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The Master Surgery Scheduling Problem (MSSP) can be described as a timetabling problem involving assigning surgery groups to operating theatre (OT) time slots. Previous MSSP optimization models considered throughput, waiting measures, resource utilization, costs, and schedule assignment objectives, but have overlooked consecutive days assignment preferences and surgical equipment-sharing limitations. Furthermore, previous works utilize greedy constructive heuristics to produce solutions, which increases quality but decreases feasibility. Our prior study demonstrated that the saturation degree heuristic enhances feasibility by considering assignment difficulty during event selection. However, its impact on solution quality remained unexplored. Therefore, this study proposes an improved saturation degree-based constructive heuristic that integrates objective function value for event selection to increase both quality and feasibility. The algorithm sorts surgery groups by unit scores, prioritizing higher assignment difficulty and objective value. The highest-scoring group is assigned to its feasible slot with the highest slot score. If no feasible slots exist, the repair mechanism vacates the slot with the highest swap score, which prioritizes lower assignment difficulty and objective value. A new mathematical model is also formulated, incorporating novel objectives regarding consecutive days assignment preference and surgical equipment-sharing limitations. Using real-world data from Hospital Canselor Tuanku Muhriz, the proposed algorithm is evaluated considering repair mechanism usage for feasibility and objective function value for quality. The algorithm is benchmarked against greedy, random, regret-based, and saturation degree-based constructive heuristics. Our algorithm achieved a 14.63% improvement in feasibility compared to the original variant. Its objective function value is over two times better than the closest competitor and 2.6 times superior to the original variant. Comparison with the hospital’s actual plan demonstrates competitive objective function value and a more balanced waiting time distribution among surgical groups. Our study showcases that a saturation degree-based constructive heuristic considering objective function value has increased solution quality while maintaining feasibility.

One of the hardest processes encountered by petroleum refining is sulfur elimination from fuel oil. There are many traditional methods executed but they caused drawbacks such as poor selectivity of sulfur compounds and toxic raw materials. Extractive oxidative desulfurization (EODS) caught the interest of researchers due to high selectivity of sulfur compounds and great desulfurization. Currently, researchers are investigating the use of ionic liquids (ILs) as green extractant, unfortunately they are expensive. This research is proposing and comparing the use of cheap biodegradable solvents called deep eutectic solvents (DESs), as extractants in removing sulfur from fuel oil. The DESs are synthesized through a combination of choline chloride - orcinol and choline chloride - ethylene glycol, and their structure is confirmed through FTIR. Their thermal properties are characterized by DSC and TGA. Their desulfurization performance is evaluated by type of DESs, different ratios of DES and model oil, different ratios of oxidant and sulfone and various temperatures which these factors are found to influence the result. The optimum conditions are found to be at 1:1 for DES and model oil ratio, 4 for O/S ratio and temperature at 85 °C with the extraction efficiency of 99.98%. In conclusion, this DES has high potential to be the cheap green alternative to the conventional extractant for extractive oxidative desulfurization process.

The use of machine learning (ML) and data mining algorithms in the diagnosis of breast cancer (BC) has recently received a lot of attention. The majority of these efforts, however, still require improvement since either they were not statistically evaluated or they were evaluated using insufficient assessment metrics, or both. One of the most recent and effective ML algorithms, fast learning network (FLN), may be seen as a reputable and efficient approach for classifying data; however, it has not been applied to the problem of BC diagnosis. Therefore, this study proposes the FLN algorithm in order to improve the accuracy of the BC diagnosis. The FLN algorithm has the capability to a) eliminate overfitting, b) solve the issues of both binary and multiclass classification, and c) perform like a kernel-based support vector machine with a structure of the neural network. In this study, two BC databases (Wisconsin Breast Cancer Database (WBCD) and Wisconsin Diagnostic Breast Cancer (WDBC)) were used to assess the performance of the FLN algorithm. The results of the experiment demonstrated the great performance of the suggested FLN method, which achieved an average of accuracy 98.37%, precision 95.94%, recall 99.40%, F-measure 97.64%, G-mean 97.65%, MCC 96.44%, and specificity 97.85% using the WBCD, as well as achieved an average of accuracy 96.88%, precision 94.84%, recall 96.81%, F-measure 95.80%, G-mean 95.81%, MCC 93.35%, and specificity 96.96% using the WDBC database. This suggests that the FLN algorithm is a reliable classifier for diagnosing BC and may be useful for resolving other application-related problems in the healthcare sector.

