15 research outputs found
Is it of any positive being COVID-19 positive?: cross-protection hypothesis
No full textMany pathogens have been reported to induce cross-protective immune responses against other related and unrelated pathogens due to shared epitopes or induction of trained immunity.
Herein, I review the evidence we have so far on the possible SARS-CoV-2 cross-reactions with other pathogens, and the immune modulatory effects it could induce, which could lead to beneficial effects against other diseases among COVID-19-recovered immunocompetent individuals
Circuit Design for Memristor based In-Memory Computing
No full textModern computing systems suffer due to inability of CMOS-device technology and conventional Von-Neumann architectures to support today's ever-increasing demand of high performance, reliability, cost and energy-efficiency. While CMOS device suffers from high static leakage, reduced reliability and manufacturing complexity; conventional computing architecture suffers from high power consumption with memory access and performance bottlenecks. Non-volatile and CMOS-compatible emerging memristive device technology with extremely compact memory structures offers in-memory computing solutions. However, research lacks quantitative benchmarking of memristor-based primitive logic designs. Moreover, the arithmetic and functional circuit design solutions are inefficient and hence incompetent to replace the state-of-the-art.The thesis first covers device level physics of different memristive devices, elaborating their basic structures, working principles and behavioural analyses using Verilog-A models. Building on single device behavioural analyses, a comprehensive exploration and quantitative benchmarking of all existing primitive gates is provided, thereby concluding that scouting logic design technique is the optimal logic gate to perform in-memory computing. Going forward, using scouting logic as the building block, the work presents efficient arithmetic and functional circuit designs that outperform previously proposed in-memory computing solutions and attempts to make a strong case to challenge the current CMOS-based state-of-the-art computing paradigm.Different flavours of a novel circuit design are proposed to tackle limitations common to circuits implementing primitive arithmetic operations and complex multiply-accumulate (dot-product) operations supporting data-intensive applications. The proposed circuit deploys in-built sample-and-hold and two bit-wise weighting techniques to enable pipelining and self-timing-path to improve accuracy against variations. As compared to 4-bit adder utilising integrate and fire circuit (IFC) that is optimised for area/power, the proposed design improves the speed, area, and energy consumption by 4X, 2.5X, and 11X, respectively. Incorporating additional components such as high-gain differential amplifier and modified IFC provides a highly accurate, linear, power efficient dot product engine with significant improvement in memristor endurance. To perform 64_4 dot 64_1, the proposed dot product engine improves the speed, area and energy consumption by 2X, 3.5X and 54X, respectively, as compared to area-efficient IFC-based engine, while also extending the range of operands operated in parallel by >3X. Compared to highly accurate SAR-ADC(current sense amplifier) based dot product engine, the proposed design improves the speed, area and energy by a factor of 0.4X(1.2X), 200X(6X) and 260X(108X), respectively, with comparable accuracy. Read endurance is significantly improved as < 0.1V is maintained across the memristors during the dot-product operation, as opposed to > 1V endured using prior proposed designs. To showcase the scalability and versatility of the proposed circuit designs, design prepositions of multi-operand 4-bit adder, 4x4 multiplier and 4-bit comparator are also presented. Supporting equations, graphs, figures and tables have been included to justify the choices made as part of this work and to enhance the understanding of novel non-volatile memristor based in-memory computing.MNEMOSENEElectrical Engineering | Microelectronic
Surgical Capacity Assessment and Leverage in the PalEstinian Land (SCALPEL-I) Study: The First Nationwide Plastic Surgery Capacity Evaluation in Palestine
No full textSurgical Capacity Assessment and Leverage in the Palestinian Land (SCALPEL-I) Study: The First Nationwide Plastic Surgery Capacity Evaluation in Palestine.
No full textBACKGROUND: Access to surgical care in low-to-middle-income countries (LMICs), especially in war-torn areas such as the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt), is a global health priority. The plastic surgical capacity in the oPt has not been evaluated. This study provides the first systematic evaluation of plastic surgical capacity in the oPt.
