Three newly designed pyrochlore oxides, Eu2Tm2O7 (Tm = Hf, Sn, Zr), are analyzed for their magnet... more Three newly designed pyrochlore oxides, Eu2Tm2O7 (Tm = Hf, Sn, Zr), are analyzed for their magnetic, optical and electronic properties using ab-initio calculations within the context of density functional theory (DFT). We can refer these compounds as direct bandgap materials because there is a very slight difference between the height of bands at the Γ- and M-point. It is observed that bandgap engineering can be performed by replacing Hf with Sn and Zr. It is observed from total density of states (TDOS) plots that shape and height of curves is not the same in spin up and spin down channels, showing significant magnetic moment in these compounds. It is evident from magnetic properties that a major portion of total magnetic moment (mtot) comes from Eu-atoms. In all compounds, the magnetic moment of O, Hf, Sn and Zr atoms is negative, whereas the magnetic moment of Eu-atoms is positive, showing their antiparallel arrangement. In both spin channels, significant absorption of the incomin...
Medical image acquisition devices are susceptible to producing blurry images due to respiratory a... more Medical image acquisition devices are susceptible to producing blurry images due to respiratory and patient movement. Despite having a notable impact on such blind-motion deblurring, medical image deblurring is still underexposed. This study proposes an end-to-end scale-recurrent deep network to learn the deblurring from multi-modal medical images. The proposed network comprises a novel residual dense block with spatial-asymmetric attention to recover salient information while learning medical image deblurring. The performance of the proposed methods has been densely evaluated and compared with the existing deblurring methods. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can remove blur from medical images without illustrating visually disturbing artifacts. Furthermore, it outperforms the deep deblurring methods in qualitative and quantitative evaluation by a noticeable margin. The applicability of the proposed method has also been verified by incorporating it into ...
Zn-based biodegradable alloys or composites have the potential to be developed to next-generation... more Zn-based biodegradable alloys or composites have the potential to be developed to next-generation orthopedic implants as alternatives to conventional implants to avoid revision surgeries and to reduce biocompatibility issues. This review summarizes the current research status on Zn-based biodegradable materials. The biological function of Zn, design criteria for orthopedic implants, and corrosion behavior of biodegradable materials are briefly discussed. The performance of many novel zinc-based biodegradable materials is evaluated in terms of biodegradation, biocompatibility, and mechanical properties. Zn-based materials perform a significant role in bone metabolism and the growth of new cells and show medium degradation without the release of excessive hydrogen. The addition of alloying elements such as Mg, Zr, Mn, Ca, and Li into pure Zn enhances the mechanical properties of Zn alloys. Grain refinement by the application of post-processing techniques is effective for the developme...
Objective: To compare the frequency of sore throat and cough after prophylactic Lignocaine versus... more Objective: To compare the frequency of sore throat and cough after prophylactic Lignocaine versus Beclomethasone in adults undergoing tracheal intubation. Study Design: Prospective longitudinal study. Place and Duration of Study: Anesthesia Department, Combined Military Hospital, Lahore Pakistan, from Jun to Sep 2019. Methodology: A total of 180 patients of both gender scheduled for elective surgery under general anaesthesia with endo-tracheal intubation were recruited for this study. Ninety patients of Group-A received Lignocaine, while 90 patients of Group-B received Beclomethasone. After 24 hours of the procedure, sore throat and cough were assessed from both groups and noted. Results: The age range in this study was from 18 to 50 years, with a mean age of 34.22±5.31 years in Group -A while 36.57±7.22 years in Group-B. Sore throat was seen in 22(24.4%) patients in Lignocaine-Group (Group-A) as compared to 9(10.0%) patients in Beclomethasone-Group (Group-B) (p=0.010). Cough was se...
Solar energy is the most promising green energy resource, as there is an enormous supply of solar... more Solar energy is the most promising green energy resource, as there is an enormous supply of solar power. It is considered a good potential solution for energy crises in both domestic and industrial sectors. Nowadays, many types of solar systems are used for harvesting solar energy. Most of the research is focused on direct absorption solar collectors (DASCs) due to their ability to capture more solar energy. The effectiveness of DASCs is dependent on various factors, such as working fluid properties, geometry, and operating parameters. This review summarizes the impact of different design and operating parameters on the performance of DASCs. Many effective parameters are considered and their impact on optical and thermal properties is summarized. The influence of working fluid parameters, such as base fluid type, nanoparticle type, nanoparticle size, nanoparticle shape, and nanoparticle concentration on heat transfer performance, was discussed and their optimum range was suggested. ...
