The concentrations of zinc, copper, cadmium and lead in surface water, sediments and two native snail species, Bellamya bengalensis, and Melanoides tuberculata from Latipada dam were determined. The concentrations of cadmium and lead in surface water were higher than the WHO recommended limits for drinking water standards where as those of zinc and copper were within the limits. The concentrations of zinc, copper, cadmium and lead were higher in the sediments than in water. The bioaccumulated levels of zinc, copper, cadmium, and lead in Bellamya bengalensis were 197.45, 172.42, 18.53 and 112.63 μg/g respectively, while in Melanoides tuberculata were 136.87, 128.36, 20.35 and 127.64 μg/g respectively. The metal concentrations in both species of snails were higher than those of the water and sediment. \nThe bioaccumulated metal concentrations, BWAF and BSAF values indicate that Bellamya bengalensis, have greater potential for zinc and copper bioaccumulation than Melanoides tuberculata, while Melanoides tuberculata have greater potential for cadmium and lead bioaccumulation than Bellamya bengalensis. Therefore, Bellamya bengalensis is proposed as sentinel organism for monitoring of zinc and copper and Melanoides tuberculata for cadmium and lead in freshwater.

In this paper, challenges regarding the provision of channel state information (CSI) in multiple input multiple output orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (MIMO-OFDM) based Cognitive Radio (CR) systems are addressed. A novel scheme that utilizes a Hybrid of Bacterial Foraging and Modified Cuckoo Search (HBFOMCS) optimization together to design pilot symbols that minimizes the channel estimate mean squared error (MSE) is proposed. The optimal selection of pilot subcarriers is a combinatorial problem that requires heavy computations. To reduce the computational complexity, the HBFOMCS optimization is utilized to determine the position of pilot subcarriers. Then, for a given pilot placement obtained by the HBFOMCS algorithm, the MSE of least squares (LS) based channel estimation is computed. Simulation results indicate that, the proposed pilot symbol design provides better channel estimate MSE as well as the bit error rate (BER) performance with reduced computational complexity when compared with the conventional optimization based pilot design.

This paper proposes a prototype for nutrition recommendation and energy expenditure application. The application runs on iOS smartphones. The application advises the users about their food energy intake in calories and their energy expenditure on exercise in daily life. The application consists of five functions which are food and exercise list, calories intake and burn history, calories and BMI, food and healthy articles, and application configuration.

Introduction: Confirmation of correct placement of a nasogastric (NG) tube may be difficult in the operating room. A malpositioned NG tube may result in deleterious consequences. The purpose of this study was to compare the reliability of pressure measurements obtained by a cuff pressure manometer with the reliability of epigastric auscultation and fluid aspiration in determining correct placement of NG tubes in anesthetized, paralyzed and intubated patients. \nMaterial and Methods: The study subjects comprised 104 patients requiring general anesthesia, endotracheal intubation, and NG tube placement prior to elective exploratory laparotomy. A cuff pressure manometer was used to take pressure readings during epigastric palpation and air inflation to determine the position of the NG tube. Afterwards, an epigastric auscultation with air insufflation and aspiration of fluid content were performed in turn by two blinded observers. The correct placement of a NG tube was confirmed by fiberscopic examination and direct palpation of the tube during surgery. The sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value (PPV), and negative predictive value (NPV) of the pressure measurement technique were calculated and compared with values obtained from epigastric auscultation and fluid aspiration. The two-tailed McNemar’s test was used to analyze the data.\nResults and Discussion: Intragastric placement of NG tube was successful on the first attempt in 86 out of 104 patients (82.7%). The pressure measurement technique confirmed the placement of NG tubes with a sensitivity, specificity, PPV, and NPV of 100%. The pressure measurement technique was significantly more accurate than fluid aspiration in confirming correct placement. There was no significant difference between the pressure measurement technique and epigastric auscultation. Furthermore, synchronous pressure change with mechanical ventilation accurately detected tracheal placement of NG tubes. \nConclusions: Pressure measurements taken with a cuff pressure manometer accurately confirm the position of NG tubes.

Tungsten Inert Gas Arc Welding is a commonly used welding technique due to its versatility and ease that can be maintained in almost all type of working conditions. Stainless Steel (SS304) possessing high strength and toughness is usually known to offer major challenges during its welding. In this paper, Taguchi’s DOE approach is used to plan and design the experiments to study the effect of welding process parameters on metal deposition rate and hardness of the weld bead. Three input parameters—current, gas flow rate and no. of passes—were selected to ascertain their effect on the metal deposition rate and hardness.

