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In this research, simultaneous quantification of cysteine (Cys) and histidine (His) using a paper-based sensor was investigated for the first time. A microfluidic paper-based sensor is a promising amino acid determination tool due to its low cost, low sample consumption, and fast analysis and is easy to make. We used SBA-15 as porous materials that are crystalline compounds formed with surfactants and TEOS as a silica source. The SBA-15 sample was characterized by X-ray diffraction, Fourier transform infrared, and scanning electron microscope techniques. The microfluidic paper-based sensors were fabricated using a wax pen, and the mesoporous SBA-15 modified filter paper. The fabricated sensors for Cys and His determination are operated based on an indicator-displacement assay. A comparative determination study of Cys and His on the sensors was carried out. The results illustrated that the addition of silica nanoporous material led to an immediate and uniform color change. The sensors were successfully exploited in the simultaneous determination of urinary Cys and His levels, thus providing the potential opportunity for clinical diagnosis. The linear range of 1.0 to 90.0 μM and 1.0 to 100 μM for His and Cys was obtained from the calibration data. The detection limits were also calculated (S/N = 3) for His and Cys of 0.5 μM and 1.5 μM, respectively. The proposed method showed a good agreement with the results achieved by a standard method.

Purpose Eosinophilic lung diseases are a group of pulmonary disorders associated with peripheral or tissue eosinophilia. They can be classified into primary (idiopathic) and secondary groups based on their aetiology. On the other hand, blood eosinophilia is a common clinical problem with various causes. In many cases the lung infiltrations in patients with peripheral eosinophilia are non-eosinophilic. Herein, we aim to assess the relationship between blood eosinophilia and abnormal high-resolution computed tomography (HRCT) features and their extent in idiopathic chronic eosinophilic pneumonia (ICEP) (the most common form of idiopathic eosinophilic lung disease). This can help in differentiating eosinophilic from non-eosinophilic lung infiltrations in patients with blood eosinophilia. Material and methods In this descriptive-correlational study, all patients with proven ICEP, who were referred to Masih Daneshvari Hospital, Tehran, Iran from 2012 to 2019, were included. The ICEP diagnosis was based on lung infiltrations on imaging, in addition to increased numbers of eosinophils in bronchoalveolar lavage fluid, blood or lung biopsy samples, and rapid response to corticosteroids. Patients with known aetiologies for eosinophilic lung diseases were excluded. The HRCT findings and their extent in each patient were compared with the blood eosinophil level. Results Positive correlation was found only between blood eosinophil level and frequency and extent of consolidation, and with frequency of lymphadenopathy. Conclusions HRCT can help to differentiate eosinophilic from non-eosinophilic lung infiltrations in patients with blood eosinophilia by comparing the extent of consolidation with the blood eosinophil level.

Traditional methods for detection of lead ions in water samples are costly and time-consuming. In this work, an accurate smartphone-based colorimetric sensor was developed utilizing a novel machine learning algorithm. In the presence of Pb2+ ions in the solution of specifically functionalized gold nanoparticles, the color of solution turns from red to purple. Indeed, the color variation of the solution is proportional to Pb2+ concentration. The smartphone camera captures the corresponding color change, and the image is processed by an efficient artificial intelligence protocol. The nonlinear regression approach was used for concentration estimation, in which the parameters of the proposed model are obtained using a new feature extraction algorithm. In prediction of Pb2+ concentration, the average absolute error and root-mean-square error were 0.094 and 0.124, respectively. The influence of pH of the medium, temperature, oligonucleotide concentration, and reaction time on the performance of the proposed sensor was carefully investigated and understood to achieve the best sensor response. This novel sensor exhibited good linearity for the detection of Pb2+ in the concentration range of 0.5–2000 ppb with a detection limit of 0.5 ppb.

