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Cavernous sinus thrombosis (CAST) is a rare and potentially fatal complication following tooth extraction. In present case of a 55 year old male known case of diabetes mellitus underwent tooth extraction. After 5 days, he noticed swelling around the cheek, high grade fever, and frontal headaches. Diagnosis of alveolar abscess after inspection was made, for which incision and drainage was done. Next morning, he noticed that the cheek swelling progressed to left eye and there was CT brain was performed which showed hyperdense areas in cavernous sinus on left side and left sylvian fissure with hemorrhagic venous infarct in left temporal and frontal lobes. More caudal sections revealed mucosal thickness in left maxillary and ethmoidal sinuses, edema over cheek, preseptal orbital swelling, retro-orbital fat stranding and axial proptosis. A diagnosis of rhino-orbital infection from dental source with cavernous sinus extension causing left temporo-frontal hemorrhagic venous infarction was made Emergency surgery for decompression was performed but the patient did not responded to the treatment and succumbed to the infection. This case is a reminder that in patients with uncontrolled diabetes, undergoing dental procedures should be carefully dealt with appropriate antibiotic cover. Early signs like unilateral facial edema, orbital chemosis, edema, and proptosis should raise high index suspicion of cavernous sinus thrombosis.

Abstract Background Pericardiocentesis offers a definitive diagnostic and a life-saving therapeutic modality through removal of pericardial fluid and relief of high intrapericardial pressure. Percutaneous pericardiocentesis has been performed via different approaches depending on different institutional experiences. In this paper, we present our institutional experience and review the current literature of the different approaches for performing percutaneous pericardiocentesis. Materials and methods We evaluated consecutive patients who underwent echocardiographic-guided pericardiocentesis via the apical approach for pericardial effusion between the period of April 1st, 2022, and April 1st, 2023, at University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS). Health records were reviewed for clinical presentations, available imaging findings, procedural outcomes, and short-term follow up. Results A total of eight consecutive cases of pericardiocentesis via the apical approach were found. Seven were successful. No complications were reported. Six patients had evidence of tamponade physiology on echocardiogram. Conclusion Historically, pericardiocentesis has been most performed via the subxiphoid approach. However, an ultrasound-guided apical approach offers a safe and effective alternative and may be preferable in patients with challenging anatomies.

Introduction Breast reconstruction has become integral part of breast cancer treatment. Deep inferior epigastric perforator (DIEP)-based flap is considered the gold standard in autologous breast reconstruction.

Abstract The pedestrians’ feeling of comfort while walking on footpaths varies according to the time of day, environment, and the purpose of the trip. The quality of service offered by pedestrian facilities such as walkways, intersections, and public places is evaluated by the Pedestrian level of service (PLOS) and has been measured from time to time, to upgrade and maintain the sustainable travel choice of people. This paper aims to focus on the level of service based on three main trip purposes such as work, education, and recreation, while considering various path characteristics and pedestrian flow characteristics that affect the pedestrian’s feeling of comfort on the walkways. The data has been collected using pedestrian questionnaire surveys and pedestrian sensors in the Melbourne central business district and the significant factors that influence the PLOS for each trip purpose will be chosen using the Mutual Information gain, which is found to be different for each trip purpose. The major influencing factors that affect the PLOS will be used to develop machine learning models for three trip purposes separately using Random Forest and Light-GBM algorithm in Python. The accuracy of prediction using the light GBM model is 0.74 for education, 0.80 for recreation, and 0.70 for work trip purposes. It is found using SHAP which stands for Shapely Additive explanations that the factors such as interpersonal distance, distance from vehicles, construction sites, vehicle volume, traffic noise, and footpath surface are the most influencing variables that affect the PLOS based on three different trip purposes.

