In this work, we present a framework that facilitates the sharing of EHRs among the community of health-care providers (HCPs). However, the sharing might be obstructed by patients' privacy and the ...controlling legislation. Nevertheless, our sharing scheme of EHRs strives to respect patients' privacy and comply with relevant legislator guidelines, e.g., HIPPA. The proposed work introduces two services while sharing the EHRs: privacy and non-repudiation. To this end, we introduce the partners and the role of each during the course of exchanging of EHRs. The principle of sharing EHRs among HCPs has to be reinforced to save patients' lives while cryptographic primitives have to be employed to serve this purpose. In this paper, we are motivated to introduce the notion of non-repudiation private membership test (NR-PMT). In NR-PMT, we help patients receive medical services with great flexibility while maintaining their privacy and thwarting all possible threats to disclose their identities. In addition, a formal security analysis based on Kailar's accountability framework has been used to analyze the proposed framework. Also, a complexity analysis has been conducted.
The herbal products proved to be more promising antimicrobials even though their antimicrobial activity is milder than commercially available antibiotics. Moreover, herbal drugs may act ...synergistically with antibiotics to kill microbes. In this study, we aimed to enhance the activity of penicillin against MRSA through combination with the active saponin fraction isolated from the Zygophyllum album plant. Three different types of metabolites (saponins, sterols, and phenolics) have been extracted from Zygophyllum album with ethanol and purified using different chromatographic techniques. The antibacterial activity of crude extract and the separated metabolites were checked against MRSA isolates, Saponin fraction (ZA-S) was only the active one followed by the crude extract. Therefore, the compounds in this fraction were identified using ultra-high-performance liquid chromatography connected to quadrupole time-of-flight mass spectrometry (UHPLC/QTOF-MS) operated in positive and negative ionization modes. UHPLC/QTOF-MS revealed the presence of major six ursane-type tritepenoidal saponins (Quinovic acid, Quinovic acid 3β-O-β-D-quinovopyranoside, Zygophylloside C, Zygophylloside G, Zygophylloside K and Ursolic acid), in addition to Oleanolic acid. Interaction studies between saponin fraction and penicillin against MRSA were performed through the checkerboard method and time-kill assay. According to checkerboard results, only three combinations showed a fractional inhibitory concentration index less than 0.5 at concentrations of (62.5 + 312.5, 62.5 + 156.25, and 62.5 + 78.125 of penicillin and ZA-S, respectively). Time kill assay results showed that the highest reduction in log10 colony-forming unit (CFU)/ml of initial inoculum of MRSA after 24 h occurred by 3.7 at concentrations of 62.5 + 312.5 (µg/µg)/ml of penicillin and ZA-S, respectively. Thus, the combination between saponin fraction of Zygophyllum album and penicillin with these concentrations could be a potential agent against MRSA that can serve as possible model for new antibacterial drug.
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•Waste gases from oil refinery plants are burned for thermal desalination and electric power generation.•Heat from waste gases powered on ORC and gas turbine cycle.•Hybrid MSF and MED ...is used in the performed work.
Thermal desalination plants need large amounts of fuel to desalinate large quantities of seawater. At the same time, burning non-beneficial gases in the oil refineries is considered a huge waste of energy instead of using it. In this paper, a novel study on the possibility of operating the thermal desalination plants by waste gases that emerged from oil refineries rather than burning these gases in the air is performed. Hybrid MSF-MED thermal desalination processes are utilized in this study to produce a total range of 100–40,000m3/day. Three scenarios are performed utilizing the waste gases with MSF-MED. The comparison brings out that using waste gases would save roughly 1136$/h (UHC-unit hourly costs, $/h) while comparing against the conventional natural gas operation. Moreover; 5m3/h of waste gases would produce an amount of 58–60MW of electric power combined with a production of 100m3/d of fresh water (gas turbine cycle scenario) and 4.5–5MW combined with a production of 40,000m3/d in case of organic Rankine cycle operation. Based on energy and exergy balances, the 3rd scenario gives remarkable results.
The performance of photovoltaic (PV) modules worsens due to increasing their operating temperature. In the current study, a passive cooling technique comprising an aluminum metal foam (AMF) with PCM ...for thermal regulation of a PV system is performed. Outdoors experiments are conducted comprising two modules: PV without any modifications and PV with AMF embedded in PCM denoted as PV/PCM/AMF. The temperature distribution on the surface of the PV panels, PCM temperature, open-circuit voltage, and output power produced were recorded during the winter period. The results revealed that the PV surface temperature of the PV-PCM/AFM system was 4 %, 7.4 %, and 13.2 % lower than that of conventional PV, and the power produced from PV-PCM/AFM system was 1.85 %, 3.38 %, and 4.14 % higher than that of conventional PV in December, January, and February, respectively.