The primary motivation of this paper is to investigate the sand-retention mechanisms that occur at the opening of sand filters. Various retention mechanisms under various conditions are explored that have a particulate flow with a low concentration of sand particles (called slurry flow) such as particle shape, size, and concentration. The computational fluid dynamic (CFD)–discrete element method (DEM) model is applied to predict the retention mechanisms under steady flow conditions of the well-bore. By using coupled CFD–DEM (CFD to model the fluid flow, and DEM to model the particle flow), the physics involved in the retention mechanisms is studied. The coarse grid unresolved and the smoothed unresolved (refined grid unresolved) coupling approaches implemented in STAR-CCM+ (SIEMENS PLM) are used to transfer data between the fluid and solid phases and calculate the forces. The filter slots under investigation have different geometries: straight, keystone, wire-wrapped screen (WWS) and seamed slot and the particles are considered with different shapes and different aspect ratios and size distributions. The flow regime is laminar in all simulations conducted. The CFD–DEM model is validated from the perspectives of particle–fluid, particle–particle, and particle–wall interactions. Verification of the CFD–DEM model is conducted by mesh sensitivity analysis to investigate the coupling resolution between the CFD and DEM. By simulation of numerous slurry flow scenarios, three retention mechanisms including surface deposition, size exclusion, and sequential arching of particles are observed. However, the concentration of particles is too diluted to result in multiparticle arch formation. In the simulations, various conditions are tested to give us an insight into the parameters and conditions that could affect the occurrence of the retention mechanisms. As an example, the importance of the gravity force and interaction forces on retention mechanisms are confirmed at the microscale in comparison with others forces involved in retention mechanisms such as the drag force, lift force, cohesive force, buoyancy force, and virtual mass force.

The article's abstract is not available.

Thrombosis is an important pathology in the deterioration of COVID-19 patient [...]

Objectives: In countries with a high prevalence of tuberculosis, such as Iran, the differentiation of malignant from non-malignant tumors is crucial. We attempted to find a reliable model in determining malignant nodes by investigating the sonographic characteristics of lymph nodes (LNs). Methods: In this prospective study, the morphologic characteristics of LNs, including size, shape, vascular pattern, echogenicity, margin, coagulation necrosis sign, calcification, and central hilar structure, which had been obtained during endobronchial ultrasound-guided transbronchial needle aspiration, were compared with the final pathology results. Results: We examined 253 LNs from 93 patients. Round shape, non-hilar vascular pattern, heterogeneous echogenicity, hyperechogenicity, distinct margin, and the existence of necrosis signs were significantly higher in malignant nodes. On the other hand, the existence of calcification, as well as the presence of central hilar structure, were highly suggestive of benign nodes (p < 0.050). Multivariate logistic regression revealed that size > 1 cm, heterogeneous echogenicity, hyperechogenicity, the existence of necrosis signs, and the lack of central hilar structure are independent predictive factors for malignancy. The accuracy of each of the aforementioned characteristics are 42.3%, 71.5%, 71.9%, 73.5%, and 65.6%, respectively. Of 74 malignant LNs, 100% had at least one of these independent factors. Conclusions: The morphological features of LNs based on endobronchial ultrasound-guided transbronchial needle aspiration can play a role in predicting malignancy.

The article's abstract is no available.