Environmental heterogeneity is considered as one of the main drivers of habitat specialization and niche evolution among tropical plant lineages, and local‐scale habitat specialization promotes niche differentiation among sister taxa. In this study, we examined the degree to which habitat specialization leads to niche differentiation across the distribution range of a given species using five species of the family Myristicaceae native to Western Ghats, India, as an example. In the Western Ghats, Myristicaceae species occur in two main habitat types, namely, freshwater swamps (flooded habitat) and terra firme forest (non‐flooded habitat), distributed across a seasonal flooding gradient. First, we reconstructed the evolutionary history of flooded habitat specialization among global and Western Ghats Myristicaceae by mapping flooded habitat association and traits conferring flood tolerance (e.g., aerial roots) on a dated phylogeny. Then, we investigated climatic niche differences among lineages occupying flooded and terra firme habitats using occurrence data and environmental variables. Our analysis revealed swampy habitat occurrence as the probable ancestral state with subsequent speciation events leading to adaptation to non‐swampy habitats. We also show that traits conferring flood tolerance have evolved independently several times during the evolution of Myristicaceae. Furthermore, phylogenetically distantly related Myristicaceae taxa occupying different habitats (flooded and terra firme habitat) in Western Ghats show significant niche divergence. Overall, the repeated gain of swampy habitat specialization and associated morphological traits and evidence for habitat‐associated climatic niche divergence among Myristicaceae taxa suggest that seasonal flooding may have been an important driver of ecological diversification in this primitive plant family. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we introduce conformal Riemannian morphisms. The idea of conformal Riemannian morphism generalizes the notions of isometric immersions, Riemannian submersions, Riemannian maps and conformal Riemannian maps. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wireless sensor networks comprise a set of autonomous sensor nodes, commonly used for data gathering and tracking applications. Node localization and intrusion detection are considered as the major design issue in WSN. Therefore, this paper presents a new multi-objective manta ray foraging optimization (MRFO) based node localization with intrusion detection (MOMRFO-NLID) technique for WSN. The goal of the MOMRFO-NLID technique is to optimally localize the unknown nodes and determine the existence of intrusions in the network. The MOMRFO-NLID technique encompasses two major stages namely MRFO based localization of nodes and optimal Siamese Neural Network (OSNN) based intrusion detection. The OSNN technique involves the hyperparameter tuning of the traditional SNN using the MRFO algorithm and consequently increases the detection rate. In order to assess the enhanced performance of the MOMRFONLID technique, a series of simulations take place and the results reported superior performance compared to existing techniques interms of distinct evaluation parameters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To link to full-text access for this article, visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.comnet.2006.11.016 Byline: Vasudev Shah, Ece Gelal, Srikanth V. Krishnamurthy Keywords: Power control; Power-heterogeneous ad hoc networks; Link asymmetry; Cross-layer design; MAC; Routing Abstract: Traditional MAC and routing protocols, which are primarily designed for homogeneous networks wherein all nodes transmit with the same power, suffer performance degradations when employed in power heterogeneous networks. The observed degradations are due to link asymmetry, which arises as high power nodes that do not sense the transmissions of low power nodes can potentially initiate transmissions that interfere with the low power communications. Link layer asymmetry in power heterogeneous networks not only disrupts the functioning of the routing protocol in use, but also results in unfairness in medium access. In this paper, we develop a cross-layer framework to effectively address the link asymmetry problem at both the MAC and the routing layers. At the MAC layer, the framework intelligently propagates low power control messages to the higher power nodes, so as to preclude them from initiating transmissions while there are low power communications in progress within their sensing range. At the routing layer, the framework facilitates the efficient use of unidirectional links. We perform extensive simulations to study the performance of our proposed framework in various settings, and show that the overall throughput in power heterogeneous networks is enhanced by as much as 25% over traditional layered approaches. In addition, we show that our schemes are also beneficial in power homogeneous settings, as they reduce the extent of false link failures that arise when the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol is used. In summary, our framework offers a simple yet effective and viable approach for medium access control and for supporting routing in power heterogeneous ad hoc networks. Author Affiliation: Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of California, Riverside, CA 92521, USA Article History: Received 4 May 2006; Revised 19 September 2006; Accepted 20 November 2006 Article Note: (miscellaneous) Responsible Editor: M. Venkatachalam