METHODS: A cross-sectional study conducted between December 2022 and February 2023 included facilities providing plastic surgery services in the oPt, except private centers run by nonsurgeons. A modified PIPES (personnel, infrastructure, procedures, equipment, and supplies) tool was used. Data were analyzed for geographic and private/public disparities.
RESULTS: Eleven facilities were included; 6 (54.5%) were in the West Bank and 5 (45.5%) in Gaza. The majority were private hospitals (n = 6, 54.5%). The mean PIPES score was personnel = 4.3 (4.03), infrastructure = 18.4 (2.4), procedures = 9.8 (3.8), equipment = 19.2 (3.6), and supplies = 22.4 (1.9). Hospital beds, operating rooms, and plastic surgeons per 100,000 people were 33.5, 1.0, and 0.5, respectively. There were 8 board-certified plastic surgeons. No facilities had a plastic surgery residency program. Key deficiencies included: 8 facilities (72.2%) not performing microsurgical free tissue transfers (none in Gaza), 5 (45.5%) lacking a system to identify complications, and 7 (63.3%) not offering regular educational courses. Average power supply was 8.0 hours/day in Gaza and 24.0 hours/day in the West Bank.
CONCLUSIONS: Plastic surgical capacity in the oPt shows significant deficiencies, especially in Gaza. These findings should inform stakeholders to address disparities, develop training programs, and improve access to safe plastic surgery
Improving Automated Arabic Essay Questions Grading Based on Microsoft Word Dictionary
No full textThere are three main types of questions: true/false, multiple choice, and essay questions; it is easy to implement automatic grading system (AGS) for multiple choice and true/false questions because the answers are specific compared with essay question answers. Automatic grading system (AGS) was developed to evaluate essay answers using a computer program that solves manual grading process problems like high cost, time-consuming task, increasing number of students, and pressure on teachers. This chapter presents Arabic essay question grading techniques using inner product similarity. The reason behind this is to retrieve students’ answers that more relevance to teachers’ answers. NB (naive Bayes) classifier is used because it is simple to implement and fast. The process starts by preprocessing phase, where tokenization step divides answers for small pieces of tokens. For normalization step, it is used to replace special letter shapes and remove diacritics. Then, stop word removal step removes meaningless and useless words. Finally, stemming process is used to get the stem and root of the words. All the preprocessing phase is meant to be implemented for both student answer and dataset. Then, classifying by naive Bayes classifier to get accurate result also for both students’ answers among with dataset. After that, using Microsoft Word dictionary to compare and get enough synonyms for both students’ answers and model answers in order to have exceptional results. Finally, showing results with the use of inner product similarity then compare the results showed by inner product similarity with human score results so the evaluation among with the efficiency of the proposed technique can be measured using mean absolute error (MAE) and Pearson correlation results (PCR). According to the experimental results, the approach leads to positive results when using MS dictionary and improvement Automated Arabic essay questions grading, where experiment results showed improvement in MAE is 0.041 with enhanced accuracy is 4.65% and PCR is 0.8250. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
A Classification of Memory-Centric Computing
No full textsponsorship: The results presented in this article have been obtained in the framework of the project "Computation-in-memory architecture based on resistive devices" (MNEMOSENE), which has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 780215. (European Union|780215)status: Publishe
Time-division Multiplexing Automata Processor
No full textAutomata Processor (AP) is a special implementation of non-deterministic finite automata that performs pattern matching by exploring parallel state transitions. The implementation typically contains a hierarchical switching network, causing long latency. This paper proposes a methodology to split such a hierarchical switching network into multiple pipelined stages, making it possible to process several input sequences in parallel by using time-division multiplexing. We use a new resistive RAM based AP (instead of known DRAM or SRAM based) to illustrate the potential of our method. The experimental results show that our approach increases the throughput by almost a factor of 2 at a cost of marginal area overhead.Computer Engineerin
The Power of Computation-in-Memory Based on Memristive Devices
