Near-infrared (NIR) band sensors capture digital images of scenes under special conditions such as haze, fog, overwhelming light or mist, where visible (VS) band sensors get occluded. However, the ...NIR images contain poor textures and colors of different objects in the scene, on the contrary to the VS images. In this article, we propose a simple yet effective fusion approach that combines both VS and NIR images to produce an enhanced fused image that contains better scene details and similar colors to the VS image. The proposed approach first estimates a fusion map from the relative difference of local contrasts of the VS and NIR images. Then, the approach extracts non-spectral spatial details from the NIR image and finally, the extracted details are weighted according to the fusion map and injected into the VS image to produce the enhanced fused image. The proposed approach adaptively transfers the useful details from the NIR image that contributes to the enhancement of the fused image. It produces realistic fused images by preserving the colors of the VS image and constitutes simple and non-iterative calculations with O(n) complexity. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is experimentally verified by comparisons to four different state-of-the-art VS-NIR fusion approaches in terms of computational complexity and quality of the obtained enhanced fused images. The quality is evaluated using two-color distortion measures and a novel aggregation of several blind image quality assessment measures. The proposed approach shows superior performance as it produces enhanced fused images and preserves the quality even when the NIR images suffer from loss of texture or blurriness degradations, with acceptable fast execution time. Source code of the proposed approach is available online.
To assist policymakers in making adequate decisions to stop the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, accurate forecasting of the disease propagation is of paramount importance. This paper presents a deep ...learning approach to forecast the cumulative number of COVID-19 cases using bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (Bi-LSTM) network applied to multivariate time series. Unlike other forecasting techniques, our proposed approach first groups the countries having similar demographic and socioeconomic aspects and health sector indicators using K-means clustering algorithm. The cumulative case data of the clustered countries enriched with data related to the lockdown measures are fed to the bidirectional LSTM to train the forecasting model. We validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach by studying the disease outbreak in Qatar and the proposed model prediction from December 1st until December 31st, 2020. The quantitative evaluation shows that the proposed technique outperforms state-of-art forecasting approaches.
Current situation of viral hepatitis in Egypt Elbahrawy, Ashraf; Ibrahim, Marwa K.; Eliwa, Ahmed ...
Microbiology and immunology,
September 2021, Volume:
65, Issue:
9
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
An estimated 8–10 million people suffer from viral hepatitis in Egypt. Hepatitis A virus (HAV) and hepatitis E virus (HEV) are the major causes of viral hepatitis in Egypt as 50% or more of the ...Egyptian population are already exposed to HAV infection by the age of 15. In addition, over 60% of the Egyptian population test seropositive for anti‐HEV in the first decade of life. HEV mainly causes self‐limiting hepatitis; however, cases of fulminant hepatitis and liver failure were reported in Egypt. Hepatitis B virus (HBV), hepatitis C virus (HCV), and hepatitis D virus (HDV) are the main causes of chronic hepatitis, liver cirrhosis, and liver cancer (hepatocellular carcinoma HCC) in Egypt. Globally, Egypt had the highest age‐standardized death rate due to cirrhosis from 1990 to 2017. The prevalence rate of HBV (1.3%–1.5%) has declined after national infantile immunization. Coinfection of HBV patients with HDV is common in Egypt because HDV antibodies (IgG) vary in range from 8.3% to 43% among total HBV patients. After the conduction of multiple national programs to control HCV infection, a lower rate of HCV prevalence (4.6%) was recently reported. Data about the incidence of HCV after treatment with direct antiviral agents (DAAs) are lacking. An HCC incidence of 29/1000/year in cirrhotic patients after DAA treatment is reported. A higher rate of infiltrative pattern among HCC patients after DAA treatment is also recognized. Viral hepatitis is one of the major public health concerns in Egypt that needs more attention and funding from health policymakers.
Vaccination has been confirmed to be the safest and, sometimes, the only tool of defense against threats from infectious diseases. The successful history of vaccination is evident in the control of ...serious viral infections, such as smallpox and polio. Viruses that infect human livers are known as hepatitis viruses and are classified into five major types from A to E, alphabetically. Although infection with hepatitis A virus (HAV) is known to be self-resolving after rest and symptomatic treatment, there were 7134 deaths from HAV worldwide in 2016. In 2019, hepatitis B virus (HBV) and hepatitis C virus (HCV) resulted in an estimated 820,000 and 290,000 deaths, respectively. Hepatitis delta virus (HDV) is a satellite virus that depends on HBV for producing its infectious particles in order to spread. The combination of HDV and HBV infection is considered the most severe form of chronic viral hepatitis. Hepatitis E virus (HEV) is another orally transmitted virus, common in low- and middle-income countries. In 2015, it caused 44,000 deaths worldwide. Safe and effective vaccines are already available to prevent hepatitis A and B. Here, we review the recent advances in protective vaccines against the five major hepatitis viruses.
Bats are considered ideal reservoirs for zoonotic viruses with emerging capabilities over the past two decades and spotted evidence points out that they may play a role as a reservoir host for ...SARS-CoV-2. To investigate the possible role of bats as part of SARS-CoV-2 anthropozoonotic spill-over infections in Egypt, a total of 800 samples obtained from 200 Egyptian fruit bats (Rousettus aegyptiacus) were tested for SARS-CoV-2 using quantitative RT-PCR assay (RT-qPCR). RT-qPCR analysis of RNA extracted from bat tissues showed no positive results for SARS-CoV-2 nucleic acid. These findings suggest that during the study period, the Rousettus aegyptiacus bat was not a reservoir or amplifying host for SARS-CoV-2 infection in Egypt. The lack of SARS-CoV-2 nucleic acid in Egyptian fruit bats is thought to make a significant contribution to SARS-CoV-2 epidemiology.