Information retrieval is a difficult process due to the overabundance of information on the web. Nowadays, search result responds to user queries with too many results although only a few are relevant. Therefore, the existing clustering methods that fail in clustering snippets (short texts) of web documents due to the low frequencies of document terms should be deeply investigated. One of the approaches that can be used to solve this problem is the expansion of document terms with semantically similar terms. Hence, a list of terms with their closest and accurate semantically similar words (word representation) must be built. This study aims to design and develop a new framework to enhance the performance of web search result clustering (WSRC). The research also presents a new unsupervised distributed word representation scheme where each word is represented by a vector of its semantically related words; such as scheme expands snippets and user queries. The proposed framework consists of several activities, such as (1) various standard datasets (Open Directory Project [ODP]-239 and MORESQUE) that are used for evaluating search result clustering algorithms for most cited dataset works, (2) text pre-processing, (3) document representation based on a new wiki-based k-nearest neighbors (KNN) representation method, (4) effect of the proposed model on the performance of traditional clustering methods (k-means, k-medoids, single-linkage, and complete-linkage) for WSRC, and (5) evaluation stage of the proposed method. Results indicate that enhanced clustering methods, according to the new wiki-KNN based representation method in comparison with the baseline methods, show a significant improvement in WSRC. Furthermore, the new data representation scheme has enhanced the overall performance of clustering methods.

Deep learning models have shown great promise in diagnosing skeletal fractures from X-ray images. However, challenges remain that hinder progress in this field. Firstly, a lack of clear definitions for recognition, classification, detection, and localization tasks hampers the consistent development and comparison of methodologies. The existing reviews often lack technical depth or have limited scope. Additionally, the absence of explainable facilities undermines the clinical application and expert confidence in results. To address these issues, this comprehensive review analyzes and evaluates 40 out of 337 recent papers identified in prestigious databases, including WOS, Scopus, and EI. The objectives of this review are threefold. Firstly, precise definitions are established for the bone fracture recognition, classification, detection, and localization tasks within deep learning. Secondly, each study is summarized based on key aspects such as the bones involved, research objectives, dataset sizes, methods employed, results obtained, and concluding remarks. This process distills the diverse approaches into a generalized processing framework or workflow. Moreover, this review identifies the crucial areas for future research in deep learning models for bone fracture diagnosis. These include enhancing the network interpretability, integrating multimodal clinical information, providing therapeutic schedule recommendations, and developing advanced visualization methods for clinical application. By addressing these challenges, deep learning models can be made more intelligent and specialized in this domain. In conclusion, this review fills the gap in precise task definitions within deep learning for bone fracture diagnosis and provides a comprehensive analysis of the recent research. The findings serve as a foundation for future advancements, enabling improved interpretability, multimodal integration, clinical decision support, and advanced visualization techniques.

The Master Surgery Scheduling Problem (MSSP) allocates operating theatre time to surgery groups such as medical specialities or surgeons, which is essential for daily operational planners. Many researchers have highlighted issues in the optimization of surgical scheduling problems. However, most recent reviews limited the issues at the operational level and excluded the problem characteristics such as surgery group type and schedule cyclicity. This study aims to review the state-of-the-art of MSSP and identify new trends in optimization strategies (problem characteristics and objective function), uncertainty scheduling factors (types and approaches), and solution and evaluation methods. These aspects are the key components in developing an effective MSSP optimization model. This paper reviews articles published between 2000 and 2021 that addressed the MSSP, concentrating on papers between 2016 and 2021. We underlined the popularity of medical specialities as the surgery group, one-week horizon length, a cyclic schedule, multi-objective optimization and evaluation by benchmarking. The analysis shows that surgery duration is the most prominent uncertainty type, whereas strategies for handling this are stochastic programming, robust optimization, and fuzzy programming. We highlighted the role of heuristic approaches in addressing the MSSP’s computational complexity. This review’s trends, challenges, and potential solutions are essential for future researchers in developing optimization models for MSSP.

E-shopping is a form of electronic commerce used for business (B2B) and business (B2C) transactions. In Malaysia, it can be considered as infant and far from reaching its full potential. Millennials are the largest e-commerce buyers, with the age group consuming 54 percent of their goods online. Full time students recorded the highest smartphone users with 95.5%. Data collection was done by distributing self-designed questionnaires to 216 respondents. 95% of the questions are coming from the previous researchers done the similar topic and the raw data are being analyzed using IBM SPSS Statistics Subscription. The findings revealed that the perceived benefit is the most significant factors that influence the students toward online shopping. In details, there is relationship between perceived benefit, ambassador, price offered and ease of use with the online purchasing behavior except for trust on the seller. In conclusion, e-commerce or e-shopping has become convenience and reliable option for the students to get particular needs. 90% of the respondents had experienced online shopping beforehand. The benefit from online shopping is it enable everyone to conduct the transaction with the access of the internet and mobile phone. It is recommended for future researcher to conduct physical distribution of questionnaire directly to the potential students to get more convincing audience and population. Last but not least, as a result, vendors have found a new approach to create value for customers and build relationships with them towards marketing mix strategy and obtain more customer with the advance strategy and approach.