To link to full-text access for this article, visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.comnet.2006.06.008 Byline: Lap Kong Law, Srikanth V. Krishnamurthy, Michalis Faloutsos Keywords: Multicast; Broadcast; Ad hoc networks; Adaptive Abstract: In group communications, we find that current multicast protocols are far from "one size fits all": they are typically geared towards and optimized for particular scenarios. As a result, when deployed in different scenarios, their performance and overhead often degrades significantly. A common problem is that most of these protocols incur high overheads with a high density of group members and in high mobility. Our objective is to design a protocol that adapts in response to the dynamics of the network. In particular, our objective is to provide efficient and lightweight multicast data dissemination irrespective of the density of group members and node density. Our work is motivated by two observations. First, broadcasting in some cases is more efficient than multicasting. Second, member and node layout distributions are not necessarily homogeneous. For example, many MANET applications result in a topological clustering of group members that move together. Thus, we develop Fireworks, an adaptive approach for group communications in mobile ad hoc networks. Fireworks is a hybrid 2-tier multicast/broadcast protocol that adapts to maintain performance given the dynamics of the network topology and group density. In a nutshell, our protocol creates pockets of broadcast distribution in areas with many members, while it develops a multicast backbone to interconnect these dense pockets. Fireworks offers packet delivery statistics comparable to that of a pure multicast scheme but with significantly lower overheads. Author Affiliation: Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of California, Riverside, Riverside, CA 92521, United States Article History: Received 29 April 2006; Revised 11 June 2006; Accepted 18 June 2006 Article Note: (miscellaneous) Responsible Editor: X.S. Shen

To link to full-text access for this article, visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.comnet.2006.06.007 Byline: Zhenqiang Ye (a), Lap Kong Law (b), Srikanth V. Krishnamurthy (b), Zhong Xu (a), Suvidhean Dhirakaosal (b), Satish K. Tripathi (c), Mart Molle (b) Keywords: Cellular networks; Handoff prioritization; Channel reservation; Analysis; Simulation Abstract: In wireless cellular networks, a roaming mobile station (MS) is expected to move from one cell to another. In order to ensure that ongoing calls are not dropped while the owner mobile stations roam among cells, handoff calls may be admitted with a higher priority than newly generated calls. Predictive channel reservation (or pre-reservation) schemes allow the reservation of a channel for an ongoing call in an adjacent cell before its owner MS moves into that cell, so that the call is sustained when the MS moves into the adjacent cell. Pre-reservations are made when the MS is within some distance of the new cell boundary. This distance determines the area in which the MS can make channel reservations. In this paper, we study the effect of the pre-reservation area size on handoff performance in wireless cellular networks. Our studies show that if the reserved channels are strictly mapped to the MSs that made the corresponding reservations, as we increase the pre-reservation area size, the system performance (in terms of the probability that the handoff calls are dropped) improves initially. However, beyond a certain point, the performance begins to degrade due to a large number of false reservations. The optimal pre-reservation area size is closely related to the traffic load of the network and the MSs' mobility pattern (moving speed). We provide an analytical formulation that furthers understanding with regard to the perceived behavior in one-dimensional networks (in which all cells are along a line). With the objective of improving handoff performance and alleviating this sensitivity to the area size, we propose an adaptive channel pre-reservation scheme. Unlike prior pre-reservation methods, the key idea in our scheme is to send a channel pre-reservation request for a possible handoff call to a neighboring cell not only based on the position and orientation of the owner MS, but also as per its speed towards the target cell. The newly proposed scheme uses GPS measurements to determine when channel pre-reservation requests are to be made. Simulation results show that the adaptive channel pre-reservation scheme performs better in all typical scenarios than a previously proposed popular pre-reservation method that does not take mobility into account. Author Affiliation: (a) Department of Electrical Engineering, University of California, Riverside, CA 92521, United States (b) Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of California, Riverside, CA 92521, United States (c) Department of Computer Science and Engineering, SUNY at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY 14260, United States Article History: Received 12 September 2005; Revised 7 June 2006; Accepted 12 June 2006 Article Note: (miscellaneous) Responsible Editor: S. Kasera

