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Objective: To assess economic and social issues faced by cirrhotic patients & its financial burden for developing nations like Pakistan. Method: This cross-sectional study was carried out at the Department of Gastroenterology & Hepatology, Shaikh Zayed Hospital, Lahore, Pakistan during the period between July & December 2019. Patients with liver cirrhosis were recruited and information regarding disease, financial status, treatment expenses & dependency was recorded. Results: A total of 450 patients were recruited, 272 (60%) were males & 178 (40%) were females, with mean age 55.4±6.2 years. HCV was cause of cirrhosis in 86% of cases, 65% were diagnosed incidentally and 39.6% were illiterate. About 82.7% were urban while only 28.7% own their own home. Co-morbid conditions including diabetes, hypertension & ischemic heart disease were present in 54% of cases. Monthly income was

Nowadays, a far-field wireless power transfer (WPT) system aims to deliver wireless power over a distance of a few meters. Communication among devices for the purpose of WPT in the far-field WPT system is unique as its purpose is to establish, maintain and monitor a WPT session among devices in the system. For proper functionality of a WPT system, a number of communication-, control- and management-related challenges need to be addressed. Hence, here an application layer protocol specifically designed for a WPT system is presented. The protocol provides essential control, management and communication functionalities to establish, maintain and monitor a WPT session. Some features of a WPT system require low-latency communication, hence enhancements for a networking protocol stack are also proposed. To validate the effectiveness of the presented application layer protocol along with the enhancements proposed for the networking protocol stack, a set of experiments was carried out over a real WPT system. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed protocol possesses the features essential for a WPT system, and the proposed enhancements for the networking protocol stack provide low-latency communication along with lower control overhead compared with an existing state-of-the-art network protocol stack. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on economic, ecological and relative benefits from organic and conventional farming systems has gained significant importance. Organic farming increases species diversity, enhances biological control services, and thus complements sustainable pest management. However, published literature is scarce on cotton crops grown organically with respect to the abundance and diversity of biological control agents and their effects on herbivore populations, typically from developing nations. To address the question, the non‐transgenic cotton variety CIM‐573 was cultivated under two fertility management systems, that is, organic and conventional in 2019 and 2021, and subsequently, differences in the abundance and diversity of arthropod communities were carried out. We applied cattle manure in organic fields 1 month before planting; however, synthetic fertilizers were used in conventional fields. We sampled arthropods weekly after 7 weeks of sowing from the middle rows of treatments for both types of fields. We recorded 10 herbivores as well as eight natural enemy species. Herbivores were more abundant in conventional cotton. However, natural enemies were higher in organic cotton fields. Principal component analysis of herbivores assemblages depicted that Shannon diversity and abundance were positively correlated in the conventional cotton while Menhinick richness and Simpson dominance index were higher in organic cotton. Likewise, natural enemies' abundance, Shannon diversity, Menhinick richness and Simpson dominance were typically more concentrated in organic cultivated cotton. Regression analysis confirmed that the abundance and diversity of natural enemies played a significant role in lowering herbivores populations. Seed cotton yield was significantly higher in conventional cotton and the yield difference between organic and conventional cotton was 27.98%. Our study clearly demonstrates that organic cotton provides more functional and complementary niches to natural enemies and plays a crucial role in pest suppression. Implications of our results for future pest management with respect to ecosystem services in organically grown cotton crops are also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The routing protocol for low-power and lossy networks (RPL) is a standard routing framework for Internet of Things (IoT). It supports multipoint-to-point (MP-to-P), point-to-point (P-to-P) and point-to-multipoint (P-to-MP) communications. It is known that RPL's control overhead can result in the protocol's poor performance in P-to-P and P-to-MP communications especially in its non-storing mode of operation. Here, we present a routing protocol for the Internet of Things (RIoT) that supports MP-to-P, P-to-P and P-to-MP communications. The protocol can construct P-to-P and P-to-MP routes with relatively lower control overhead. Another salient feature of RIoT is that it supports multiple gateways in the same network with an aim to reduce memory requirement for storing a forwarding table. Furthermore, RIoT is also capable of handling mobility-based IoT use cases. To facilitate communication among nodes connected to different gateways in the same network, here we also present an inter-gateway communication mechanism. We implemented RIoT in the Contiki operating system, and it is extensively evaluated using emulation and real testbed-based experiments. We analyzed the impact of the number of gateways, radio duty cycling (RDC) and mobility on the routing protocols' performance. Our results demonstrate that either with or without RDC RIoT demonstrates statistically significantly better packet delivery ratio, per-packet end-to-end delay and control overhead compared to the RPL-based protocol. RIoT's multi-gateway communication architecture substantially reduces the memory requirement to store a forwarding table. Our results also demonstrate that multiple gateways in a network reduce the network partitioning problem in mobile scenarios. Hence, RIoT also demonstrates better performance in mobile scenarios compared to the RPL-based protocol. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Typically, a temporary communication infrastructure deployed in a disaster scenario lacks the ability to locate those people who do not have an access to a communication device. Moreover, the system cannot detect emergency situations that may arise as an aftermath of a disaster, such as a fire or building collapse. Hence, a supporting network is also required that can detect different events and report them to a gateway. A wireless sensor network can be used as the supporting network as sensor node can detect a number of events and communicate them as well. Usually, a disaster affected area is large, hence nodes form a multihop network to reach the gateway. Usually, in a disaster scenario gateways are mobile, therefore in this paper we present different routing protocols that can be used in a disaster scenario with mobile gateways. Our protocols use multiple routing metrics to discover data forwarding paths to the gateways. Moreover, the protocols use the routing metrics in greedy and end-to-end basis. We performed extensive simulations to evaluate the protocols. We analysed the impact of the number of gateways, radio duty-cycling, and different network topologies on the protocols' performance. Our results demonstrate the following: (i) grid network topology demonstrates better performance, (ii) under random topologies along with duty cycling operation the shortest hop-count routing metric demonstrates better performance, (iii) expected transmission count (ETX) should be used in a greedy manner in conjunction with the shortest hop-count metric under random topologies with no duty cycling, (iv) in gird topology where nodes are using radio dutycycling ETX should be used in greedy manner along with the shortest hop-count metric, and (v) network performance improve as we increase the number of gateways in the network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present report accounts successful production of blastocysts and birth of calves following OPU-IVEP technique in Sahiwal cows of Pakistani origin. A total of 9 transvaginal OPU sessions were performed in twelve Sahiwal cows and 520 immature COCs were recovered using commercially prepared media. These COCs were placed in maturation medium for 24 h in an incubator at 38.5°C with 5% CO2. The matured oocytes were co-incubated with sperm cells in IVF medium for 22 h. After fertilization, the presumptive zygotes were transferred to culture medium for 7 days at 5% CO2. The results showed that the cleavage rate of IVF was 68.6% out of which 26.3% were developed up to blastocyst. A total of 2 blastocyst-stage fresh embryos were transferred in a single synchronized recipient cow. The pregnancy was confirmed one month after transfer and resulted in successful calving demonstrating the possibility of performing embryo transfer in elite native herds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]