This study aims to examine the factors that influence the motor abilities of elementary school students. The following aspects were explored: 1) The influence of social identity on students' motor abilities. 2) The influence of self-concept on students' motor abilities. 3) The influence of learning motivation on students' motor abilities. 4) The simultaneous influence of social identity, self-concept and learning motivation on students' motor abilities. In this study, a quantitative method was employed to investigate the relationship between the three aforementioned factors and motor ability among 128 elementary school students in Banda Aceh City. The data collection process involved the use of structured questionnaires which were employed to gather relevant information. Multiple regressions were used to analyse the data with the use of SPSS version 23 software. The obtained results from this study showed that both social identity and learning motivation positively and significantly influenced the motor ability of the observed students while self-concept had no discernable impact. However, when simultaneously considering these variables altogether, it was found that they did significantly influence the skills of the students. In a nutshell, the results of this study indicated that there was a positive relationship between social identity and the motor ability of the students. The implications of this research show that to improve students' motor abilities, efforts must also be made to increase social identity and learning motivation.

With the rise of neoliberal reforms and efforts to privatize education, there is a growing need to examine how actors and groups from the public and private sectors influence educational policy change together. In this article, we advance a critical approach to understanding the changing discursive space of educational politics by following discourses through an expansive policy network that goes beyond its traditional boundaries. Specifically, we draw on argumentative discourse analysis (ADA), which allows for the analysis of how and why various actors and groups come together to assign certain meanings to educational phenomena or problems, leading to policy responses or changes. Rooted in Foucault's notions of discourse and power, ADA offers a unique approach to discourse analysis that can illuminate policy change through discourse coalitions. Three case studies from educational policy scholarship are discussed to illustrate the value and utility of ADA in future critical education policy studies.

Many works have employed Machine Learning (ML) techniques in the detection of Diabetic Retinopathy (DR), a disease that affects the human eye. However, the accuracy of most DR detection methods still need improvement. Gray Wolf Optimization-Extreme Learning Machine (GWO-ELM) is one of the most popular ML algorithms, and can be considered as an accurate algorithm in the process of classification, but has not been used in solving DR detection. Therefore, this work aims to apply the GWO-ELM classifier and employ one of the most popular features extractions, Histogram of Oriented Gradients-Principal Component Analysis (HOG-PCA), to increase the accuracy of DR detection system. Although the HOG-PCA has been tested in many image processing domains including medical domains, it has not yet been tested in DR. The GWO-ELM can prevent overfitting, solve multi and binary classifications problems, and it performs like a kernel-based Support Vector Machine with a Neural Network structure, whilst the HOG-PCA has the ability to extract the most relevant features with low dimensionality. Therefore, the combination of the GWO-ELM classifier and HOG-PCA features might produce an effective technique for DR classification and features extraction. The proposed GWO-ELM is evaluated based on two different datasets, namely APTOS-2019 and Indian Diabetic Retinopathy Image Dataset (IDRiD), in both binary and multi-class classification. The experiment results have shown an excellent performance of the proposed GWO-ELM model where it achieved an accuracy of 96.21% for multi-class and 99.47% for binary using APTOS-2019 dataset as well as 96.15% for multi-class and 99.04% for binary using IDRiD dataset. This demonstrates that the combination of the GWO-ELM and HOG-PCA is an effective classifier for detecting DR and might be applicable in solving other image data types.

Bird mating optimizer (BMO) is a population-based metaheuristic that has been recently extended to solve combinatorial optimization problems. Even though the algorithm shows promising performance in solving combinatorial optimization problems, it suffers from slow convergence and poor efficiency which leads to poor solution quality for some problem instances. This is due to the limited capability of BMO in exploiting the search space and identifying more promising regions. Therefore, in this work we propose a hybrid BMO with five single-based metaheuristics: hill-climbing, late acceptance hill-climbing, simulated annealing, iterated greedy heuristic and variable iterated greedy heuristic. Each of these algorithms is used inside the BMO to exploit the search space, and improve the quality of solution generated from the BMO population. This work also compares which one of these five is better for hybridizing with BMO. The performance of these algorithms is tested on two combinatorial problems: travelling salesman problem and berth allocation problem. Experimental results demonstrate that the hybrid algorithm is superior to BMO when applied to both problems and it improved the BMO by 1.13% for BAP and by 4.13% for TSP. Furthermore, the hybrid algorithm is able to match the best-known results for most of the instances. In addition, the proposed hybrid approaches perform well over both tested domains and obtain competitive results when compared to the best-known results that have previously been presented in the scientific literature.

