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Background: Dairy consumption and especially cheese consumption has been increasing in most countries of the world due to its favorable taste. European countries and the United States are the major producers and consumers of cheese. Due to the nutritional and economic importance of cheese, various schemes have been considered to increase its consumption and the most important of which is to improve its sensory properties. Several factors affect the development of cheese properties including chemical composition, residual coagulation factors, enzymes in milk, microbial flora of cheese and the storage conditions during the ripening stage, microorganisms in cheese especially lactic acid bacteria. Objective: Various methods have been studied to improve the sensory properties of cheese in the world and the most successful of which is the addition of adjunct culture. Adjunct cultures are a variety of selected microorganisms that are added to milk to improve the sensory quality or to accelerate the ripening of the product. The major adjunct cultures are lactobacilli. Many studies show that Lactobacillus helveticus LH212 and Lactobacillus helveticus CNRZ32 are among the most desirable bacteria. Adjunct cultures are used in two ways: attenuated and live cultures. There are several methods for preparing attenuated cultures, but most researchers focus on physical methods such as heat shock, freezing shock and spray drying. Conclusion: The purpose of this article is to express the role of adjunct cultures (types of Lactobacilli) in the sensory properties of cheddar cheese, selection criteria, and the amount, and time of adding adjunct cultures in the cheese-making process.

The Mahidasht region is a vital cultural sphere on the Great Khorasan Road that has provided substantial evidence for administrative activity, which is considered to be an indicator of economic and political complexity in late prehistoric societies. This article discusses a corpus of bureaucratic artefacts from the site of Tapeh Tyalineh in the Kouzaran plain in the north of Mahidasht, including 52 jar sealings and 12 door sealings. The artefacts were found during the recent surveys conducted by two of the authors at Tapeh Tyalineh after reports were received of illegal diggings at the site by villagers who had used its soil to plaster the roofs of their houses and to level and cultivate their farmland. Tyalineh seal impressions are studied here in terms of style and iconography in order to date the corpus of administrative artefacts. Furthermore, applying a functionalist approach, the artefacts are examined to answer questions regarding the nature and function of the site. The results suggest that the corpus dates to the proto-Elamite era. The significance of the door sealings, as the most important artefact type from Tyalineh, is that at least a part of the site was devoted to administrative affairs, which probably involved holding certain commodities in rather small closed-mouthed jars and then securing them behind locked doors. The administrative technology not only at Tyalineh but also at Chogha Maran and Dehsavar in Mahidasht and Godin VI:1 in Kangavar attest to well-established Early Bronze Age administrative and economic institutions along the Khorasan Road in the Central Zagros, which were involved in interregional commercial interactions.

In this work, the problem of learning Koopman operator of a discrete-time autonomous system is considered. The learning problem is formulated as a constrained regularized empirical loss minimization in the infinite-dimensional space of linear operators. We show that under certain but general conditions, a representer theorem holds for the learning problem. This allows reformulating the problem in a finite-dimensional space without any approximation and loss of precision. Following this, we consider various cases of regularization and constraints in the learning problem, including the operator norm, the Frobenius norm, rank, nuclear norm, and stability. Subsequently, we derive the corresponding finite-dimensional problem. Furthermore, we discuss the connection between the proposed formulation and the extended dynamic mode decomposition. Finally, we provide an illustrative numerical example.

We focus on an anisotropic p (x)-Laplacian equation defined on a bounded domain with smooth boundary. Moreover, using variational methods to find the existence of at least three solutions due to Ricceri is discussed.

Background: It is essential to study the availability of reproductive health services and the capacities of providers, to provide evidence for improving service quality. Aims: To identify the role of midwives in the provision of reproductive health services and recommend improvements. Methods: A national review of government health resources in the Islamic Republic of Iran was conducted to explore available reproductive health services. Through semi-structured interviews with 30 midwives, information was collected about the compatibility of services with the capacity and scope of the activities of midwives. A panel of 12 experts was assembled to develop a proposed service package. The content analysis method was applied to data analysis and interpretation. Results: The service package developed covered 82 services that midwives can offer at the 8 healthcare facility groups. Although midwives were trained to manage a range of primary and gynaecological care services, certain essential aspects of reproductive health services were not being delivered on the frontline. These include sexually transmitted diseases and human papilloma virus management, diagnosis and treatment of common gynaecological problems, sexual education and counselling, and childbirth services. Midwives were not adequately engaged to provide reproductive health care at the secondary level. Conclusion: There are drawbacks to the current reproductive health service delivery in the Islamic Republic of Iran. The service package designed and proposed in this study aims to strengthen reproductive health care services and planning and better integration of midwife-led programmes.