Many researchers and scientists have contributed significantly to provide structural and molecula... more Many researchers and scientists have contributed significantly to provide structural and molecular characterizations of biochemical interactions using microscopic techniques in the recent decade, as these biochemical interactions play a crucial role in the production of diverse biomaterials and the organization of biological systems. The properties, activities, and functionalities of the biomaterials and biological systems need to be identified and modified for different purposes in both the material and life sciences. The present study aimed to review the advantages and disadvantages of three main branches of microscopy techniques (optical microscopy, electron microscopy, and scanning probe microscopy) developed for the characterization of these interactions. First, we explain the basic concepts of microscopy and then the breadth of their applicability to different fields of research. This work could be useful for future research works on biochemical self-assembly, biochemical aggr...
Printing technology promises a viable solution for the low-cost, rapid, flexible, and mass fabric... more Printing technology promises a viable solution for the low-cost, rapid, flexible, and mass fabrication of biosensors. Among the vast number of printing techniques, screen printing and inkjet printing have been widely adopted for the fabrication of biosensors. Screen printing provides ease of operation and rapid processing; however, it is bound by the effects of viscous inks, high material waste, and the requirement for masks, to name a few. Inkjet printing, on the other hand, is well suited for mass fabrication that takes advantage of computer-aided design software for pattern modifications. Furthermore, being drop-on-demand, it prevents precious material waste and offers high-resolution patterning. To exploit the features of inkjet printing technology, scientists have been keen to use it for the development of biosensors since 1988. A vast number of fully and partially inkjet-printed biosensors have been developed ever since. This study presents a short introduction on the printing...
In the last few years the exotic animals are becoming more and more popular pets. The prophylacti... more In the last few years the exotic animals are becoming more and more popular pets. The prophylactic and medical procedures in these animals require appropriate immobilization and anesthesia. The information for the anesthetic and analgesic agents for these animals is not enough. The purpose of this study was to be made a review of the appropriate anesthetic agents, methods and schemes for sedation, analgesia and anesthesia in snakes, which could help veterinary doctors to perform safer clinical examination or painless invasive procedures with a minimal stress for the patient.
In this research article, an organic polymer based polypyrrole (Ppy) composite material has been ... more In this research article, an organic polymer based polypyrrole (Ppy) composite material has been synthesized and analyzed for the design and fabrication purposes of a fast-responsive, highly sensitive, and an economical resistive-type novel humidity detection sensor. This humidity sensor most suitably serves the purpose for industrial humidity (i.e., values ranging from low to high) detection applications. First, a polypyrrole composite material (a mixture of polypyrrole, polypyrrole-NiO, polypyrrole-CeO2, and polypyrrole-Nb2O5) has been synthesized by chemical oxidative polymerization method, and then is treated at various temperatures, i.e., 100, 150 and 200 °C, respectively. After this treatment, the synthesized samples were then characterized by using FTIR, SEM, and DTA/TGA techniques for analyzing humidity sensing properties. The polypyrrole samples with the best morphological structure and properties were then incorporated on interdigitated electrodes. For the fabrication purp...
Current research attempts to define the behaviour of the employee's job satisfaction with res... more Current research attempts to define the behaviour of the employee's job satisfaction with respect to the path goal theory of leadership. Furthermore corporate culture based on the competing value approach is still trying to learn the parameters governing this section by collect data from 200 participants from Pakistani employees who work in organizations through structured questionnaires for job satisfaction. Job satisfaction of performance is measured through multiple assessment methods and organizational culture assessment instrument (OCAI) will be used to represent leadership and culture. In order to conclude hypothesis, correlation analysis is performed to study the topic of leadership in order to measure satisfaction. Employee satisfaction to work in contrast to the participation of leaders focused on supporting student achievement and positively correlated with the behaviour of the two employees. However, it was found that organizational culture has an important role in ma...
An airship is lighter than an air vehicle with enormous potential in applications such as communi... more An airship is lighter than an air vehicle with enormous potential in applications such as communication, aerial inspection, border surveillance, and precision agriculture. An airship model is made up of dynamic, aerodynamic, aerostatic, and propulsive forces. However, the computation of aerodynamic forces remained a challenge. In addition to aerodynamic model deficiencies, airship mass matrix suffers from parameter variations. Moreover, due to the lighter-than-air nature, it is also susceptible to wind disturbances. These modeling issues are the key challenges in developing an efficient autonomous flight controller for an airship. This article proposes a unified estimation method for airship states, model uncertainties, and wind disturbance estimation using Unscented Kalman Filter (UKF). The proposed method is based on a lumped model uncertainty vector that unifies model uncertainties and wind disturbances in a single vector. The airship model is extended by incorporating six auxili...