Composite steel-concrete construction has been widely implemented in high-rise buildings and bridges having long spans due to its favorable characteristics inherited from both materials acting as one unit. The main objective of this research is to propose a new beam system having a high strength-weight ratio, and to replace the shear studs used in composite beams by steel mesh wraps around the steel tube without any flexural or shear reinforcements. This new structural beam can be part of a lightweight-precast floor system with fast and easy ducting through its hollow tubular part. Four simply supported T-shaped beams of 3 m length are investigated experimentally to study and compare their flexural behavior. All beams are tested under two points quasi-static point loading. A comparison was initially performed between a control T-shaped reinforced concrete (RC) beam and a fully encased steel tube in a T-shaped RC beam of the same section dimensions as the control beam and without any mesh wrapping. The effect of full and partial wrapping of the steel tube was also investigated in the other two beams where 100 % and 60 % of the encased steel tube length were wrapped by a 3 mm steel mesh. Discussions and interpretation of the load-deflection behaviors and the failure modes are presented in this paper. The obtained results showed that the composite beam with unwrapped encased steel tubular section provided an advantage over the control RC beam in terms of load/weight ratio and ductility by 28.5 % and 22.4 % respectively. Besides, the use of steel mesh wraps in different length percentages revealed a much better partial composite action between the steel tube and the surrounding concrete. The attained strength ranged between 18.2 % and 33 %, whereas the ductility was enhanced by 63.8 % and up to 66.7 %.

PURPOSE: Fibroblast Activation Protein (FAP) is an emerging theranostic target that is highly expressed on cancer-associated fibroblasts and on certain tumor cells including sarcoma. We investigated the anti-tumor efficacy of [225Ac]Ac-FAPI-46 as monotherapy or in combination with immune checkpoint blockade (ICB) in immunocompetent murine models of sarcoma sensitive or resistant to ICB. METHODS: [68Ga]Ga- and [225Ac]Ac-FAPI-46 were tested in subcutaneous FAP+ FSA fibrosarcoma bearing C3H/Sed/Kam mice. The efficacy of up to three cycles of 60 kBq [225Ac]Ac-FAPI-46 was evaluated as monotherapy and in combination with an anti-PD-1 antibody. Efficacy of [225Ac]Ac-FAPI-46 and/or ICB was further compared in FAP-overexpressing FSA (FSA-F) tumors that were sensitive to ICB or rendered ICB-resistant by tumor-induction in the presence of Abatacept. RESULTS: [225Ac]Ac-FAPI-46 was well tolerated up to 3 × 60 kBq but had minimal effect on FSA tumor growth. The combination of three cycles [225Ac]Ac-FAPI-46 and ICB resulted in growth delay in 55% of mice (6/11) and partial tumor regression in 18% (2/11) of mice. In FSA-F tumors with FAP overexpression, both [225Ac]Ac-FAPI-46 and ICB were effective without additional benefits from the combination. In locally immunosuppressed and ICB resistant FAP-F tumors, however, [225Ac]Ac-FAPI-46 restored responsiveness to ICB, resulting in significant tumor regression and tumor-free survival of 56% of mice in the combination group up to 60 days post treatment. CONCLUSION: [225Ac]Ac-FAPI-46 efficacy is correlated with tumoral FAP expression levels and can restore responsiveness to PD-1 ICB. These data illustrate that careful patient selection based on target expression and rationally designed combination therapies are critically important to maximize the therapeutic impact of FAP-targeting radioligands.

In February of 2024, the Society of Gynecologic Oncology (SGO) hosted a journal club focused on new treatment options for the management of advanced and metastatic endometrial cancer. This clinical commentary is intended to provide a summary report of that presentation. The session described the importance of molecular characterization shown in the work of The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). The updated 2023 FIGO staging of endometrial cancer was reviewed. The panel then described the role of upfront immunotherapy for the treatment of advanced or recurrent endometrial cancer as demonstrated in four recent trials (RUBY, NRG-GY018, AtTEnd, and DUO-E studies). The DUO-E study uniquely examined the combination immunotherapy with a PARP inhibitor. The trials had unique differences in inclusion criteria, primary outcomes, and length of maintenance therapy, but all boasted similarly promising results particularly in mismatch repair deficient (dMMR) endometrial cancer. This era of rapid innovation in advanced and recurrent endometrial cancer will hopefully enhance individualized treatment approaches and improved outcomes for patients with endometrial cancer.