Cardiotoxicity is one of the main complications of chemotherapy that increases morbidity and mortality in cancerous patients. The present systematic review aimed to investigate the protective effects of berberine (Ber) on doxorubicin (Dox)-induced cardiotoxicity. The study protocol was developed following the PRISMA statement. An extensive search was performed in multiple databases, including Embase, PubMed, Cochrane library, Web of Science, and Scopus. After defining the inclusion/exclusion criteria of the study, 12 records were included. The desired data of the retrieved articles were extracted from the studies and imported into an Excel form and ultimately, the effects, probable outcomes and mechanisms were surveyed. By activating sirtuin 1 (SIRT1), Ber caused reduced oxidative damage and loss of mitochondria integrity in cardiomyocytes. It also regulated autophagy and apoptosis via down-regulating AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK), nucleotide-binding oligomerization domain, leucine rich repeat, and pyrin domain containing protein (NLRP) activation. Moreover, Ber increased superoxide dismutase (SOD), catalase (CAT), and plasma glutathione peroxidase (GSH-Px) activities, reduced the levels of malondialdehyde (MDA), up-regulated SIRT3, and subsequently reduced oxidative stress in cardiomyocytes and loss of mitochondria integrity, leading to developed apoptosis and regulating the histopathological and electrocardiogram changes in the myocardium. It also ameliorated the DOX-induced calcium ions (Ca2+) and iron overload. Ber reduced oxidant and inflammatory activity, and regulated apoptosis of cardiomyocytes, thus protecting the cells against DOX-induced cardiotoxicity.

Several studies have examined the association between CD36 rs1761667 polymorphism with cardiometabolic risk factors and metabolic syndrome (MetS). This study aimed to investigate the interactions between rs1761667 polymorphism and dietary patterns on the cardiometabolic risk factors and the risk of MetS in apparently healthy individuals aged 20–70 years. Food consumption data were acquired using a validated semi-quantitative FFQ. Dietary patterns were identified by factor analysis. CD36 rs1761667 was genotyped by PCR-restriction fragment length polymorphism. The gene–diet interaction was detected by the general linear model or logistic regression. Significant or marginally significant interactions were observed between healthy dietary pattern (HDP) and CD36 rs1761667 on weight (P = 0·006), BMI (P = 0·009), waist circumference (P = 0·005), hip circumference (P = 0·06), body muscle percentage (P = 0·02), body fat percentage (P = 0·09), TAG-glucose index (P = 0·057), atherogenic index of plasma (P = 0·07), the risk of MetS (P = 0·02), risk of abdominal obesity (P = 0·02) and elevated blood pressure (P = 0·07). Besides, a gene–diet interaction was detected between the traditional dietary pattern and rs1761667 variants on odds of hypertriglyceridaemia (P = 0·02). The adherence to HDP was associated with a lower weight, BMI and higher odds of HDL-cholesterol only in A-allele carriers. In conclusion, adherence to HDP (a diet with high fibre, fish and dairy products) can be more effective on some cardiometabolic risk factors and risk of MetS components in the A-allele carrier than the GG genotype of rs1761667 polymorphism. However, future studies are required to shed light on this issue.

In the era of smart healthcare tremendous growth, plenty of smart devices facilitate cognitive computing for the purposes of lower cost, smarter diagnostic, etc. Android system has been widely used in the field of IoMT, and as the main operating system. However, Android malware is becoming one major security concern for healthcare, by the serious threat for our medical software assets, like the leakage of private information, the abusing of critical operations, etc. Unfortunately, the existing methods focus on building sustainable classification models, without fully considering system API which is the key to model aging. Compared to the traditional methods, we apply the lifeCycle of API as temporal metric. In addition to the temporal view, the “sizes” of the APPs are utilized as spatial metric in the spatial view. Based on this, we firstly discuss the temporal and spatial metrics together in terms of clustering, and then propose our novel framework-TSDroid. In this framework, we use TS-based clustering algorithm to obtain clustering subsets to enhance the detection capability. We have carried out an experimental verification on three existing excellent methods (i.e., Drebin, HinDroid, and DroidEvolver) and obtain good promotion effects by our framework.