Near-infrared (NIR) band sensors capture achromatic images that contain complementary details of a scene which are diminished in visible (VS) band images when the scene is obscured by haze, mist, or ...fog. To exploit these complementary details, an integrated FPGA architecture and implementation of a video processing system are proposed in this paper. This system performs VS-NIR video fusion and produces an enhanced VS video in real-time. The proposed FPGA architecture and implementation effectively handle the challenges associated with the simultaneous processing of video signals obtained from different sources such as the inevitable delay among corresponding frames and time-varying deviation among frame rates. Moreover, the proposed implementation is efficiently designed and able to produce the fused video at the same frame rate as the input videos, i.e. in real-time, regardless of the resolution of the input videos while the consumed FPGA resources are kept small. This is achieved by data and calculations reuse, besides performing operations concurrently in parallel and pipelined fashions at both the data and task levels. The proposed implementation is synthesized, validated on a low-end FPGA device, and compared to three other implementations. The comparison shows the superiority of the proposed implementation in terms of the consumed resources which have a direct industrial impact in the case of integration in modern smart-phones and cameras.
Introduction: Besides being a risk factor for urolithiasis, obesity is a challenge in the treatment of urolithiasis from the perspective of both the surgeon and the anesthetist. In this study, we ...tried to assess the feasibility and safety of supine percutaneous nephrolithotomy (PCNL) under regional anesthesia in obese patients with a body mass index (BMI) ≥30.
Methods: This was a prospective observational study and included 51 obese patients (BMI ≥30 kg/m2) with renal stones planned for PCNL. All patients underwent supine PCNL under regional anesthesia with the standard technique. A decision for totally tubeless or a tubeless PCNL was made at the end of the procedure and the intraoperative and postoperative data were recorded. All patients underwent computed tomography (CT) imaging at 1 month after surgery to assess the stone-free status and the need for additional treatment.
Results: The mean age of the patients was 53.2 ± 8.09 years, and the mean BMI was 34.4 ± 2.369 kg/m2. The mean operative time was 73.3 ± 26.2 min, the mean hospital stay was 58.3 ± 22.1 h, and the mean postoperative Visual Analog Score (VAS) for pain was 3.8 ± 1.4. The stone-free rate was 68.6% on the follow-up CT performed after 1 month, and 31.4% of the patients had significant residual fragments which required re-treatment either by retrograde intrarenal surgery (RIRS) in 19.6% (either as primary RIRS for the residual calculi in one patient 1.9% or as RIRS for post shock wave lithotripsy (SWL) or alkalinization failure in 9 patients), SWL in 21.6%, or urine alkalinization in 7.8%.
Conclusion: Supine PCNL under regional anesthesia, in this subgroup of obese patients, was found to be feasible and safe with satisfactory stone-free rates and minimal postoperative pain.
Model predictive control (MPC) is an optimal control method that predicts the future states of the system being controlled and estimates the optimal control inputs that drive the predicted states to ...the required reference. The computations of the MPC are performed at pre-determined sample instances over a finite time horizon. The number of sample instances and the horizon length determine the performance of the MPC and its computational cost. A long horizon with a large sample count allows the MPC to better estimate the inputs when the states have rapid changes over time, which results in better performance but at the expense of high computational cost. However, this long horizon is not always necessary, especially for slowly-varying states. In this case, a short horizon with less sample count is preferable as the same MPC performance can be obtained but at a fraction of the computational cost. In this paper, we propose an adaptive regression-based MPC that predicts the best minimum horizon length and the sample count from several features extracted from the time-varying changes of the states. The proposed technique builds a synthetic dataset using the system model and utilizes the dataset to train a support vector regressor that performs the prediction. The proposed technique is experimentally compared with several state-of-the-art techniques on both linear and non-linear models. The proposed technique shows a superior reduction in computational time with a reduction of about 35–65% compared with the other techniques without introducing a noticeable loss in performance.
Bladder and urodynamic changes in multiple sclerosis Torad, Hesham; Shalaby, Nevin; Hussein, Hussein Aly ...
The Egyptian Journal of Neurology, Psychiatry and Neurosurgery,
05/2020, Volume:
56, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Background
Urinary dysfunction is a common symptom during the course of multiple sclerosis (MS). Long-term follow-up of the natural history of bladder dysfunction in MS has been seldom addressed.
...Objective
To identify the type and the course of voiding dysfunction in MS patients in relation to the urodynamic changes of the lower urinary tract (LUT)
Subjects and methods
An observational prospective study including 120 MS patients with urinary dysfunction rated by the American Urological Association (AUA) symptoms questionnaire and assessed by urodynamic studies and followed for 1 year.
Results
Irritative symptoms were the most frequently encountered symptoms (90%), whereas overactive bladder was recorded by urodynamic studies in 35% of subjects. Urinary symptoms severity score was higher in patients with initial urodynamic abnormalities by the end of the 1-year follow-up period (
P
< 0.001). A statistically significant relationship was found between urinary symptoms severity score and each of expanded disability status scale (EDSS) and urodynamic pattern of abnormalities (
P
< 0.01).
Conclusion
Irritative symptoms and overactive bladder seem to be the most frequent urinary dysfunction in MS patients. Urinary symptoms are related to the degree of disability. The initial urodynamic abnormalities are associated with worse urinary dysfunction outcome after 1 year.
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