International Journal on Advanced Science, Engineering and Information Technology
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Quantitative Study of Articular Cartilage Based on Greyscale Assessment Using Low-Field MRI
Get PDFOsteoarthritis is a degenerative disorder that changes the biomechanical properties of articular cartilage in its development phase. MRI has become the diagnosing tool used widely to examine the articular cartilage in the synovial joint since it can provide excellent soft-tissue contrast. However, most diagnoses were conducted using clinical high-field MRI, while the low-field MRI was only used to obtain the geometrical data. This study aims to quantitatively assess the biomechanical properties of cartilage tissue using a low-field MRI system based on the image greyscale assessment. The articular cartilage image of intact bovine hip joints was obtained using 0.18 T MRI. The MRI images were characterized based on the intensity of the greyscale. The biomechanical properties of elastic modulus and permeability of cartilage were subsequently characterized by incorporating the creep indentation test data with the computational finite element model. Further correlation analyses were performed to examine the relationship between the greyscale of MRI images and biomechanical properties of elastic modulus and permeability of the cartilage. The cartilage greyscale was found to be strongly associated with the cartilage biphasic elastic modulus (r = 0.85), while the permeability (r = -0.51) was observed to have a moderate correlation with the greyscale. These findings show the capability of low-field MRI to produce an image that correlates with the articular cartilage's biomechanical properties, which could be adapted as a biomarker to detect osteoarthritis earlier than usual
CT-based Analysis of Vascular Tree Abnormalities in Different Phenotypes of COVID-19 Pneumonia
Get PDFIn this paper, Computed Tomography (CT) images of six confirmed COVID-19 patients were analyzed in order to investigate the physiological abnormalities in the vascular tree in response to the disease-induced hypoxia. The CT images were classified into an L-type and H-type groups based on the cumulative voxel distribution of the CT scan. A 3-Dimentional model of the vascular tree was reconstructed out of each CT image following a computational framework. Then, the Cross-Sectional Area (CSA) of the vessels belonging to each vascular tree was computed. The acquired results were compared against averaged measurements of three healthy subjects that were computed following the same approach. The results showed that as the severity of COVID-19 lean towards H-type phenotype, signs of vasoconstriction in small blood vessels with a CSA less than 10 mm2 tend to decreases, whereas signs of vasodilation in medium to large blood vessels increases. The intensity of dilated blood vessels proximal to consolidated areas of the lung was found to increase significantly as the disease progresses in the lungs. Furthermore, signs of vasoconstriction and vasodilation in the vascular tree were observed in all lobes of the lung in both phenotypes including seemingly healthy lobes. The results in this paper are suggestive of intrapulmonary blood flow shunting towards unaerated areas of the lungs which may lead to a ventilation/perfusion mismatch even at minor cases of COVID-19. The results also suggest that subject-specific regulated use of vasodilating medication may reduce the number of cases that require mechanical ventilation
The Role of Technical Support and Effective Communication to Successful Intervention Program on Palm Oil Mills
Get PDFThe palm oil mills demand the workers perform manual material still managing activities, which results in pain complaints leading to possible disability. These pain complaints can be resolved by implementing an intervention program involving all parties. Most previous studies only investigated the program implementation, and few addressed workers' behavioral responses. Organizational culture, which may affect the correlation between organizational climate and the effectiveness of intervention programs, has never been properly studied. This study aims to determine how the interaction between technical support and effective management-worker communication on the effectiveness of the intervention program by considering the influence of organizational culture. Understanding worker acceptance of intervention programs can determine how to implement them effectively. All these research variables were analyzed simultaneously using Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) software, in which data were obtained from questionnaires given to 280 people working in 20 government-owned and private-owned palm oil mills in North Sumatra Province. The results show that technical support and effective communication affect the effective intervention program, but effective communication has a bigger effect. Organizational climate mediates the effects of technical support and effective communication on effective intervention programs. Organizational culture negatively moderates the correlation between organizational climate and effective intervention programs. The dimensions of organizational culture in palm oil mills are high power distance, high uncertainty avoidance, collectivism, masculinity, long-term orientation, and restraint
Early Generation and Detection of Efficient IoT Device Fingerprints Using Machine Learning