Background: Lipid-polymer hybrid nanoparticles (LPHNP) are suitable for co-delivery of hydrophili... more Background: Lipid-polymer hybrid nanoparticles (LPHNP) are suitable for co-delivery of hydrophilic and lipophilic drugs. The structural advantages of polymers and biomimetic properties of lipids enable higher encapsulation of drugs and controlled release profile. Lipidpolymer hybrid nanoparticles have been prepared for co-delivery of curcumin and cisplatin for enhanced cytotoxicity against ovarian cancer. Material and Methods: Chitosan, cisplatin, curcumin, Lipoid S75 were selected as structural components and ionic gelation method was used for preparation of LPHNPs. Nanoparticles were formed via ionic interaction of positively charged chitosan and negatively charged lipid. Results: The optimized nanoparticles were of 225 nm with cationic charge. The encapsulation efficiency was greater than 80% with good drug loading. The drug release profile showed controlled release behavior of both curcumin and cisplatin simultaneously and the absence of burst release. The in vitro therapeutic efficacy and cellular association was evaluated using A2780 ovarian cell lines. To further investigate therapeutic efficacy, we developed 3D spheroids as tumor model to mimic the in vivo conditions. The cytotoxicity and uptake of co-loaded LPHNPs were evaluated on 3D spheroids and results indicated increased chemosensitization and enhanced therapeutic efficacy of co-loaded LPHNPs. Conclusion: Lipid-polymer hybrid nanoparticles could be a suitable platform for co-delivery of curcumin and cisplatin for enhanced cytotoxic effect on ovarian cell lines.
Many studies have stated that technological progress is an important driver of carbon dioxide (CO... more Many studies have stated that technological progress is an important driver of carbon dioxide (CO 2) emissions and energy consumption. However, the sectorial differences in the relationship between CO 2 emission and technological progress have been understudied by scholars. This study attempts to fill such gap by empirically investigating the impact of technological progress on CO 2 emissions. A quantile regression method and balanced national data from Pakistan covering the period of 1991-2017 are used to establish relationships among the variables. The results and analysis reveal that the agriculture and services sectors have a negative impact on CO 2 emissions, whereas the construction, manufacturing, and transportation sectors greatly contribute to these emissions. The lower, medium, and upper-level emitters are used to understand the percentile conditions of each variable. A scenario analysis is also performed to forecast the reduction proportion of CO 2 emissions for the best understanding and policy implication in 2030, 2035, and 2040. The results of this study provide useful insights into the relationship between technological progress and CO 2 emissions and suggest different scenarios for reducing CO 2 emissions in the future that can support policy makers and planners.
Journal of Network and Computer Applications, 2019
Software Defined Networking (SDN) decouples the control plane from the data plane, thereby facili... more Software Defined Networking (SDN) decouples the control plane from the data plane, thereby facilitating network virtualization, dynamic programmability and flexibility in network management. Previous studies on SDN modeling focus only on packet-level arrivals. However, if flow-level arrivals are not also considered, the model cannot properly reflect the true probability of packets being sent to the controller. Accordingly, the present study proposes two analytical models for predicting the performance of TCP and UDP flows over SDN, respectively, given the assumption of both flow-level arrivals and packet-level arrivals. In constructing the models, the switch and controller are considered jointly and four-dimensional states are used to evaluate the steady-state probabilities of the states. Analytical formulae are derived for the average packet delay and packet loss probability of the TCP and UDP flows. Simulation results very well match with the analytical ones, thereby validating our analytical models. The results show that TCP significantly outperforms UDP over SDN architectures. In particular, TCP reduces the packet delay by 12 ∽ 50% and the packet loss probability by 25 ∽ 100%.
CCTV cameras are commonly used for security issues. Pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) cameras are mostly used f... more CCTV cameras are commonly used for security issues. Pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) cameras are mostly used for this purpose. To stitch two or more video streams from different cameras is much cheaper than PTZ solution. There are three stages of video stitching. Feature identification is the first stage of video stitching. To scale the invariant features like rotation, scaling and noise etc. Direct and feature base identification has basically two types of feature identification. Shifting and warping the images purpose to identify how these features are agreeing with each other is the main concern for direct base identification. While feature identification rely on extracting the features and then perform matching among them on the base of features. Calibration is the second stage of the video stitching. The images are stitch in panoramic way in calibration depending upon alignment among them. Blending is the last stage of video stitching where numerous videos are display in single panoramic way. Any blending algorithm is used to blend the pixels together and for final view.
