• Diabetes and Metabolism Journal
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• v.42 no.6
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• pp.538-543
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• 2018

Globally, diabetic retinopathy (DR) is one of the leading causes of blindness, that diminishes quality of life. This study aimed to describe the prevalence of DR, and its associated risk factors. This cross-sectional study was carried out among 478 diabetic patients in a referral center in Fars province, Iran. The mean${\pm}$standard deviation age of the participants was $56.64{\pm}12.45$ years old and DR prevalence was 32.8%. In multivariable analysis, lower education levels (adjusted odds ratio [aOR], 0.43; 95% confidence interval [CI], 0.24 to 0.76), being overweight (aOR, 1.70; 95% CI, 1.02 to 2.83) or obese (aOR, 1.88; 95% CI, 1.09 to 3.26), diabetes duration of 10 to 20 years (aOR, 2.35; 95% CI, 1.48 to 3.73) and over 20 years (aOR, 5.63; 95% CI, 2.97 to 10.68), receiving insulin (aOR, 1.99; 95% CI, 1.27 to 3.10), and having chronic diseases (aOR, 1.71; 95% CI, 1.02 to 2.85) were significantly associated with DR. In conclusion, longer diabetes duration and obesity or having chronic diseases are strongly associated with DR suggesting that control of these risk factors may reduce both the prevalence and impact of retinopathy in Iran.

• Healthcare Informatics Research
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• v.24 no.4
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• pp.335-345
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• 2018

Objectives: The retinal nerve fiber layer (RNFL) is a site of glaucomatous optic neuropathy whose early changes need to be detected because glaucoma is one of the most common causes of blindness. This paper proposes an automated RNFL detection method based on the texture feature by forming a co-occurrence matrix and a backpropagation neural network as the classifier. Methods: We propose two texture features, namely, correlation and autocorrelation based on a co-occurrence matrix. Those features are selected by using a correlation feature selection method. Then the backpropagation neural network is applied as the classifier to implement RNFL detection in a retinal fundus image. Results: We used 40 retinal fundus images as testing data and 160 sub-images (80 showing a normal RNFL and 80 showing RNFL loss) as training data to evaluate the performance of our proposed method. Overall, this work achieved an accuracy of 94.52%. Conclusions: Our results demonstrated that the proposed method achieved a high accuracy, which indicates good performance.

• Parasites, Hosts and Diseases
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• v.56 no.6
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• pp.553-558
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• 2018

Pathogenic Acanthamoeba spp. cause granulomatous amoebic encephalitis and keratitis. Acanthamoeba keratitis (AK) is a rare but serious ocular infection that can result in permanent visual impairment or blindness. However, pathogenic factors of AK remain unclear and treatment for AK is arduous. Expression levels of proteins secreted into extracellular space were compared between A. castellanii pathogenic (ACP) and non-pathogenic strains. Two-dimensional polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis revealed 123 differentially expressed proteins, including 34 increased proteins, 7 qualitative increased proteins, 65 decreased proteins, and 17 qualitative decreased proteins in ACP strain. Twenty protein spots with greater than 5-fold increase in ACP strain were analyzed by liquid chromatography triple quadrupole mass spectrometry. These proteins showed similarity each to inosine-uridine preferring nucleoside hydrolase, carboxylesterase, oxygen-dependent choline dehydrogenase, periplasmic-binding protein proteinases and hypothetical proteins. These proteins expressed higher in ACP may provide some information to understand pathogenicity of Acanthamoeba.

• Journal of Veterinary Clinics
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• v.38 no.4
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• pp.189-193
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• 2021

An 11-years old spayed female Persian chinchilla cat presented with acute onset of blindness from bilateral retinal detachment and systemic hypertension. On physical examination, the cat was tachycardic (240 beats/min) with a systolic blood pressure of around 250 mmHg. Clinical findings, blood works, urinalysis, thyroid function test, radiography, echocardiogram, and ultrasonography were performed to rule out underlying diseases. Organ injury induced by systemic hypertension including bilateral retinal detachment and left ventricular hypertrophy were confirmed by ultrasound. Based on these results, it was diagnosed as feline idiopathic hypertension with target organ damage (TOD). The cat was treated with a combination therapy using high doses of amlodipine, telmisartan, and atenolol. After the treatment, its hypertension and TOD were improved. This case showed that appropriate therapeutic management can help prevent TOD associated with feline hypertension.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.18 no.3
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• pp.93-113
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• 2018

This paper examines C. S. Lewis's view of myth and religion in the mid-twentieth century England. Lewis provided his social and cultural criticisms for materialistic contemporary culture and a decline in religiosity in Till We Have Faces (1956). Under the agitated influence of the time period and social movements in which he had lived, Lewis's writing uncovers dynamic interactions with the traumatized world aroused by two World Wars and the apocalyptic aura of an upcoming new world. The narrative of Lewis's novel Till We Have Faces, in a larger perspective, presents the mixtures of mythic motifs and nostalgia. On the plot basis, the novel depicts contemporary spiritual blindness and national dissociations. Many criticisms of Lewis have not been exploring the author's keen knowledge of the modern society because of his conspicuous depictions of evil and grace involving religious and medievalist views. Nonetheless, the paper explores how Lewis's apocalyptical views, related to turmoil and nostalgia, uncover complexities of his religious dilemmas between restoring the deteriorated status of the privileged. Ultimately, it analyzes Lewis's consciousness of the social changes related to the larger, more often than not psychological, context of redefining the national empire.