Get PDFThe proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) markets in the last decade introduces new challenges for network traffic analysis, and processing packet flows to identify IoT devices. This type of device suffers from scarcity, making them vulnerable to spoofing operations. In such circumstances, the device can be recognized by identifying its fingerprint. In this paper, a novel idea to elicit Device FingerPrint (DFP) is presented by extracting 30 features from the collected traffic packets of 19 IoT devices during setup and startup operations. Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ is configured as an access point to collect and analyze the traffic of seven networked IoT devices using Wireshark Network Protocol Analyzer. Moreover, the rest of IoT devices traffic is taken from the publicly available network traffic dataset. Each IoT device's feature extraction process starts from getting Extensible Authentication Protocol over LAN (EAPOL) protocol, continuing with the other flowed protocols until the first session of Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) related to that device is closed. Depending on some produced variation of device traffic features, 20 fingerprints for each device are created. The probability theorem of Gaussian Naive Bayes (GNB) supervised machine learning is utilized to identify fingerprints of individual known devices and isolate the unknown ones. The performance evaluation for the proposed technique was calculated based on two measures, F1-score and identification accuracy. The average F1 score was around 0.99, while the overall identification accuracy rate was 98.35%
Performance Evaluation of a Quorum Sensing based Scheme in Multi-Agent Task Development
Get PDFRobotics is positioned today as a fundamental tool in industrial and commercial development, where machines interact directly with humans. There is a vast variety of tasks that require autonomous, robust, and high-performance systems. Among these tasks can benefit from the autonomous integration of multiple elements, known as multi-agent systems. These schemes have interesting advantages over the single robot solution centered on the high degree of robustness achieved and the lower cost. The control of these multi-agent systems turns out to be of great complexity and is an active field of robotics research. The motion coordination schemes are complex and require a certain level of processing and communication. In this paper, a decentralized coordination scheme for low-cost robot groups based on local interaction is evaluated. The algorithm uses bacterial Quorum Sensing (QS) as a behavioral model, a scheme under which certain actions are triggered by the agents conditioned to the population density in the region they cover. The algorithm is tested in navigation tasks for different conditions of the design parameters. Among the parameters evaluated are environment dependence, system size, and QS threshold. The development times of the tasks were statistically analyzed, and a strong dependence of the environment on the total time required was found (a well-structured and small environment concerning the system improves the performance considerably), as well as the design of the robot in terms of QS threshold and sensors
The Development of Hydroponic Nutrient Solutions Control Using Fuzzy and BPNN for Celery Plant
Get PDFAs the increasing number of human populations, most live in urban areas with limited farmlands. Hydroponic is one of the solutions to grow crops in urban areas. Electrical Conductivity (EC) and scale of acidity (pH) in the hydroponic nutrient solution are the important things to be controlled. Controlling EC and pH in hydroponic can increase the quantity and quality of the crop. This research suggested a new method to merge fuzzy and Backpropagation Neural Network (BPNN) to control nutrient solutions in a Nutrient Film Technique hydroponic, with sensors EC and pH as input. The training data of BPPN are obtained from the implementation of the fuzzy technique. Controlling nutrient solutions can use fuzzy methods, but it has a weakness: use greater power because sensors require continuous detection. By using BPNN method, sensors only detect once to perform the same control action. In this research, the outputs of both methods are the duration of pumps in active conditions to optimize the nutrient solution. Based on experiments, the best BPNN model has eight hidden layers with a learning rate of 0.8. The result accuracies which had been obtained by alkaline solution (pump A) was 90.77 %, 91.93% for acid solution (pump B), and 91.13% for nutrient fertilizer (pumps C and D). The result showed that the use of power for BPNN is less than fuzzy. The average total power used for BPNN method is 68.43% lower than the fuzzy method
Lessons from Integrated Biodiversity Information System Implementation Initiatives