D2 steel possess high strength and toughness is usually known to create major challenges during its machining. Turning is the process known to its capabilities in providing machining efficiency in terms of higher machining rate and low tool wear apart from reasonably good surface quality. Turning is the traditional machining method that could be effectively used for the cost effective machining of D2 Steel. Hence the study was aimed to investigate the machining characteristics of D2 Steel under the process conditions. The machining characteristic investigated is Feed force (F.F). The results showed that the response variables were strongly influenced by the control factors (input parameters).

Opportunistic computing has seen great deal of advancements in the area of mobile healthcare where the patients are monitored continuously through the readings obtained from Body sensors nodes & smart phones given to users. Whenever smart phones run short of power resources to transmit data to healthcare to centres, other resources are opportunistically computed and used to transmit PHI. Though extensive researches and improvements are in progress to solve various problems like battery power, privacy & security of PHI at the user end, the healthcare centres remain an area of open concern with the overload of large PHI received continuously from numerous users. In this paper we propose a new method of critical data analysis at the health centres where the medical personnel is relieved from overburden of pouring PHI from every patient and help to concentrate on critical/emergency conditions of patients. Thus the Health centres can quickly release help and provide intensive monitoring during emergency. Also data transmission from smart phones to healthcare is done in a secure manner where the PHI is encrypted and then transmitted to the healthcare centres. This ensures secure and reliable transmission of PHI.

Image segmentation is an important task in the field of image processing. Medical image segmentation plays a vital role in assisting the radiologists to visualize and analyze the region of interest in medical images. Region growing is a very useful technique for image segmentation. Region growing method of segmentation which is based on the classification of pixels into connected components based on selecting a seed and grouping its neighbours with the seed based on the gray levels of the neighbours. In this article, we propose a new seeded region growing segmentation algorithm based on metric topological ε- neighbourhoods of different metrics and grouping criterion for segmentation of region of interest from the medical images. The quality of segmented images are measured by the evaluation measure ‘Accuracy ’.

A study was carried out to investigate the effect of land utilisation on soil quality in three landuse types(cultivated land, pine plantation and secondary forest) in Jos, Nigeria. In order to assess the effect of land use changes on soil quality properties, soil samples were collected and nalysed for pH, exchangeable base (Ca, Mg, Na and K), organic carbon,available P, total N and CEC. There were no significant differences (P < 0.05) between the land use types for all the soil properties assessed except for CEC. Soils in the three landuse types were strongly acidic. The study revealed that the mean values of soil properties were higher in the secondary forest than others an indication that the secondary forest was more fertile than the other land use types. It is therefore recommended that land under utilisation should be covered with vegetation as to protect it and also improve its soil quality.

For the extraction and quantitation of plasma fluoxetin (FLX), simvastatin (ST) and simvastatin acid (STA), a rapid, robust and sensitive method using solid-phase extraction (SPE) cartridges and ultra high pressure liquid chromatography (UHPLC) with ultraviolet (UV) detection was developed. Waters HLB cartridges were used for the sample clean-up and purification. Separation of analytes and internal standard (IS) mewastatin was achieved using Phenomenex C18 column (150 x 2 mm, 3 μm). The relative retention times for FLX, ST, STA and IS were 1.5, 8.5, 3.7 and 5.0 min respectively. Mobile phase consisted acetonitrile and phosphate buffer (65:35, v/v) in isocratic mode with a flow rate of 0.3 ml/min. The calibration curves were plotted by using peak area ratios of analytes to IS. The plots were linear from 10-1500 ng/ml for FLX and 10-1000 ng/ml for ST and STA. Intra and inter precision values for FLX ranged from 4.69 to 12.61, for ST 3.36-13.38 and for STA it ranged from 3.73 to 12.93% respectively. The 10 ng/ml was the lowest limit of quantitation (LLOQ) for FLX, ST, and STA. The specificity and sensitivity of this method make it appropriate to estimate plasma level of FLX, ST, and STA in preclinical studies in a single run.

This paper presents an outline for removing noise in digital images used for real time applications. A digital image is get corrupted from various types of noise during transmission and acquisition. Noise is nothing it’s just an unwanted signal or pixel that may inserted or deleted from the original image. The noise in an image may be due to a noisy channel if the image is transmitted through a medium. It may also be due to electronic noise associated with a storage-retrieval system. As we deal 98% of our daily work on real time application data. So to suppress noise and elimination of noise from real time images is a research area for the developers, that how to predict noise and to remove that one noise from the image. As the real time images deals with spatial domain area. So in this paper we present a non-liner filter that may used to detect and remove the noise from digital images. There are so many filters available in literature, some are used to remove substitutive noise and some for additive noise but no filter is used to reduce noise from real time images. So we give a spatial filter for digital image de-noising used for real time applications.