Background: Renal failure after cardiac surgery is an important complication due to its clinical,... more Background: Renal failure after cardiac surgery is an important complication due to its clinical, quality-of-life and cost implications. There is a current need to evaluate renal outcomes after aortic valve interventions. We assessed the rates, predictors and outcomes of renal failure after aortic valve replacement (AVR). Methods: Consecutive patients undergoing isolated AVR during 2005-2012 at Auckland City Hospital were studied. Postoperative renal failure defined as per the Society of Thoracic Surgeon's (STS) database and score was analysed for predictors and outcomes. Results: Out of 620 patients with isolated AVR, 4.5% (28) developed postoperative renal failure. Independent predictors (odds ratio and 95% confidence interval) of renal failure included male gender (3.23, 1.06-9.84), critical preoperative state (6.57, 2.21-19.5), hypertension (3.98, 1.48-10.7) and history of stroke (3.9, 1.28-11.9). Renal failure was an independent predictor of operative mortality (4.60, 1.19-17.8) and mortality during follow-up (4.04, 1.96-8.36). Both Euro-SCORE II (c-statistic 0.614, 95% confidence interval 0.501-0.727) and STS Score (0.634, 0.524-0.743) were able to modestly predict renal failure. Conclusion: We found renal failure after AVR to be independently associated with operative and long-term mortality, with a number of risk factors, but is only modestly predicted by contemporary surgical risk scores.
In this paper, we establish various inequalities for some mappings that are linked with the illus... more In this paper, we establish various inequalities for some mappings that are linked with the illustrious Hermite-Hadamard integral inequality for mappings whose absolute values belong to the class K α,s m,1 and K α,s m,2 .
Integrity of a reinforced concrete member, or structure composed of such members cannot be ensure... more Integrity of a reinforced concrete member, or structure composed of such members cannot be ensured if there is inadequate bond between reinforcement and concrete around it. In current experimental work, effect on bond performance of lightweight concrete is discussed after addition of steel fibers. For the purpose, modified Pull-out specimens were tested at 28 days. Hooked end steel fibers having length of 35 mm and 0.5 mm in diameter, developing aspect ratio of 70 were used. Fiber contents of 0, 20 and 40 kg/m 3 were added to the lightweight concrete mixes. Besides bond behavior, results of fresh and hardened properties are also presented. Results indicate higher tensile strengths and pull-out loads for higher fiber contents. The fresh concrete density and compressive strength of mixes reduced, whereas air-content values increased with higher fiber content.
Organizational leadership literature highlights that transformational leadership has four salient... more Organizational leadership literature highlights that transformational leadership has four salient features: intellectual stimulation, individualized consideration, individualized influenced attributed, and individualized influence behavior. The ability of leaders to properly implement this leadership style may have a significant impact on organizational commitment. More importantly, recent studies in this area reveal that effect of transformational leadership style on organizational commitment is indirectly affected by empowerment. The nature of this relationship is interesting, but little is known about the mediating effect of empowerment in organizational leadership literature. Therefore, this study was conducted to examine the influence of empowerment in the relationship between transformational leadership and organizational commitment using a sample of 118 usable questionnaires gathered from employees who have worked in one US subsidiary firm in East Malaysia, Malaysia. The results of exploratory factor analysis confirmed that the measurement scales used in this study satisfactorily met the standards of validity and reliability analyses. Further, the outcomes of Stepwise Regression analysis showed that the relationship between empowerment and transformational leadership positively and significantly correlated with the organizational commitment. Statistically, this result confirms that empowerment acts as a mediating variable in the relationship between transformational leadership and organizational commitment in the organizational sample. In addition, discussion, implications and conclusion are elaborated.
Proceedings of the 2011 American Control Conference, 2011
This paper presents an identification technique to consistently identify multi-dimensional system... more This paper presents an identification technique to consistently identify multi-dimensional systems with additive output colored noise in transfer function representation. The method is an extension of a one-dimensional refined instrumental variable method to multi-dimensional systems. It can be used to identify models for multi-dimensional systems with Box-Jenkins structure; the method may give estimates with minimum bias and variance. In this paper we consider a general multi-dimensional system, which may be separable or non-separable, causal, semi-causal (spatially interconnected systems) or non-causal. Furthermore the algorithm can handle boundary conditions. The effectiveness of the method is shown with application to simulation examples.
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