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Hub location problem is further used in transportation and telecommunication networks (airlines, post delivery services, etc.) so origin-destination pairs, receive or send commodities via special facilities called Hub. Hub median problem with multiple allocation is an NP-hard problem which includes both locating hub facilities and allocating non-hub nodes to hubs as minimizes total transportation and location costs. In this paper, the hub median problem is considered in an environment which network flow varies during the time periods and the capacities of hubs and arcs are unlimited. Also opening and closing hubs in different periods of planning horizon are permitted. The model and the proposed algorithm for this problem were considered to Iran airlines network using real passenger flows data. Computational results state that the dynamic network compared with static model has lower cost and whatever the number of time periods in dynamic case increases, the cost will be reduced as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Figures in scientific documents are rich sources of information. The first step in retrieving information from such figures is to build a valid figure database. To this end, we developed a system for generating figure database from scholarly Persian documents, in large scale. The first step is to parse files and extract figures and their corresponding descriptions. There are two general approaches for extracting figures from documents. One is based on image processing methods and another is based on processing the file primitives. The focus of this paper is on latter one. This approach is shown to be a better choice for the search engines because of its speed and scalability properties. We propose a structure based method that extracts the figures and their descriptions by analyzing the file layout. This information is saved in a database with a specific structure and is indexed for retrieval in the search engine. The proposed algorithm was implemented in Python programming language. As a benchmark we used the basic method in the literature which is based on the processing PDF file. We employed the proposed method in a case study on Iran scientific information database (Ganj). In this regard, 150 scientific documents were randomly chosen from Ganj database and analyzed using two mentioned methods. Based on our experimental results, the proposed method is more efficient than the basic method especially for Persian documents. There are many unanswered challenges for Persian documents when using the basic method. The number of noise images resulted from the basic method is high and Persian text extracted is not well organized. Our proposed method overcomes some of these drawbacks and is recommended for generating figure database from scientific Persian documents. The proposed method is able to correctly extract about 40% of the images with their corresponding descriptions which is 10% better than the basic method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background and Aim Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia (CLL) is the most commonly occurring leukemia in adults, accounting for about 30-25% of total leukemia. One of the important etiological causes of this leukemia is the disruption of the Nuclear Factor Kappa B (NF-kB) signaling pathway. The two proteins of Apoptosis-Inducing Ligand (APRIL) and B-Cell Activating Factor (BAFF) play a role in the pathogenesis of this leukemia by affecting the NF-kB signaling pathway. In this study, due to the effect of miRNAs in regulating many cellular processes, the prediction of the prominent miRNAs targeting APRIL and BAFF transcripts in B-cell CLL patients was evaluated using specific and different bioinformatics programs. Methods & Materials Afterwards retrieving the sequences of APRIL and BAFF proteins from the NCBI website, by using several programs including miRanda, TargetScan, miRWalk, DIANA and miRDB with different algorithms, the prediction of miRNAs targeting these genes was investigated. Ethical Considerations This study was approved by the Research Ethics Committee of Arak University of Medical Sciences. Results Based on the scoring system of bioinformatics programs, “hsa-miR-145-5p” and “hsa-miR-185-5p” were identified as miRNAs targeting APRIL gene, while “hsa-miR-424” and “hsa-miR-497”were miRNAs targeting BAFF gene. They were suggested for the practical studies in future. Conclusion Based on the important role of APRIL and BAFF genes in the normal process of cell death and B-cell evolution, it seems that the mi-RNAs predicted by bioinformatics programs using different algorithms can be used as a diagnostic molecular biomarker to identify B-cell CLL patients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]