Routinely, adolescent idiopathic scoliosis (AIS) curves that progress beyond 40° in skeletally immature adolescents require surgery. However, some adolescents with AIS and their parents utterly refuse surgery and insist on wearing a brace. Debate continues regarding the appropriateness of bracing for AIS curves exceeding 40° in patients who have rejected surgical intervention. This systematic review and meta-analysis was conducted to review the literature on the effectiveness of bracing and its predictive factors in largermagnitude AIS curves ≥40°. This study replicated the search strategy used by the PICOS system for formulating study questions, which include consideration of the patient/population (P), intervention (I), comparison (C), outcome (O), and study design (S). The search was conducted up to January 2022 in the following bibliographic online databases only in the English language: PubMed, Google Scholar, Scopus, and Web of Science. Two assessors reviewed the articles for qualification. Eligible studies were assessed for risk of bias at the study level using the Newcastle-Ottawa Scale. The effect size across the studies was determined using standardized mean differences (Cohen’s d) and 95% confidence intervals for the meta-analysis. Among the eight included moderate quality studies, evidence of potential publication bias (p

The principle of maximum entropy is a well-known approach to produce a model for data-generating distributions. In this approach, if partial knowledge about the distribution is available in terms of a set of information constraints, then the model that maximizes entropy under these constraints is used for the inference. In this paper, we propose a new three-parameter lifetime distribution using the maximum entropy principle under the constraints on the mean and a general index. We then present some statistical properties of the new distribution, including hazard rate function, quantile function, moments, characterization, and stochastic ordering. We use the maximum likelihood estimation technique to estimate the model parameters. A Monte Carlo study is carried out to evaluate the performance of the estimation method. In order to illustrate the usefulness of the proposed model, we fit the model to three real data sets and compare its relative performance with respect to the beta generalized Weibull family.

Background and aim: The coronavirus disease 209 (COVID-19) pandemic has been affecting various strata of society including different guilds. Each of these segments has its role to play in controlling epidemics. Accordingly, this study aimed to explore trade unions’ roles and responsibilities in the prevention and emergency response to epidemic, including the COVID-19 pandemic.Materials and methods: The present qualitative research was conducted using directed content analysis. Participants were selected by a purposeful sampling method. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews and field notes and validated through Lincoln and Guba’s (1985) evaluative criteria. Data were analyzed by MAXQDA software.Results: Data analysis, constant comparison, and class integration provided a total of seven main themes, which were extracted into four domains of Plan, Implementation, Review, and Action. The main themes were categorized into the dimensions of each domain, so that the Plan domain included three dimensions of union/guild contexts, leadership and staff participation, and planning. The Implementation domain included two dimensions of support and operations. The Assessment domain had a performance evaluation dimension, and the Action domain was made up of an improvement dimension.Conclusion: Relying on their organizational and social capacities, trade unions can facilitate the leadership and participation of employees and communities for appropriate policies and making resilient decisions to control epidemics and other roles and responsibilities related to health.

Two decades of measurements of spectral reflectance of solar radiation at the top of the atmosphere and a complementary record of cloud properties from satellite passive remote sensing have been analyzed for their pan-Arctic, regional, and seasonal changes. The pan-Arctic loss of brightness, which is explained by the retreat of sea ice during the current warming period, is not compensated by a corresponding increase in cloud cover. A systematic change in the thermodynamic phase of clouds has taken place, shifting towards the liquid phase at the expense of the ice phase. Without significantly changing the total cloud optical thickness or the mass of condensed water in the atmosphere, liquid water content has increased, resulting in positive trends in liquid cloud optical thickness and albedo. This leads to a cooling trend by clouds being superimposed on top of the pan-Arctic amplified warming, induced by the anthropogenic release of greenhouse gases, the ice–albedo feedback, and related effects. Except over the permanent and parts of the marginal sea ice zone around the Arctic Circle, the rate of surface cooling by clouds has increased, both in spring (−32 % in total radiative forcing for the whole Arctic) and in summer (−14 %). The magnitude of this effect depends on both the underlying surface type and changes in the regional Arctic climate.