Aims and objectives: Sarcoidosis and tuberculosis (TB) are two granulomatous inflammatory diseases with several common symptoms. The aim of the present study was to compare the serum levels of biomarkers including interleukin-4 (IL-4) and IL-13, calcium (Ca), hemoglobin, sedimentation rate, and lymphocyte-to-neutrophil ratio between patients with pulmonary TB, patients with sarcoidosis, and control group. Methods: This case–control study was performed on patients referred to the Masih Daneshvari Hospital, Tehran, from April 2017 to 2018. In this study, 24 newly diagnosed patients with active pulmonary TB, 34 patients with pulmonary sarcoidosis, and 30 healthy individuals as the control group were enrolled. Demographic data, erythrocyte sedimentation rate (ESR), the ratio of neutrophil-to-lymphocyte (NLR), serum Ca level, hemoglobin (Hb), and IL-4 and IL-13 were compared between the study groups. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analysis, sensitivity, and specificity were also calculated using SPSS 16.0 software. Results: The mean age was 47.71 ± 10.88 and 55.25 ± 21.58 years in the sarcoidosis and TB. The mean ESR in sarcoidosis patients was 21.45 ± 13.37 mm/h and 41.4 ± 17 mm/h in the TB group. The percentage of peripheral blood lymphocytes in sarcoidosis and TB patients was 28.02 ± 12.20 and 21.41 ± 12.49, respectively, which was significantly higher among patients with sarcoidosis. NLR was also 2.4 ± 1.6 and 4.4 ± 2.9 in sarcoidosis and TB patients, respectively, which showed a significant difference among the groups. Regarding the evaluation of the level of IL-4 and IL-13 in patients, it is worth noting that IL-4 in patients with sarcoidosis was 90 pg/ml compared to 20 pg/ml for TB patients (P < 0.001). There was no significant difference in the levels of IL-13 in the TB and control groups, which varied between 20 and 80 pg/ml (P = 0.35). However, its value was significantly higher in patients with sarcoidosis (P = 0.01) than in the healthy control group and TB (P = 0.01). The ROC curves showed that the diagnostic cutoff of ESR level, Ca, NLR, and Hb could be valuable due to the area under the curves. The cutpoint of 34 mm/h for ESR had a sensitivity of 86% as well as 80% specificity to distinguish TB from the sarcoidosis. Conclusions: Serum levels of the biomarkers indicated a stronger immunological background in sarcoidosis using NLR, Ca, ESR, and Hb.

The Vortex Search Algorithm (VSA) is a single-based meta-heuristic algorithm inspired by the vortices created by stirred fluids. A VSA search creates nested vortices starting from an initial center (the middle of the boundaries), and the vortices are gradually scaled down. In each iteration, the center of a new vortex is created by searching around the previous center and creating a set of candidate solutions with a Gaussian distribution, selecting best of them and comparing it with previous center, in order to replace it. However, this strategy can become trapped in a local optimum, since the search space may not be explored properly by time passing and according to the structure of the many objective functions. Therefore, in this paper an improved version of the VSA is introduced. Actually, the proposed method is not necessarily limited to creating nested vortices; after employing the VSA, the search space is explored by a uniform distribution in each iteration, then the center of the vortex moves toward the best random solution. In this situation, if the shifted center is better than the previous center, then the center is transferred to the new point; in this way, the VSA runs at the shifted center in the next iteration. Therefore, the proposed method is Semi-VSA (SVSA) and its vortices are animated, not necessarily nested. Experiments on 50 benchmark optimization functions indicate that the SVSA is able to improve the VSA, especially when the VSA has been trapped in a local optimum.

Introduction: Pulmonary alveolar proteinosis (PAP) is a rare disease in the field of pulmonary medicine. The efficacy of whole-lung lavage (WLL) as the treatment of PAP had never been evaluated in the Iranian population. Therefore, there is a real need to investigate the characteristics of PAP and also to evaluate the efficacy of WLL in this rare disease. The study aimed to investigate demographic features, clinical presentation and treatment outcomes of the disease in Iranian PAP patients. Material and methods: Data of 45 patients with definite diagnosis of PAP, who had regular follow-ups from March 2004 to March 2015 at an Iranian referral respiratory hospital, were collected. Whole-lung lavages (WLL) efficacy was assessed by comparing spirometric, arterial blood gas parameters and six-minute walk test (6MWT) results before and after all lavages. Results: Mean age at diagnosis of disease was 30.33 ± 14.56 years. Four patients (8.8%) reported non-massive hemoptysis and three subjects (6.6%) had concomitant pulmonary tuberculosis. In 71.1% of cases, transbronchial lung biopsy and bronchoalveolar lavage were sufficient for diagnosis. Spirometric results and arterial blood gas parameters and 6MWD improved significantly after all the lavages. Four patients (8.8%) died because of respiratory failure. The only variable capable of predicting treatment failure was the history of hemoptysis. Conclusion: The study revealed sufficiency of WLL as the PAP patients’ treatment. Also hemoptysis was found to be the independent factor that can predict treatment failure.