Diet is a robust entrainment cue that regulates diurnal rhythms of the gut microbiome. We and others have shown that disruption of the circadian clock drives the progression of colorectal cancer (CRC). While certain bacterial species have been suggested to play driver roles in CRC, it is unknown whether the intestinal clock impinges on the microbiome to accelerate CRC pathogenesis. To address this, genetic disruption of the circadian clock, in an Apc-driven mouse model of CRC, was used to define the impact on the gut microbiome. When clock disruption is combined with CRC, metagenomic sequencing identified dysregulation of many bacterial genera including Bacteroides, Helicobacter, and Megasphaera. We identify functional changes to microbial pathways including dysregulated nucleic acid, amino acid, and carbohydrate metabolism, as well as disruption of intestinal barrier function. Our findings suggest that clock disruption impinges on microbiota composition and intestinal permeability that may contribute to CRC pathogenesis.

As some of the objective functions are piecewise, so they are non-differentiable at specific points which have a significant impact on deep network rate and computational time. The non-differentiability issue increases the computational time dramatically. This issue is solved by the reformulation of the absolute value equation (AVE) through a parametrized single smooth equation. However, utilizing a single smoothing function is less effective to produce a better curve at the breaking points. Therefore, this work formulates a new smoothing function of Aggregation Fischer Burmister (AFB) via amalgamating of two popular smoothing functions: Aggregation (AGG) and Fischer-Burmeister (FB). These functions are having the ability of minimum estimation from both sides of the canonical piecewise function (CPF). If an amalgamation of smoothing functions can affect the differentiability of the piecewise objective function, then amalgamating the AGG and FB smoothing functions will produce a smooth secant line slope on both sides with less computational time. To evaluate the proposed technique, we implement a Newton algorithm using MATLAB, with random initial values. A new smoothing function is formulated by firstly converting the piecewise objective function to CPF. Then, we applied it to the Newton algorithm. Finally, to validate the AVE difficulty of the new piecewise function, we perform one run for each initial value, and 30 runs for time evaluation. The experimental analysis verified that the proposed technique outperformed other techniques of AGG and FB individually in terms of the natural logarithm, exponential, and square root. Hence, this novel technique yields promising smooth approximation for AVE with less computational time.

The bird mating optimizer is a new metaheuristic algorithm that was originally proposed to solve continuous optimization problems with a very promising performance. However, the algorithm has not yet been applied for solving combinatorial optimization problems. Thus, the formulation may not be able to generate a discrete feasible solution. Many continuous algorithms used random-key representation to represent the discrete solution using real numbers or a discrete variant of the algorithm is used to deal with the discrete solution of the problem. However, there is no evidence which methodology is better for solving combinatorial optimization problems. Therefore, this work proposes two variants of bird mating optimizer (random-key bird mating optimizer and the discrete bird mating optimizer), to identify which one is more efficient in solving combinatorial optimization problems. In the first one, we use a random-key encoding scheme, whilst, in the later one, we use crossover (multi-parent) and mutation operators to combine the components of the selected parents to generate new broods. The performance of these algorithms is tested on the travelling salesman problem and berth allocation problem, and are compared with the results of two well-known optimization algorithms: Genetic Algorithm and Particle Swarm Optimization. Experimental results show that the discrete bird mating optimizer is more efficient than the others on all tested benchmark instances. Indeed, it is able to attain the best-known results in some of the BAP benchmark instances. These indicate the applicability and the effectiveness of the proposed discrete bird mating optimizer in solving combinatorial optimization problems.

Data clustering algorithms experience challenges in identifying data points that are either noise or outlier. Hence, this paper proposes an enhanced connectivity measure based on the outlier detection approach for multi-objective data clustering problems. The proposed algorithm aims to improve the quality of the solution by utilising the local outlier factor method (LOF) with the connectivity validity measure. This modification is applied to select the neighbour data point’s mechanism that can be modified to eliminate such outliers. The performance of the proposed approach is assessed by applying the multi-objective algorithms to eight real-life and seven synthetic two-dimensional datasets. The external validity is evaluated using the F-measure, while the performance assessment matrices are employed to assess the quality of Pareto-optimal sets like the coverage and overall non-dominant vector generation. Our experimental results proved that the proposed outlier detection method has enhanced the performance of the multi-objective data clustering algorithms.