With the increasing number of real-world events that are originated and discussed over social networks, event detection is becoming a compelling research issue. However, the traditional approaches to ...event detection on large text streams are not designed to deal with a large number of short and noisy messages. This paper proposes an approach for the early detection of emerging hotspot events in social networks with location sensitivity. We consider the message-mentioned locations for identifying the locations of events. In our approach, we identify strong correlations between user locations and event locations in detecting the emerging events. We evaluate our approach based on a real-world
Twitter
dataset. Our experiments show that the proposed approach can effectively detect emerging events with respect to user locations that have different granularities.
Multirobot coordination for finding multiple users in an environment can be used in numerous robotic applications, including search and rescue, surveillance/monitoring, and activities of daily living ...assistance. Existing approaches have limited coordination between robots when generating team plans or do not consider user location probability within these plans. This results in long searches and robots potentially revisiting the same locations in succession. In this article, we present a novel multirobot person search system to generate search plans for multirobot teams to find multiple dynamic users before a deadline. Our approach is unique in that it simultaneously considers the search actions of all robots and user location probabilities when generating team plans, where user location probabilities are represented as conditional spatial-temporal probability density functions. We model this multirobot person search problem as a two-stage optimization problem to maximize the expected number of users found before the deadline. Stage 1 solves the action selection problem to determine a set of team actions, and the second stage solves the action allocation problem to distribute these actions amongst the robots. Namely, in stage 1, a novel conditional multiperiod multiknapsack problem is modeled as a min-flow graph solved sequentially by the Bellman-Ford shortest path algorithm. Stage 2 is a variant of the min-max multitraveling salesperson problem which models the environment topology as a search region network and search times selected by the previous stage. This stage is solved by a novel fuzzy clustering method. Numerous experiments comparing our proposed method to other existing approaches with varying environment sizes, search durations, and the number of users showed that our approach was able to find more target users before a defined deadline.
Fungal endophytes are living inside plants without any harmful effects; the prospecting about them is increased day by day because they can produce bioactive compounds which can be used in different ...applications. Herein, the current study was aimed to isolate the endophytic fungi from the
Ocimum basilicum
plant as safe microorganisms and evaluate their biological activities. The results illustrated that three endophytic fungal strains were isolated and identified morphologically and genetically as
Aspergillus nidulans
,
Aspergillus fumigatus
, and
Aspergillus flavus
and deposited in gene bank under accession numbers MZ045561, MZ045562, and MZ045563 respectively. Moreover, cell-free filtrates of endophytic fungal strains were extracted using ethyl acetate, where these crude extracts exhibited promising antimicrobial activity against
Staphylococcus aureus
,
Bacillus cereus
,
Bacillus subtilis
,
Escherichia coli
,
Salmonella typhimurium
,
Pseudomonas aeruginosa
,
Klebsiella pneumonia
, and
Candida albicans
at a concentration of 1000 µg/mL. Furthermore, these endophytic strains exhibited a potential antioxidant activity where IC
50
of the crude extract of
A. nidulans
,
A. fumigatus
, and
A. flavus
were (166.3, 68.4, and 347.1 µg/mL) and (151.2, 77.9, and 246.3 µg/mL) using DPPH and ABTS methods, respectively. Furthermore, the ethyl acetate crude extracts of these endophytic fungi did not exhibit any cytotoxic effect against Vero and Wi 38 normal cells. GC–MS analysis of the crude extract of
A. nidulans
,
A. fumigatus
, and
A. flavus
indicated the presence of 22, 22, and 20 active compounds, respectively. The major compounds in the fungal extracts are belonging to fatty acids, fatty acid esters, tetrahydrofurans, and sterols. In conclusion, the isolated endophytic
A. nidulans
,
A. fumigatus
, and
A. flavus
from
Ocimum basilicum
are promising sources for bioactive compounds.