Aim. This study aimed to investigate the frequency of unnecessary tests requested in Be’sat Hospital in Hamadan. Materials and Methods. This descriptive research was conducted in order to investigate the frequency of unnecessary requests for CT scan and radiography of patients referring to the imaging department of Be’sat Hospital in Hamadan in a 4- to 6-month period. Patient information, including gender, age, type of CT scan test, the reason for requesting the test, the expertise of the requesting physician, and the result of the radiologist’s report on each test, was extracted and collected. Results. A total of 1000 CT scans were evaluated. The mean age of these patients was about 36 years and most of them were men. The highest and lowest percentages of unnecessary cases were related to CT scans of the brain (42.3%) and facial bones (2.3%), respectively. The most and the least unnecessary CT scans based on the reason given for the request were related to multiple physical trauma (30.7%) and chronic kidney disease (1.5%), respectively. Conclusion. In all tests, over 74% of the reports were unnecessary and less than 26% were necessary. Therefore, it is necessary to reduce unnecessary requests to reduce the radiation dose of patients. Also, the knowledge of doctors should be increased in the field of appropriate evaluation of CT scan tests based on clinical guidelines.

A non-common case of unilateral fusion between the left upper central tooth and the supernumerary deciduous tooth, which also has an extra maxillary impacted tooth, was reported in the present study. The patient was a 9-year-old Iranian boy. The left lateral maxillary tooth was found during the oral examination. In the radiographic presentations, the fused teeth showed separate roots, pulpal chambers, and separate root canals. Delayed eruption of the first and second maxillary permanent incisors was experienced due to the presence of an extra impacted tooth. In the management of this condition, both the deciduous fused teeth and extra impacted teeth were removed, and an appointment was scheduled for three months to check for spontaneous tooth eruption.

ObjectivesGranulomatosis with polyangiitis (GPA) and microscopic polyangiitis (MPA) are autoimmune vasculitides associated with antineutrophil cytoplasm antibodies that target proteinase 3 (PR3) or myeloperoxidase (MPO) found within neutrophils and monocytes. Granulomas are exclusively found in GPA and form around multinucleated giant cells (MGCs), at sites of microabscesses, containing apoptotic and necrotic neutrophils. Since patients with GPA have augmented neutrophil PR3 expression, and PR3-expressing apoptotic cells frustrate macrophage phagocytosis and cellular clearance, we investigated the role of PR3 in stimulating giant cell and granuloma formation.MethodsWe stimulated purified monocytes and whole peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) from patients with GPA, patients with MPA or healthy controls with PR3 or MPO and visualised MGC and granuloma-like structure formation using light, confocal and electron microscopy, as well as measuring the cell cytokine production. We investigated the expression of PR3 binding partners on monocytes and tested the impact of their inhibition. Finally, we injected zebrafish with PR3 and characterised granuloma formation in a novel animal model.ResultsIn vitro, PR3 promoted monocyte-derived MGC formation using cells from patients with GPA but not from patients with MPA, and this was dependent on soluble interleukin 6 (IL-6), as well as monocyte MAC-1 and protease-activated receptor-2, found to be overexpressed in the cells of patients with GPA. PBMCs stimulated by PR3 formed granuloma-like structures with central MGC surrounded by T cells. This effect of PR3 was confirmed in vivo using zebrafish and was inhibited by niclosamide, a IL-6-STAT3 pathway inhibitor.ConclusionsThese data provide a mechanistic basis for granuloma formation in GPA and a rationale for novel therapeutic approaches.

This article presents an automated, model-free, data-driven method for the safe tuning of PID cascade controller gains based on Bayesian optimization. The optimization objective is composed of data-driven performance metrics and modeled using Gaussian processes. The safety requirement is imposed via a barrier-like term in the objective, which is introduced to account for operational changes in the system. We further introduce a data-driven constraint that captures the stability requirements from system data. Numerical evaluation shows that the proposed approach outperforms relay feedback autotuning and quickly converges to the global optimum, thanks to a tailored stopping criterion. We demonstrate the performance of the method through simulations and experiments. For experimental implementation, in addition to the introduced safety constraint, we integrate a method for automatic detection of the critical gains and extend the optimization objective with a penalty depending on the proximity of the current candidate points to the critical gains. The resulting automated tuning method optimizes system performance while ensuring stability and standardization., IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics, 70 (2), ISSN:0278-0046, ISSN:1557-9948