Background: Copper is a pollutant compound which can cause earnest toxicity in human and some organisms. Bioreporters are frugal and non-toxic detectors for pollution compounds. Precedent designed recombinant Escherichia coli copper bioreporters with the lux gene of Vibrio fischeri or Aequorin luciferase of Jellyfish does not provide a high sensitivity. The aim of current study was to design an incipient Copper bioreporter with applying firefly luciferase and Copper resistance promoter of P. syringae pv.Tomato in Escherichia coli XL1-Blue. Methods: Recombinant pGL3 was obtained by applying the pGL3-Control vector to Escherichia coli XL1-Blue, by Polymerase Chain Reaction method and double digestion. Recombinant Escherichia coli cells were cultured with applying different concentrations of copper sulphate to study the activity of luciferase by Luminometer. Copper bioreporter specificity was resolute by different concentrations of Zinc sulfate and Ferric sulfate. Results: Recombinant Escherichia coli BL21, with copper promoter gene in pGL3 Vector showed the highest Luciferase activity in 0.1 millimolar of Copper sulfate. The highest Luciferase activity was in 0.09 millimolar and 1.0 millimolar of Zinc sulfate and Ferric sulfate respectively. Conclusion: Current study provided a categorical bioreporter for detecting copper, utilizing firefly luciferase with a high specificity (96.1%). By optimizing inhibitor factors, application of current copper bioreporter can be developed in human life.

Background: Bronchoscopy with endobronchial ultrasound-guided transbronchial needle aspiration (EBUS-TBNA) provides reliable access to cytologic specimens from the mediastinal and hilar lymph nodes. The aim of our study was to compare the accuracy and diagnostic value between EBUS-TBNA pathologic samples using needle suction versus no suction. Method: This clinical trial study carried out on 93 patients with mediastinal or hilar lymphadenopathy or lung cancer patients who underwent EBUS-TBNA procedures using suction and no suction at Masih Daneshvari hospital. Result: A total of 93 patients and 245 LNs were studied. The numbers of malignant and non-malignant nodules using suction were 40 and 80 respectively. There were no significant differences between Endobronchial Ultrasound-Guided Transbronchial Needle Aspiration with and without performing suction regarding diagnostic yield (p=0.16) and tumor size (1.6±0.58 vs 1.74±0.76 p=0.477). Conclusion: There were no differences in adequacy and diagnosis between samples obtained using EBUS-TBNA and those obtained using EBUS-TBNCS. According to this study, there is no advantage in using suction or no suction to EBUS-guided biopsies.

Introduction: Several studies have investigated different tools for asthma diagnosis in order to reduce the cost and improve its early recognition. The goal of this study is to establish ashort questionnaire to be used in practice for asthma screening and compare diagnostic values between this method and spirometric response to bronchodilators. Material and method: 208 patients presenting with chronic stable dyspnea (> 6 months) and definite clinical diagnosis of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, bronchiectasis, pulmonary fibrosis or asthma, were enrolled. 9 questions out of 43 based on the literature search were selected by regression analysis. Patients were asked to complete the questionnaire and then their spirometric responses to bronchodilators were evaluated. Results: Of all, 53.8% of cases were diagnosed clinically to have asthma. For establishing diagnosis of asthma, the bronchodilator test had 48.2% sensitivity, 78.1% specificity, 72% positive, 56.4% negative predictive values, 2.2 positive, 0.66 negative likeli-hood ratios, and false positive, false negative and accuracy of 21.9%, 51.8% and 62.01%, respectively. The revised 9 questions from the questionnaire had 97.3% sensitivity, 77.1% specificity, 83.2% positive, 96.1% negative predictive values, 4.24 positive, 0.03 negative likelihood ratios, 22.9% false positive, 2.7% false negative and 87.98% accuracy. Conclusions: The 9-question questionnaire had better diagnostic values in defining asthma in patients with chronic dyspnea than reversibility of airway obstruction to salbutamol and can be used as auseful screening test for diagnosis of asthma in clinical practice and for investigational purposes.

