spatial and directional coherence. The texture features extract regular patterns in images. The proposed method then combines the above properties in a new way for classifying family and non-family photos with the help of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). Experimental results on our own as well as benchmark datasets show that the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in terms of classification rate. © 201
Limited applicability of cathepsin D for the diagnosis and monitoring of non‐alcoholic steatohepatitis
No full textBackground and Aim: To date, there are limited data on the applicability of cathepsin D for the diagnosis and monitoring of non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH). Methods: This study included patients with biopsy-proven non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) diagnosed between November 2012 and October 2015. Serum cathepsin D levels were measured using the CatD enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (USCN Life Science, Wuhan, China) using stored samples collected on the same day of the liver biopsy procedure. The performance of cathepsin D in the diagnosis and monitoring of NASH was evaluated using receiver operating characteristic analysis. Results: Data for 216 liver biopsies and 34 healthy controls were analyzed. The mean cathepsin D level was not significantly different between NAFLD patients and controls; between NASH and non-NASH patients; and across the different steatosis, lobular inflammation, and hepatocyte ballooning grades. The area under receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) of cathepsin D for the diagnosis of NAFLD and NASH was 0.62 and 0.52, respectively. The AUROC of cathepsin D for the diagnosis of the different steatosis, lobular inflammation, and hepatocyte ballooning grades ranged from 0.51 to 0.58. Of the 216 liver biopsies, 152 were paired liver biopsies from 76 patients who had a repeat liver biopsy after 48 weeks. There was no significant change in the cathepsin D level at follow-up compared to baseline in patients who had histological improvement or worsening for steatosis, lobular inflammation, and hepatocyte ballooning grades. Cathepsin D was poor for predicting improvement or worsening of steatosis and hepatocyte ballooning, with AUROC ranging from 0.47 to 0.54. It was fair for predicting worsening (AUROC 0.73) but poor for predicting improvement (AUROC 0.54) of lobular inflammation. Conclusion: Cathepsin D was a poor biomarker for the diagnosis and monitoring of NASH in our cohort of Asian patients, somewhat inconsistent with previous observations in Caucasian patients. Further studies in different cohorts are needed to verify our observation. © 2019 The Authors. JGH Open: An open access journal of gastroenterology and hepatology published by Journal of Gastroenterology and Hepatology Foundation and John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd
The thermophysical properties and the stability of nanofluids containing carboxyl-functionalized graphene nano-platelets and multi-walled carbon nanotubes
No full textTwo structures of carbon-based materials with sp2-hybridized are carbon nanotubes and graphene arrayed in the concentric tube and two-dimensional sheet, respectively. The most important problems of graphene and carbon nanotube for use in various applications are insufficient dispersibility and their inadequate stability in different organic and aqueous solvents. The low interaction with other materials is second category problems of carbon nanostructures. Functionalization, a common method suggested by numerous researchers, can be employed to enhance this property. In this regard, the nanofluids containing graphene nanoplatelets and carboxylated multi-walled carbon nanotube were synthesized and dispersed in deionized water to prepare homogeneous samples of 0.1 and 0.2 wt%. The stability dependency of samples was investigated, for the first time, on ultrasonic time and microwave irradiation. Thermophysical properties including shear stress, viscosity, surface tension, density and stability were also measured and reported. © 2019 Elsevier Lt