• Journal of Dental Anesthesia and Pain Medicine
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• v.22 no.3
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• pp.227-231
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• 2022

Although rare, complications can occur with anesthetic procedures. The posterior superior alveolar nerve (PSAN) block anesthetic technique has a high success rate, but positive aspiration can cause bruising, transient diplopia, blurred vision, and temporary blindness in approximately 3% cases. When edema occurs, it is occasionally massive, especially in the infratemporal fossa, and the resulting hematoma is usually unsightly. A 20-year-old woman presented with massive edema followed by hematoma in the upper right jaw immediately after PSAN block administration, which subsequently spread to the oral mucosa. The patient did not report any complications during the anesthetic procedure. However, after the injection was administered, the patient experienced anesthetic sensations, which rapidly evolved to facial edema. There was mild pain, but without intraoral or extraoral bleeding. The patient was prescribed medicines and instructed to perform contrast therapy. Although hematomas and edema are rare, they are difficult to prevent. The choice of local anesthetic and appropriate application of the anesthetic technique can minimize their occurrence.

• International Journal of Computer Science & Network Security
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• v.22 no.9
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• pp.23-30
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• 2022

Glaucoma is a chronic neuropathy that affects the optic nerve which can lead to blindness. The detection and prediction of glaucoma become possible using deep neural networks. However, the detection performance relies on the availability of a large number of data. Therefore, we propose different frameworks, including a hybrid of a generative adversarial network and a convolutional neural network to automate and increase the performance of glaucoma detection. The proposed frameworks are evaluated using five public glaucoma datasets. The framework which uses a Deconvolutional Generative Adversarial Network (DCGAN) and a DenseNet pre-trained model achieves 99.6%, 99.08%, 99.4%, 98.69%, and 92.95% of classification accuracy on RIMONE, Drishti-GS, ACRIMA, ORIGA-light, and HRF datasets respectively. Based on the experimental results and evaluation, the proposed framework closely competes with the state-of-the-art methods using the five public glaucoma datasets without requiring any manually preprocessing step.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.17 no.2
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• pp.335-352
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• 2023

When solving multi-objective optimization problems, the blindness of the evolution direction of the population gradually emerges with the increase in the number of objectives, and there are also problems of convergence and diversity that are difficult to balance. The many- objective optimization problem makes some classic multi-objective optimization algorithms face challenges due to the huge objective space. The sine cosine algorithm is a new type of natural simulation optimization algorithm, which uses the sine and cosine mathematical model to solve the optimization problem. In this paper, a knee-driven many-objective sine-cosine algorithm (MaSCA-KD) is proposed. First, the Latin hypercube population initialization strategy is used to generate the initial population, in order to ensure that the population is evenly distributed in the decision space. Secondly, special points in the population, such as nadir point and knee points, are adopted to increase selection pressure and guide population evolution. In the process of environmental selection, the diversity of the population is promoted through diversity criteria. Through the above strategies, the balance of population convergence and diversity is achieved. Experimental research on the WFG series of benchmark problems shows that the MaSCA-KD algorithm has a certain degree of competitiveness compared with the existing algorithms. The algorithm has good performance and can be used as an alternative tool for many-objective optimization problems.

• International Journal of Computer Science & Network Security
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• v.22 no.12
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• pp.98-106
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• 2022

A condition of the retina known as hypertensive retinopathy (HR) is connected to high blood pressure. The severity and persistence of hypertension are directly correlated with the incidence of HR. To avoid blindness, it is essential to recognize and assess HR as soon as possible. Few computer-aided systems are currently available that can diagnose HR issues. On the other hand, those systems focused on gathering characteristics from a variety of retinopathy-related HR lesions and categorizing them using conventional machine-learning algorithms. Consequently, for limited applications, significant and complicated image processing methods are necessary. As seen in recent similar systems, the preciseness of classification is likewise lacking. To address these issues, a new CAD HR-diagnosis system employing the advanced Deep Dense CNN Learning (DD-CNN) technology is being developed to early identify HR. The HR-diagnosis system utilized a convolutional neural network that was previously trained as a feature extractor. The statistical investigation of more than 1400 retinography images is undertaken to assess the accuracy of the implemented system using several performance metrics such as specificity (SP), sensitivity (SE), area under the receiver operating curve (AUC), and accuracy (ACC). On average, we achieved a SE of 97%, ACC of 98%, SP of 99%, and AUC of 0.98. These results indicate that the proposed DD-CNN classifier is used to diagnose hypertensive retinopathy.

• Annual Conference of KIPS
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• 2022.05a
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• pp.643-644
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• 2022

시청각 중복 장애인은 타인과 의사소통에 어려움이 있기 때문에 이에 대한 연구가 필요하다. 본 논문에서는 시청각 중복 장애인이 타인과 실시간 의사소통이 가능한 팔목 보호대 형태의 Google Cloud Speech API 기반 점자 단말기를 제안한다. 점자 단말기에는 심박, 온도, 인바디 센서를 부착하여 착용자의 건강상태를 분석한다. 또한 타인과 실시간 소통을 위해 점자 출력 닷 셀 6 개와 점자 입력버튼을 2 × 3 형태로 배치하여 STT 를 통해 타인의 음성을 점자형태로 출력하여 읽거나 점자를 입력하여 TTS 를이용해 타인에게 스피커를 통해 의사를 전달할 수 있다. 이를 통해 시청각 중복 장애인들은 타인과 실시간 의사소통과 정보 취득에 자유로워질 수 있다.