Get PDFBiodiversity information system (BIS) plays an essential role in supporting research, exploration, and conservation activities of biodiversity. However, the implementation of BIS is complex and challenging because it involves many stakeholders and various datasets and systems. As a developing country, Indonesia started to implement the integrated BIS because of its benefit to managing Indonesia’s biodiversity effectively. This paper attempted to explore the lesson learned of BIS implementation in several countries that may be useful for other countries to develop and implement BIS. This research was accomplished by conducting four focus group discussions (FGDs) that involved a representative of stakeholders, practitioners, and experts of a biodiversity information system in discussing issues in BIS implementation. The first FGD was conducted in Jakarta, Indonesia, which involved 16 participants. The second FGD has invited thirteen members and conducted them in Taiwan. The third session of FGD has been done by discussing with six members of FGD in Spain. The last FGD was held in Japan and invited eight members from several South Korea and Japan institutions. The output of FGDs was an analysis of five themes were identified, including data management, technology infrastructure, funding management, stakeholder involvement, and specialized agency. Stakeholder involvement is important to formulate policies and support BIS implementation and utilization sustainability. The lesson related to funding resources is that many organizations or people must be managed in centralization. It means a specialized agency is needed to conduct and control all programs related to BIS implementation
Dynamic Study and PI Control of Milk Cooling Process
Get PDFThe background of this research is to understand the operation process, which is the main goal of developing the process model. This model is often used for operator training, process design, safety system analysis, or control system design. The dynamic model of the milk cooling process from 36ËšC to 4ËšC using chilled water available at 2ËšC was performed. Chilled water was maintained at a constant temperature by using a refrigerant unit. The process being investigated was a Packo brand milk cooling tank belonging to KUD SAE Pujon (Malang - Indonesia). A fundamental heat balance method was used to derive the model, leading to a first-order transfer function process. For a 2-hr cooling process, the gain and time constant values are 1.00 and 42.3548 mins, respectively. Heat balance was then extended to continuous processes so that its transfer function could also be obtained. This study simulated and investigated the behavior of batch and continuous processes. Process Identification via input-output data was also introduced for continuous process. The process model obtained from the system identification toolbox was very useful in control, such as for determining tuning parameters via the Ziegler-Nichol method for Proportional-Integral control. However, a small delay was required to be introduced to the system as the first order process without time Ziegler Nichol method cannot be implemented. Further research may include other system identification methods, such as ARX, ARMAX, Output-Error, Box Jenkins etc., or implementing advanced process control for milk cooling
Evaluation of Average Term Occurrences Weighting Technique for Arabic Textual Information Retrieval
Get PDFInformation retrieval of documents is an important process in the current time, and the vector space retrieval model uses a term weighting scheme as a basic method for matching queries with documents. Term frequency-Inverse document frequency is a widely used and famous term weighting scheme, and many studies proved its effectiveness in information retrieval. However, this term weighting scheme has some drawbacks like retrieving irrelevant documents, which sometimes reduces effectiveness. From this point, a new term weighting scheme called Term Frequency with Average Term Occurrence was proposed and experienced in the English language to minimize retrieving unnecessary documents. In this paper, an information retrieval system is built for the Arabic language, and Open-Source Arabic Corpora was used to complete experiments. Calculations were made using two schemes which are traditional Term frequency-inverse Document Frequency and proposed Term Frequency with Average Term Occurrence. After that, comparisons of results were made using evaluation measures. With all obtained queries, four case studies with two approaches (stop word removal and stemming) are implemented. In English experiments, stop word removal was applied with another discriminative approach, which calculates the centroid of documents. After the analysis of the results, it was found that the proposed scheme is applicable on Arabic text and applied approaches enhance IR effectiveness if they are both implemented. Furthermore, it was found that stop word removal has a favorable effect on both schemes which was also proved in English experiments
Mr. Scrum: A Reference Model to Foster and Facilitate the Adoption of Scrum in the Agile Software Development Companies
Get PDFScrum is one of the most used agile approaches in the software industry. However, some aspects can hinder its implementation, e.g., the lack of detail of artifacts, meetings, generation of the product backlog, and team composition, among others. This paper presents Mr. Scrum, a Scrum reference model obtained from comparing existing Scrum guides and applying the GQM (Goal-Question-Metric) paradigm. Mr. Scrum proposes a clear and complete set of process elements, as well as: purpose, objectives, phases, activities, roles, satisfactory-expected results, and process flows. The proposed model was evaluated through a focus group where its suitability, clarity, and completeness were evaluated. The findings show that the participants agree with the acceptance of the proposed model and that its use in the industry could motivate and facilitate the adoption, implementation, and evaluation of the Scrum implementation. In this sense, Mr. Scrum would allow professionals and organizations to be guided toward a better understanding of Scrum and minimize the subjectivity and error of its interpretation, adoption, and assessment