BACKGROUND Ultrasound elastography, is a pioneer sonographic modality that is conducted during endobronchial ultrasound-guided transbronchial needle aspiration (EBUS-TBNA) in order to increase the accuracy of sampling location. The current study aims to evaluate the usefulness of elastography during EBUS-TBNA in a population with a high prevalence of anthracosis. METHODS This prospective single-blinded study was performed on 69 lymph nodes (LNs) of patients with mediastinal lymphadenopathy undergoing EBUS-TBNA and EBUS-elastography from October 2017 to July 2018. The stiffness level of the tissue was translated into a color to demonstrate the hardness of tissue. Blue and total areas of each section were measured to calculate the hardness of each LN. RESULTS Sixty-nine LNs were evaluated by elastography. Twenty percent of LNs were malignant. There was a statistical difference between malignant and non-malignant nodes based on color dominancy (P = 0.032). However, with the exclusion of anthracosis nodes from the analysis, the difference was more significant (P

Object tracking as a branch of computer vision plays a key role in the intelligent video surveillance. In recent years, the mean shift algorithm due to its simplicity and robustness has attracted great attention for tracking the object by using a colour model, while only using the colour causes the error in some cases of tracking such as illumination variations and so on. Consequently, the authors proposed an enhanced mean shift tracking algorithm. First, they presented a new texture-based target representation by a modified version of the interlaced derivative pattern, which considers spatial dependencies between pixels. Second, an improvement for the mean shift tracking algorithm based on this representation is suggested. In addition, a parameter to resize the window around the object is considered, adaptively. Experimental results on some benchmark video in comparison with other state-of-art methods show the efficiency and utility of the proposed algorithm in many complex conditions.

The 0–1 knapsack problem is one of the classic NP-hard problems. It is an open issue in discrete optimization problems, which plays an important role in the real applications. Therefore, several algorithms have been developed to solve it. The Gravitational Search Algorithm (GSA) is an optimization algorithm based on the law of gravity and mass interactions. In the GSA, the searcher agents are a collection of masses that interact with each other based on the Newtonian gravity and the laws of motion. In this algorithm the position of the agents can be considered as the solutions. The GSA is a nature-inspired algorithm that is used for finding the optimum value of continuous functions. This paper introduces a Discrete version of the GSA (DGSA) for solving 0–1 knapsack problem. In this regard, we introduce an approach for discretely updating the position of each agent. In addition, a fitness function has been proposed for 0–1 knapsack problem. Our experimental results show the effectiveness of the DGSA in comparison with other similar algorithms in terms of the accuracy and overcoming the defect of local convergence.

Introduction: Foreign body aspiration into the respiratory tract is a life-threatening condition and an important cause of morbidity and mortality due to the suffocation in the pediatric age. Case Presentation: We present a foreign body aspiration which is related to a seven-year-old Iranian boy. His complaints included an intermittent cough and dyspnea. The distal impacted endobronchial foreign body has been retrieved by using rat tooth forceps under C-arm-guided flexible bronchoscopy after the failure of two previous interventions. Conclusions: In order to reduce the unsuccessful efforts and also mortality and morbidity rate which are the result of foreign body aspiration, early recognition and also appropriate intervention are crucial. For this purpose, the use of the fluoroscope C-arm device before bronchoscopy may increase the chance of successful extraction of an endobronchial foreign body.

Background: The 6-min walk test (6MW), Cardiopulmonary Exercise Testing (CPET) and spirometry are useful tools, for examination of the respiratory impairment and functional capacity in patients with lung diseases. Sarcoidosis is a multisystem granulomatous disease of unknown etiology. Objective: This study aimed to evaluate the aforementioned tests, in order to examine the functional capacity of sarcoidosis patients, in different stages. Methods: This cross-sectional study carried out, on 50 Iranian patients with sarcoidosis. Patients were classified into three groups, based on the findings of the chest radiography, as well as the pulmonary CT scan, performed by an expert Radiologist; Pulmonary, cardiac and activity function have been evaluated in the patients, using CPET, 6MWT and spirometry. Results: In CPET, percent-predicted peak VO2, 57.75±15.49, p Conclusions: According to this study the ventilatory limitation and pulmonary involvement are the main causes of activity limitations in sarcoidosis patients.