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The integration of the Internet of Things (IoT) and the telecare medical information system (TMIS) enables patients to receive timely and convenient healthcare services regardless of their location or time zone. Since the Internet serves as the key hub for connection and data sharing, its open nature presents security and privacy concerns and should be considered when integrating this technology into the current global healthcare system. Cybercriminals target the TMIS because it holds a lot of sensitive patient data, including medical records, personal information, and financial information. As a result, when developing a trustworthy TMIS, strict security procedures are required to deal with these concerns. Several researchers have proposed smart card-based mutual authentication methods to prevent such security attacks, indicating that this will be the preferred method for TMIS security with the IoT. In the existing literature, such methods are typically developed using computationally expensive procedures, such as bilinear pairing, elliptic curve operations, etc., which are unsuitable for biomedical devices with limited resources. Using the concept of hyperelliptic curve cryptography (HECC), we propose a new solution: a smart card-based two-factor mutual authentication scheme. In this new scheme, HECC's finest properties, such as compact parameters and key sizes, are utilized to enhance the real-time performance of an IoT-based TMIS system. The results of a security analysis indicate that the newly contributed scheme is resistant to a wide variety of cryptographic attacks. A comparison of computation and communication costs demonstrates that the proposed scheme is more cost-effective than existing schemes.

Pediatric cancers are relatively rare diseases when considering all types of cancer. Platinum-based chemotherapeutic agents are potent agents against a variety of pediatric malignancies. An important adverse effect of platinum-based agents is the occurrence of hearing loss. This hearing loss can pose a challenge to detect especially if the child is in his early of life. It will also significantly affect the child development of social, pedagogical, and personal dimensions. It is integral to identify incidence of platinum-based ototoxicity and risk factors that increase the likelihood of developing hearing loss in cancer children. We performed a retrospective chart review of 123 pediatric patients who had completed cisplatin and carboplatin therapy for a variety of malignancies. Patients were diagnosed at Princess Nourah Oncology Centre between January 2011 and December 2016, were less than 14 years old at diagnosis. Audiograms were scored using the International Society of Pediatric Oncology (SIOP) Boston Scale (0-4), a validated grading system for cisplatin-related hearing loss. Ototoxicity was reported in 16 patients out of 123 with a rate of 13%. The incidence of ototoxicity was highest in CNS tumors such as medulloblastoma (37.5%) and optic glioma (25%). Males were at greater risk for developing hearing loss than females. Cumulative cisplatin dose and addition radiation therapy were also identified as risk factors for development of ototoxicity ( P  = 0.008). Nature and location of cancer, gender, cumulative dose, and addition of radiation therapy are important clinical biomarkers of cisplatin ototoxicity., Competing Interests: Conflict of InterestThe authors declare no competing interests., (© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Indian Association of Surgical Oncology 2022, Springer Nature or its licensor holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.)

Most plant viral infections are vector-borne. There is a latent period of disease inside the vector after obtaining the virus from the infected plant. Thus, after interacting with an infected vector, the plant demonstrates an incubation time before becoming diseased. This paper analyzes a mathematical model for persistent vector-borne viral plant disease dynamics. The backpropagated neural network based on the Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm (NN-BLMA) is used to study approximate solutions for fluctuations in natural plant mortality and vector mortality rates. A state-of-the-art numerical technique is utilized to generate reference data for obtaining surrogate solutions for multiple cases through NN-BLMA. Curve fitting, regression analysis, error histograms, and convergence analysis are used to assess accuracy of the calculated solutions. It is evident from our simulations that NN-BLMA is accurate and reliable.

The present study concerns the modeling of the thermal behavior of a porous longitudinal fin under fully wetted conditions with linear, quadratic, and exponential thermal conductivities surrounded by environments that are convective, conductive, and radiative. Porous fins are widely used in various engineering and everyday life applications. The Darcy model was used to formulate the governing non-linear singular differential equation for the heat transfer phenomenon in the fin. The universal approximation power of multilayer perceptron artificial neural networks (ANN) was applied to establish a model of approximate solutions for the singular non-linear boundary value problem. The optimization strategy of a sports-inspired meta-heuristic paradigm, the Tiki-Taka algorithm (TTA) with sequential quadratic programming (SQP), was utilized to determine the thermal performance and the effective use of fins for diverse values of physical parameters, such as parameter for the moist porous medium, dimensionless ambient temperature, radiation coefficient, power index, in-homogeneity index, convection coefficient, and dimensionless temperature. The results of the designed ANN-TTA-SQP algorithm were validated by comparison with state-of-the-art techniques, including the whale optimization algorithm (WOA), cuckoo search algorithm (CSA), grey wolf optimization (GWO) algorithm, particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm, and machine learning algorithms. The percentage of absolute errors and the mean square error in the solutions of the proposed technique were found to lie between 10-4 to 10-5 and 10-8 to 10-10, respectively. A comprehensive study of graphs, statistics of the solutions, and errors demonstrated that the proposed scheme's results were accurate, stable, and reliable. It was concluded that the pace at which heat is transferred from the surface of the fin to the surrounding environment increases in proportion to the degree to which the wet porosity parameter is increased. At the same time, inverse behavior was observed for increase in the power index. The results obtained may support the structural design of thermally effective cooling methods for various electronic consumer devices.