Studies of the capacity of cellular systems, stated in terms of the admissible number of remote users, have generally been limited to voice telephony. In this paper, we address the problem of comparing the interference-limited performance of code-division multiple-access (CDMA) and time-division multiple-access (TDMA) systems in a packet-switched environment. The objective is to determine whether the capacity advantages claimed for circuit-switched CDMA still apply in a packet-switched environment, where the natural time diversity of bursty transmission may be a significant factor. Under a set of specific assumptions about the wireless environment (including path loss, shadow fading, multipath delay spread, cochannel interference, power control, and coding), we evaluate the number of users that can be admitted to the system while maintaining some desired quality-of-service (QoS) level. Four different classes of users with different characteristics and requirements are considered. The system capacity is found to significantly depend on the QoS objectives, which might be stated in terms of availability of some specified signal-to-interference level, packet-loss rate, or mean tolerable delay. The main finding is that strict requirements imposed on the radio access level tend to favor CDMA, whereas if some form of packet recovery at the higher layers is allowed (implying a relaxed set of requirements on the radio interface), then a somewhat higher capacity may be achieved by TDMA. Index Terms--Capacity, code-division multiple access (CDMA), packet communications, quality-of-service (QoS), TDMA.

The effect of supplementary cementitious materials (SCMs) such as fly ash (FA), GGBS and silica fume (SF) on the geotechnical index and engineering properties of expansive clays (EC) are studied in this research work. This manuscript aims to determine the workability (consistency limits (CL)), swellability (free swell index (FSI)), compaction properties, strength characteristics (UCS) and hydraulic conductivity (HC) of varied eighteen mix proportions of FA-EC (P-series), FA-GGBS-EC (Q-series) and FA-GGBS-SF-EC (R-series) are experimentally studied as a bottom liner in landfills. From the test results, CL and FSI significantly decreased in P, Q and R series, this is due to the effect of flocculation, a process that increases the average particle size of mix blends and also depletion of the double-diffusive layer thickness of EC by promoting the Ca2+ ions in the pore water from SCMs. The compaction parameters such as optimum moisture content decreased in all the series, due to the higher flocculation of mixes. However, maximum dry unit weight increased in Q and R and decreased in the P series. The UCS values increased with an increase in optimum SCMs quantities and with curing intervals tested at 0, 7, 14 and 28 days. The higher UCS value is attained at 40 %FA with EC (i.e. P2), 60 %FA-GGBS with EC (i.e. Q3) and 60 %FA-GGBS-SF with EC (i.e. R3) in R-series which confirmed to be optimum due to the loss of cementation action/reduced cohesion in the matrix. In the case of HC, P2, Q3 and R3 mixes are confirmed to be optimum and fall under the criterion standards of landfill liner as per USEPA recommendation. Overall, this work proves to be a novelty and shows the feasibility of various collated SCMs blended with EC as landfill liner material, furthermore, these mixes are optimized to combine with EC to create a sustainable landfill liner that fits with the United Nations sustainable goals of 2030

The use of rapid photothermal processing (RPP) enhances thermal processing in terms of reduced time and lower temperature. At the same time, RPP increases the performance and reliability of the processed device. The inherent optimization characteristics of RPP shows its potential in meeting the thermal processing needs of next-generation integrated circuits. Hence, the development of processing tools based on RPP should be established.

Research was conducted to study the role of rapid thermal processing (RTP) in process integration. The increasing scales of integration and smaller dimension devices provide a constant demand for the reduction of the macroscopic and microscopic defects in the manufacture of silicon integrated circuits. Results demonstrate that rapid thermal processing (RTP) can provide materials with better performance than other thermal processes.