In this paper, the novel heuristic search algorithm called Smart Root Search (SRS) was examined for solving a set of different-sized service time–cost optimization in cloud computing service composition (STCOCCSC) problems, and its performance was compared with those of the ICACRO-C, ICACRO-I, ICA, and Niching PSO algorithms. STCOCCSC is an np-hard problem due to the large number of unique services available as well as the many service providers who provide services with different quality levels. Finding closer-to-optimal solutions supports cloud clients by providing them with higher quality-lower price services. The SRS obtained results proved that the SRS provided 6.74, 11.2, 47.95, and 87.29 percent performance improvement on average to the comparative algorithms, respectively, for all considered five problems. Furthermore, employing symmetry concepts in dividing the problem search space helps the algorithm to avoid premature convergence and any efficiency reduction while facing higher-dimensional search spaces. Due to these achievements, the SRS is a multi-purpose, flexible, and scalable heuristic search algorithm capable of being utilized in various optimization applications.

The purpose of this community service activity is to provide education on waste management to the students of the Quranic Recitation Hall Babussalam, Limpok Village. This community service activity was attended by 20 students, consisting of groups of primary and junior high schools, divided into two stages, namely: making the rubbish bin and counseling on waste management at the Quranic Recitation Hall Babussalam. The counseling and socialization were carried out by direct introduction to students and by providing waste collection facilities according to the types of waste. The results of this community service activity can be declared successful as seen from their seriousness in listening to the presentation of the material, responding spontaneously, and discussing seriously during the activity. They can understand the benefits of solid waste management and are proven to be able to mention the negative and positive effects of waste. Garbage can be an income if it is sorted out and a disaster if it is disposed of in any place according to them and an agent of change, especially in the environment where they live and the Limpok Village community in general. In conclusion, all participants had a good understanding of the introduction to waste processing methods, types of organic and inorganic waste, and residues which were marked by the ability of each participant to answer questions given by the service team.

The diversity and quality of high-quality and diverse-solution external memory of the hybrid Elitist-Ant System is examined in this study. The Elitist-Ant System incorporates an external memory for preserving search diversity while exploiting the solution space. Using this procedure, the effectiveness and efficiency of the search may be guaranteed which could consequently improve the performance of the algorithm and it could be well generalized across diverse problems of combinatorial optimization. The generality of this algorithm through its consistency and efficiency is tested using a Nurse-Rostering Problem. The outcomes demonstrate the competitiveness of the hybrid Elitist-Ant System’s performance within numerous datasets as opposed to those by other systems. The effectiveness of the external memory usage in search diversification is evidenced in this work. Subsequently, such usage improves the performance of the hybrid Elitist-Ant System over diverse datasets and problems. Keywords: Metaheuristics, Elitist-Ant System, External memory, Diversification, Intensification, Nurse Rostering Problem

The circadian clock is a critical regulator of immunity, and this circadian control of immune modulation has an essential function in host defense and tumor immunosurveillance. Here we use a single-cell RNA sequencing approach and a genetic model of colorectal cancer to identify clock-dependent changes to the immune landscape that control the abundance of immunosuppressive cells and consequent suppression of cytotoxic CD8+ T cells. Of these immunosuppressive cell types, PD-L1-expressing myeloid-derived suppressor cells (MDSCs) peak in abundance in a rhythmic manner. Disruption of the epithelial cell clock regulates the secretion of cytokines that promote heightened inflammation, recruitment of neutrophils and the subsequent development of MDSCs. We also show that time-of-day anti-PD-L1 delivery is most effective when synchronized with the abundance of immunosuppressive MDSCs. Collectively, these data indicate that circadian gating of tumor immunosuppression informs the timing and efficacy of immune checkpoint inhibitors.

The steganography is prone to number of attacks such as geomatical, salt & pepper, gaussian, median filtering, attacks. To overcome these problems, the cryptography and error correction codes are comes in the pictures and hybrid with steganography algorithms. The cryptography algorithms add one layer of security on steganography algorithms and error correction codes improves the robustness of steganography algorithms. On the other side, the hybridization of the algorithms, increase memory complexity and increase computation time for data embedding. Thus, in this paper a review on multi-layer algorithms for video steganography is done. This paper comprehensively reviews the steganography, spatial and frequency domain techniques hybrid with cryptography and error correction techniques. In-depth analysis on published literatures revealed that the spatial domain techniques require shorter computation time for data embedding and provide higher data hiding capacity than frequency domain methods. Performance of such techniques was evaluated in terms of visual quality and robustness parameters. Present challenges and future trends towards the improvement of the multi-layer data security in video steganography are discussed to provide the taxonomy for further navigation.