Cowpea (Vigna unguiculata [L.] Walp.) is a major crop for worldwide food and nutritional security, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, that is resilient to hot and drought-prone environments. An assembly of the single-haplotype inbred genome of cowpea IT97K-499-35 was developed by exploiting the synergies between single-molecule real-time sequencing, optical and genetic mapping, and an assembly reconciliation algorithm. A total of 519 Mb is included in the assembled sequences. Nearly half of the assembled sequence is composed of repetitive elements, which are enriched within recombination-poor pericentromeric regions. A comparative analysis of these elements suggests that genome size differences between Vigna species are mainly attributable to changes in the amount of Gypsy retrotransposons. Conversely, genes are more abundant in more distal, high-recombination regions of the chromosomes; there appears to be more duplication of genes within the NBS-LRR and the SAUR-like auxin superfamilies compared with other warm-season legumes that have been sequenced. A surprising outcome is the identification of an inversion of 4.2 Mb among landraces and cultivars, which includes a gene that has been associated in other plants with interactions with the parasitic weed Striga gesnerioides. The genome sequence facilitated the identification of a putative syntelog for multiple organ gigantism in legumes. A revised numbering system has been adopted for cowpea chromosomes based on synteny with common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris). An estimate of nuclear genome size of 640.6 Mbp based on cytometry is presented., (© 2019 The Authors. The Plant Journal published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd and Society for Experimental Biology.)

Background: The majority of eukaryotic genomes are unfinished due to the algorithmic challenges of assembling them. A variety of assembly and scaffolding tools are available, but it is not always obvious which tool or parameters to use for a specific genome size and complexity. It is, therefore, common practice to produce multiple assemblies using different assemblers and parameters, then select the best one for public release. A more compelling approach would allow one to merge multiple assemblies with the intent of producing a higher quality consensus assembly, which is the objective of assembly reconciliation., Results: Several assembly reconciliation tools have been proposed in the literature, but their strengths and weaknesses have never been compared on a common dataset. We fill this need with this work, in which we report on an extensive comparative evaluation of several tools. Specifically, we evaluate contiguity, correctness, coverage, and the duplication ratio of the merged assembly compared to the individual assemblies provided as input., Conclusions: None of the tools we tested consistently improved the quality of the input GAGE and synthetic assemblies. Our experiments show an increase in contiguity in the consensus assembly when the original assemblies already have high quality. In terms of correctness, the quality of the results depends on the specific tool, as well as on the quality and the ranking of the input assemblies. In general, the number of misassemblies ranges from being comparable to the best of the input assembly to being comparable to the worst of the input assembly.

Cowpea (Vigna unguiculata L. Walp.) is a legume crop that is resilient to hot and drought-prone climates, and a primary source of protein in sub-Saharan Africa and other parts of the developing world. However, genome resources for cowpea have lagged behind most other major crops. Here we describe foundational genome resources and their application to the analysis of germplasm currently in use in West African breeding programs. Resources developed from the African cultivar IT97K-499-35 include a whole-genome shotgun (WGS) assembly, a bacterial artificial chromosome (BAC) physical map, and assembled sequences from 4355 BACs. These resources and WGS sequences of an additional 36 diverse cowpea accessions supported the development of a genotyping assay for 51 128 SNPs, which was then applied to five bi-parental RIL populations to produce a consensus genetic map containing 37 372 SNPs. This genetic map enabled the anchoring of 100 Mb of WGS and 420 Mb of BAC sequences, an exploration of genetic diversity along each linkage group, and clarification of macrosynteny between cowpea and common bean. The SNP assay enabled a diversity analysis of materials from West African breeding programs. Two major subpopulations exist within those materials, one of which has significant parentage from South and East Africa and more diversity. There are genomic regions of high differentiation between subpopulations, one of which coincides with a cluster of nodulin genes. The new resources and knowledge help to define goals and accelerate the breeding of improved varieties to address food security issues related to limited-input small-holder farming and climate stress., (© 2016 The Authors. The Plant Journal published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd and Society for Experimental Biology.)