To use longitudinal optical coherence tomography (OCT) and OCT angiography (OCTA) data to detect glaucomatous visual field (VF) progression with a supervised machine learning approach.Prospective cohort study.One hundred ten eyes of patients with suspected glaucoma (33.6%) and patients with glaucoma (66.4%) with a minimum of 5 24-2 VF tests and 3 optic nerve head and macula images over an average follow-up duration of 4.1 years were included. VF progression was defined using a composite measure including either a "likely progression event" on Guided Progression Analysis, a statistically significant negative slope of VF mean deviation or VF index, or a positive pointwise linear regression event. Feature-based gradient boosting classifiers were developed using different subsets of baseline and longitudinal OCT and OCTA summary parameters. The area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) was used to compare the classification performance of different models.VF progression was detected in 28 eyes (25.5%). The model with combined baseline and longitudinal OCT and OCTA parameters at the global and hemifield levels had the best classification accuracy to detect VF progression (AUROC = 0.89). Models including combined OCT and OCTA parameters had higher classification accuracy compared with those with individual subsets of OCT or OCTA features alone. Including hemifield measurements significantly improved the models' classification accuracy compared with using global measurements alone. Including longitudinal rates of change of OCT and OCTA parameters (AUROCs = 0.80-0.89) considerably increased the classification accuracy of the models with baseline measurements alone (AUROCs = 0.60-0.63).Longitudinal OCTA measurements complement OCT-derived structural metrics for the evaluation of functional VF loss in patients with glaucoma.

Mycobacterium fortuitum is a clinically important species among nontuberculous mycobacteria (NTM). Treatment of diseases caused by NTM is challenging. The aim of this study was identification of drug susceptibility and detection of mutations in erm(39) related to clarithromycin resistance and in rrl related to linezolid resistance in clinical isolates of M. fortuitum in Iran. In the study, 328 clinical NTM isolates were subjected to identification based on rpoB and 15% of isolates were assigned to M. fortuitum. Minimum inhibitory concentration for clarithromycin and linezolid was determined by E-test. Altogether 64% of M. fortuitum isolates showed resistanc to clarithromycin and 18% of M. fortuitum isolates showed resistance to linezolid. PCR and DNA sequencing were performed in erm(39) and in rrl genes for detection of mutations related to clarithromycin and linezolid resistance, respectively. Sequencing analysis revealed (84.37%) single nucleotide polymorphisms in the erm(39). A total 55.55% of M. fortuitum isolates harbored an A→G, 14.81% harbored an C→A, 29.62% harbored an G→T mutation in erm(39) at position 124, 135, 275. Seven strains harbored point mutation in the rrl gene either at T2131C or at A2358G. Our findings showed M. fortuitum isolates have become a serious problem with high-level antibiotic resistance. The existence of drug resistance to clarithromycin and linezolid indicates more attention to the study of drug resistance in M. fortuitum.

This chapter reflects on my experiences as an early researcher of colour in Dutch academia and in confronting post-graduation challenges. I recount some exclusionary moments that compelled me to realize my own positionality as a ‘strategic outsider’. With the help of previous thinkers who have also felt like outsiders and subsequently theorized ways to navigate ‘outsideness,’ I share examples from my time as a GEMMA student in the Netherlands to illustrate how and why I perceive a need to be constantly alert to exclusionary moments as well as critical of numerous toxicities that any individual in a situation like mine might encounter within and beyond Western academia.

Data-driven ontology-based knowledge (OK) presentation and computational linguistics for evolving semantic Asian social networks (ASNs) can make one of the most important platforms that provide robust and real-time data mapping in massive access across the heterogeneous big data sources in the web that is named OK-ASN. It benefits from computational intelligence, web-of-things (WoT) architecture, semantic features, statistical learning and pattern recognition, database management, computer vision, cyber-security, and language processing. OK-ASN is a critical strategy for WoT big data mining and enterprises from social media to medical and industrial sectors.

This article examines the rising Farsi ‘manosphere’ of Iran and the case of online misogynistic, anti-feminist and anti-queer mobilisations across social media platforms and messaging applications. It focuses on memes and memetic figures that are circulated on Iranian social media and proposes the term ‘memetic alliances’ to convey complicated and unforeseen mutations of today’s internet meme culture and online hate culture. Moreover, it unpacks the increasing convergences of seemingly conflicting online and political contexts. Drawing on digital ethnographic fieldwork on selected platforms as well as visual and conceptual analyses of memes, the article theorises that online figurations of hate have memeto-(micro)political qualities that allow for their propagation across numerous contexts. Furthermore, the case of Iran’s emergent Farsi manosphere is arguably not a totalitarian exception unique to the Middle East but is reconfiguring and standing in alliance with the global rise of the right and its online culture wars.