Existing text clustering methods utilize only one representation at a time (single view), whereas multiple views can represent documents. The multiview multirepresentation method enhances clustering quality. Moreover, existing clustering methods that utilize more than one representation at a time (multiview) use representation with the same nature. Hence, using multiple views that represent data in a different representation with clustering methods is reasonable to create a diverse set of candidate clustering solutions. On this basis, an effective dynamic clustering method must consider combining multiple views of data including semantic view, lexical view (word weighting), and topic view as well as the number of clusters. The main goal of this study is to develop a new method that can improve the performance of web search result clustering (WSRC). An enhanced multiview multirepresentation consensus clustering ensemble (MMCC) method is proposed to create a set of diverse candidate solutions and select a high-quality overlapping cluster. The overlapping clusters are obtained from the candidate solutions created by different clustering methods. The framework to develop the proposed MMCC includes numerous stages: (1) acquiring the standard datasets (MORESQUE and Open Directory Project-239), which are used to validate search result clustering algorithms, (2) preprocessing the dataset, (3) applying multiview multirepresentation clustering models, (4) using the radius-based cluster number estimation algorithm, and (5) employing the consensus clustering ensemble method. Results show an improvement in clustering methods when multiview multirepresentation is used. More importantly, the proposed MMCC model improves the overall performance of WSRC compared with all single-view clustering models.

The text clustering is considered as one of the most effective text document analysis methods, which is applied to cluster documents as a consequence of the expanded big data and online information. Based on the review of the related work of the text clustering algorithms, these algorithms achieved reasonable clustering results for some datasets, while they failed on a wide variety of benchmark datasets. Furthermore, the performance of these algorithms was not robust due to the inefficient balance between the exploitation and exploration capabilities of the clustering algorithm. Accordingly, this research proposes a Memetic Differential Evolution algorithm (MDETC) to solve the text clustering problem, which aims to address the effect of the hybridization between the differential evolution (DE) mutation strategy with the memetic algorithm (MA). This hybridization intends to enhance the quality of text clustering and improve the exploitation and exploration capabilities of the algorithm. Our experimental results based on six standard text clustering benchmark datasets (i.e. the Laboratory of Computational Intelligence (LABIC)) have shown that the MDETC algorithm outperformed other compared clustering algorithms based on AUC metric, F-measure, and the statistical analysis. Furthermore, the MDETC is compared with the state of art text clustering algorithms and obtained almost the best results for the standard benchmark datasets.

The coronavirus disease (COVID-19), is an ongoing global pandemic caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome. Chest Computed Tomography (CT) is an effective method for detecting lung illnesses, including COVID-19. However, the CT scan is expensive and time-consuming. Therefore, this work focus on detecting COVID-19 using chest X-ray images because it is widely available, faster, and cheaper than CT scan. Many machine learning approaches such as Deep Learning, Neural Network, and Support Vector Machine; have used X-ray for detecting the COVID-19. Although the performance of those approaches is acceptable in terms of accuracy, however, they require high computational time and more memory space. Therefore, this work employs an Optimised Genetic Algorithm-Extreme Learning Machine (OGA-ELM) with three selection criteria (i.e., random, K-tournament, and roulette wheel) to detect COVID-19 using X-ray images. The most crucial strength factors of the Extreme Learning Machine (ELM) are: (i) high capability of the ELM in avoiding overfitting; (ii) its usability on binary and multi-type classifiers; and (iii) ELM could work as a kernel-based support vector machine with a structure of a neural network. These advantages make the ELM efficient in achieving an excellent learning performance. ELMs have successfully been applied in many domains, including medical domains such as breast cancer detection, pathological brain detection, and ductal carcinoma in situ detection, but not yet tested on detecting COVID-19. Hence, this work aims to identify the effectiveness of employing OGA-ELM in detecting COVID-19 using chest X-ray images. In order to reduce the dimensionality of a histogram oriented gradient features, we use principal component analysis. The performance of OGA-ELM is evaluated on a benchmark dataset containing 188 chest X-ray images with two classes: a healthy and a COVID-19 infected. The experimental result shows that the OGA-ELM achieves 100.00% accuracy with fast computation time. This demonstrates that OGA-ELM is an efficient method for COVID-19 detecting using chest X-ray images.

In multilabel classification, each sample can be allocated to multiple class labels at the same time. However, one of the prominent problems of multilabel classification is missing labels (incomplete labels) in multilabel text. The multilabel classification performance is reduced significantly with the presence of missing labels. In order to address the incomplete or missing label problem, this study proposes two methods: an aggregated feature and label graph-based missing label handling method (GB-AS), and a unified graph-based missing label propagation method (UG-MLP). GB-AS is used to obtain an initial label matrix based on the similarity of both document levels: feature-based weighting representation and label-based weighting representation. On the other hand, UG-MLP is introduced to construct a mixed graph that combines GB-AS and label correlations into a single groundwork. A high-order label correlation is learned from the incomplete training data and applied to supplement the missing label matrix, which guides the creation of multilabel classification models. The combination of the mixed graphs by UG-MLP is aimed to obtain the benefits of both graphs to increase the classification performance. To evaluate UG-MLP, the metrics of precision, recall and F-measure were used on three benchmark datasets, namely, the Reuters-21578, Bibtex and Enron datasets. The experimental results show that UG-MLP outperformed GB-AS as well as other state-of-the-art approaches. Therefore, we can infer from the findings that by plotting a unified graph based on joining aggregated feature and label weightings together with the label correlation, the performance of multilabel classification can be improved.