Ternary silicate glass (69SiO
-27CaO-4P
O
) was synthesized with the sol-gel route, and different percentages of germanium oxide GeO
(6.25, 12.5, and 25%) and polyacrylic acid (PAA) were added. DFT ...calculations were performed at the B3LYP/LanL2DZ level of theory for molecular modelling. X-ray powder diffraction (XRPD) was used to study the effect of GeO
/PAA on the structural properties. The samples were further characterized using DSC, ART-FTIR, and mechanical tests. Bioactivity and antibacterial tests were assessed to trace the influence of GeO
on biocompatibility with biological systems. Modelling results demonstrate that molecular electrostatic potential (MESP) indicated an enhancement of the electronegativity of the studied models. While both the total dipole moment and HOMO/LUMO energy reflect the increased reactivity of the P
O
molecule. XRPD results confirmed the samples formation and revealed the correlation between the crystallinity and the properties, showing that crystalline hydroxyapatite (HA) is clearly formed in the highest percentages of GeO
, proposing 25% as a strong candidate for medical applications, consistent with the results of mechanical properties and the rest of the characterization results. Simulated body fluid (SBF) in vitro experiments showed promising biocompatibility. The samples showed remarkable antimicrobial and bioactivity, with the strongest effect at 25%. The experimental findings of this study revealed that the incorporation of GeO2 into the glass in terms of structural characteristics, bioactivity, antimicrobial properties, and mechanical properties is advantageous for biomedical fields and especially for dental applications.
Chitosan/MCM-48 (CH/MCM) and β-cyclodextrin/MCM-48 (CD/MCM) composites were synthesized as promising and eco-friendly bio-adsorbents for Cd2+ ions from water. The composites showed novel porous ...structures and complex functional groups making them of high adsorption capacities. The adsorption behaviors of CH/MCM and CD/MCM are highly controlled by the tested pH values realizing their best capacities at pH 7. The kinetic evaluation indicated the excellent agreement between the uptake of Cd2+ by CH/MCM and CD/MCM with the pseudo-first-order model achieving equilibrium intervals of 480 min and 600 min, respectively. Based on the values of Chi-squared (X2) and the correlation coefficient, the composites displayed adsorption properties related to the Freundlich hypothesis with a multilayer form. Additionally, the Gaussian energies of them are 2.23 KJ/mol (CH/MCM) and 2.46 KJ/mol (CD/MCM) reflecting physical uptake of Cd2+ by the studied composites. The thermodynamic investigation implied spontaneous uptake of Cd2+ by the composites with endothermic reactions. The prepared CH/MCM and CD/MCM are of 122.4 mg/g and 152.2 mg/g theoretical qmax, respectively which are higher values than the reported results for several studied adsorbents. Moreover, the synthetic CH/MCM and CD/MCM showed high reusability as adsorbents for Cd2+ to be applied effectively six times.
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•Chitosan/MCM and β-cyclodextrin/MCM composites were used as bio-adsorbents for Cd2+ ions.•Chitosan/MCM and β-cyclodextrin/MCM achieved uptake capacities of 122.4 and 152.2 mg/g, respectively.•The adsorption reactions of Cd2+ by the composites are physical, spontaneous, and endothermic reactions.•They are recyclable materials and have higher uptake capacities than several studied absorbents.
Regarding the crucial role of deubiquitinase (DUB) enzymes in many viruses, in particular, Adenovirus, HSV-1, coxsackievirus, and SARS-CoV-2, DUB inhibition was reported as an effective new approach ...to find new effective antiviral agents. In the present study, a new wave of 4-(2-nitrophenoxy)benzamide derivatives was designed and synthesized to fulfill the basic pharmacophoric features of DUB inhibitors. The molecular docking of the designed compounds against deubiquitinase enzymes of the aforementioned viruses was carried out. Significant molecular docking results directed us to conduct
in vitro
antiviral screening against the aforementioned viruses. The biological data showed very strong to strong antiviral activities with IC
50
values ranging from 10.22 to 44.68 μM against Adenovirus, HSV-1, and coxsackievirus. Compounds 8c, 8d, 10b, and 8a were found to be the most potent against Adenovirus, HSV-1, coxsackievirus, and SAR-CoV-2, respectively. Also, the CC
50
values of the examined compounds ranged from 72.93 to 120.50 μM. Finally, the
in silico
ADMET and toxicity studies demonstrated that the tested members have a good profile of drug-like properties. Furthermore, we concluded the structure–activity relationship (SAR) of the newly designed and synthesized compounds regarding their
in vitro
results, which may help medicinal chemists in further optimization to obtain more potential antiviral candidates in the near future as well.
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