No full textConventional computing architectures and the CMOS technology that they are based on are facing major challenges such as the memory bottleneck making the memory access for data transfer a major killer of energy and performance. Computation-in-memory (CIM) paradigm is seen as a potential alternative that could alleviate such problems by adding computational resources to the memory, and significantly reducing the communication. Memristive devices are promising enablers of a such CIM paradigm, as they are able to support both storage and computing. This paper shows the power of memristive device based CIM paradigm in enabling new efficient application-specific architectures as well as efficient implementations of some known domain-specific architectures. In addition, the paper discusses the potential applications that could benefit from such paradigm and highlights the major challenges.Computer EngineeringQuantum & Computer Engineerin
SARS-CoV-2 vaccination modelling for safe surgery to save lives: data from an international prospective cohort study
No full textBackground: Preoperative SARS-CoV-2 vaccination could support safer elective surgery. Vaccine numbers are limited so this study aimed to inform their prioritization by modelling. Methods: The primary outcome was the number needed to vaccinate (NNV) to prevent one COVID-19-related death in 1 year. NNVs were based on postoperative SARS-CoV-2 rates and mortality in an international cohort study (surgical patients), and community SARS-CoV-2 incidence and case fatality data (general population). NNV estimates were stratified by age (18–49, 50–69, 70 or more years) and type of surgery. Best- and worst-case scenarios were used to describe uncertainty. Results: NNVs were more favourable in surgical patients than the general population. The most favourable NNVs were in patients aged 70 years or more needing cancer surgery (351; best case 196, worst case 816) or non-cancer surgery (733; best case 407, worst case 1664). Both exceeded the NNV in the general population (1840; best case 1196, worst case 3066). NNVs for surgical patients remained favourable at a range of SARS-CoV-2 incidence rates in sensitivity analysis modelling. Globally, prioritizing preoperative vaccination of patients needing elective surgery ahead of the general population could prevent an additional 58 687 (best case 115 007, worst case 20 177) COVID-19-related deaths in 1 year. Conclusion: As global roll out of SARS-CoV-2 vaccination proceeds, patients needing elective surgery should be prioritized ahead of the general population. © The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of BJS Society Ltd
Infection and mortality of healthcare workers worldwide from COVID-19: a systematic review
No full textObjectives To estimate COVID-19 infections and deaths in healthcare workers (HCWs) from a global perspective during the early phases of the pandemic.Design Systematic review.Methods Two parallel searches of academic bibliographic databases and grey literature were undertaken until 8 May 2020. Governments were also contacted for further information where possible. There were no restrictions on language, information sources used, publication status and types of sources of evidence. The AACODS checklist or the National Institutes of Health study quality assessment tools were used to appraise each source of evidence.Outcome measures Publication characteristics, country-specific data points, COVID-19-specific data, demographics of affected HCWs and public health measures employed.Results A total of 152 888 infections and 1413 deaths were reported. Infections were mainly in women (71.6%, n=14 058) and nurses (38.6%, n=10 706), but deaths were mainly in men (70.8%, n=550) and doctors (51.4%, n=525). Limited data suggested that general practitioners and mental health nurses were the highest risk specialities for deaths. There were 37.2 deaths reported per 100 infections for HCWs aged over 70 years. Europe had the highest absolute numbers of reported infections (119 628) and deaths (712), but the Eastern Mediterranean region had the highest number of reported deaths per 100 infections (5.7).Conclusions COVID-19 infections and deaths among HCWs follow that of the general population around the world. The reasons for gender and specialty differences require further exploration, as do the low rates reported in Africa and India. Although physicians working in certain specialities may be considered high risk due to exposure to oronasal secretions, the risk to other specialities must not be underestimated. Elderly HCWs may require assigning to less risky settings such as telemedicine or administrative positions. Our pragmatic approach provides general trends, and highlights the need for universal guidelines for testing and reporting of infections in HCWs