Fouad Fayad,1 Nelly R Ziade,1 Georges Merheb,2 Said Attoui,3 Alla Aiko,4 Kamel Mroue,3 Abdel Fattah Masri5 1Rheumatology Department, Hotel Dieu de France Hospital, Saint Joseph University, Beirut, Lebanon; 2Department of Rheumatology, Notre Dame des Secours University Hospital, Jbeil, Lebanon, Holy Spirit University, Kaslik, Lebanon; 3Rheumatology Department, Hammoud University Medical Center, Saida, Lebanon; 4Department of Medicine (Rheumatology), Saint George Hospital, Beirut, Lebanon; 5Department of Internal Medicine (Rheumatology), American University of Beirut Medical Center, Beirut, Lebanon Introduction: To investigate the treatment preferences of patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and determine whether these preferences are related to specific disease characteristics. Method: A national survey was designed to collect demographic, disease, treatment, and preference data on RA patients enrolled in 7 private and university hospital clinics in Lebanon. Associations between patient factors and treatment preferences for RA were analyzed by χ2 or Mann–Whitney U test. Results: A total of 693 patients (83% female; 67% aged 41–70 years) consulting 7 trained rheumatologists completed the survey. Most patients (80%) had established RA >24 months, and approximately one-third (34%) were in remission according to the disease activity score in 28 joints (DAS28). Most (87%) were receiving oral agents (60% oral only). Almost two-thirds of patients (64%) expressed a preference for oral treatments, and more than half (53%) ranked doctor’s advice as the most influential factor when choosing treatment. In univariable analysis, health coverage, radiographic damage, disease duration, current therapy, and previous side effects were significantly associated with treatment preference. In multivariable analyses, only radiographic damage and current route of administration were independently associated with preference (both P

The performance of data clustering algorithms is mainly dependent on their ability to balance between the exploration and exploitation of the search process. Although some data clustering algorithms have achieved reasonable quality solutions for some datasets, their performance across real-life datasets could be improved. This paper proposes an adaptive memetic differential evolution optimisation algorithm (AMADE) for addressing data clustering problems. The memetic algorithm (MA) employs an adaptive differential evolution (DE) mutation strategy, which can offer superior mutation performance across many combinatorial and continuous problem domains. By hybridising an adaptive DE mutation operator with the MA, we propose that it can lead to faster convergence and better balance the exploration and exploitation of the search. We would also expect that the performance of AMADE to be better than MA and DE if executed separately. Our experimental results, based on several real-life benchmark datasets, shows that AMADE outperformed other compared clustering algorithms when compared using statistical analysis. We conclude that the hybridisation of MA and the adaptive DE is a suitable approach for addressing data clustering problems and can improve the balance between global exploration and local exploitation of the optimisation algorithm.

The Container Pre-marshalling Problem (CPMP) has the significant effect of reducing ship berthing time, and can help in increasing terminal turnover rate. In order to solve the CPMP, this research proposes a Multi-objectives Memetic Discrete Differential Evolution algorithm (MODDE). To date, existing research in CPMP only focuses on single-objective approaches. However, this is not a suitable approach due to the considerable effort required to validate the hard constraints of CPMP. Therefore, this work aims at addressing the effect of minimizing the number of miss-overlaid containers on the total number of movements in building the final feasible bay layout by embedding it in the multi-objectives evaluation function. The proposed algorithm combines the Discrete Differential Evolution mutation with the Memetic Algorithm evolutionary steps in order to find high quality CPMP solutions, achieve high convergence rate and avoid premature convergence and local optima problems. In addition, it improves the exploration and exploitation capabilities of the algorithm. The standard pre-marshalling benchmark dataset (i.e., Bortfeldt-Forster) is used to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. The experimental results reveal that the proposed MODDE algorithm can find good solutions on instances of the standard pre-marshalling benchmarks. This demonstrates that using the multi-objectives approach with a combination of the Discrete Differential Evolution mutation and the Memetic Algorithm evolutionary is a suitable approach for solving multi-objectives CPMP.