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Despite being potentially remediable, central nervous system tuberculosis continues to be a major cause of morbidity and mortality in developing countries. Intracranial tuberculoma is one of the many presentations of CNS tuberculosis that can occur as solitary or multiple lesions. When tuberculomas are solitary and extremely large, they may cause increased intracranial pressure, compressive focal neurological deficits, or epileptic seizures mimicking a malignant lesion. Even using magnetic resonance imaging and spectrography, giant tuberculoma and brain tumors could be mistaken for one another, which warrants consideration of an infectious etiology as a diagnostic differential for prompt diagnosis and appropriate treatment plan. This case study demonstrates a 22-year-old woman who presented with headache, nausea and vomiting ,blurring of vision , weakness of the right side of the body, and features of frontal lobe syndrome with no particular clinical features of TB, and underwent craniotomy who had a preoperative diagnosis of brain tumor. Histopathology later revealed it to be a tuberculoma. J Shaheed Suhrawardy Med Coll 2021; 13(2): 177-182

Multiclass functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) signal classification has become a convenient way for optical brain-computer interface. fNIRS signal classification with high accuracy is a challenging assignment while the signals are produced by means of voluntary and imagery movements of the same limb. Since the activation in time and space of voluntary and imagery movement show a similar pattern, the classification accuracy by the conventional shallow classifiers cannot reach an acceptable range. This paper proposes an accuracy improvement approach with the use of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). In this work, voluntary and imagery hand movements (left hand and right hand) were performed by several participants. These four-class signals were acquired utilizing fNIRS devices. The signals were separated based on the tasks and filtered. With manual feature extraction, the signals were classified by support vector machine and linear discriminant analysis. The automatic feature extraction and classification mechanism of the CNN were applied to the fNIRS signals. From the results, it was found that CNN improves the classification accuracy to an acceptable range, which has not been achieved by any convolutional network.

Background: Now a days, women are joining almost in every sector of the workforce. In view of these changes, it is necessary to find out whether the health of the working mother or their progeny has been consequently compromised. Objectives: To identify the utilization pattern of Antenatal Care (ANC) received by working mothers and their pregnancy outcome. Materials & Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted on 242 admitted working mothers with a history of recent delivery in Dhaka Medical College Hospital (DMCH), Dhaka from January 2013 to December 2013. Results: Majority (61.2%) of the mothers was in the age group of 20-30 years with an average income 4885.95 Tk. Two fifth (42.1%) of them were garment workers. Only one-third (33.9%) mother received regular ANC. Majority (79.3) of them received their ANC from doctors and rest of them from Non-Government Organizations (NGO) workers (11.6%), nurses (2.5%) and health assistant (1.7%). Mothers with a history of irregular ANC showed almost 5 times more likely to develop anemia than the mothers with history of regular ANC (p < 0.001). Mean level of birth weight was highest among regularly ANC taking group found in one-way ANOVA (F = 7.24, P

The effect of an anionic polymer in removal efficiency for turbidity and total organic carbon measured as UV254 from raw water at Dhaka was analysed. Adding0.05 mg/L of the polymer with 85 mg/L of alum the increase in the % removal of turbidity is only 1.23% than the alum alone. By doubling the polymer dose with the same alum dose, the removal efficiency increases only by 0.47%. Addition of alum alone is found far more effective than adding only polymer for the removal of turbidity. Similarly, in the first arrangement in case of removal of UV254, the removal efficiency is decreased by 3.06% rather than increased. Even doubling the polymer dose along with the same alum dose, removal of UV254 is below what is achieved by alum alone. Therefore, extensive study is needed to decide on polymer as a workable, and dependable potable water treatment process aid at Dhaka.

This paper presents a review of water research, development, and management in Bangladesh, with examples drawn from the past and present. A bibliometric analysis is adopted here to analyze the water-related publication data of Bangladesh. Water-quality-related research is the dominating research field in Bangladesh as compared to water-quantity (floods and droughts)-related ones. The most productive author was found to be Ahmed KM for water-related publication in Bangladesh. The arsenic contamination in Bangladesh has received the highest attention (13 out of the top 15 highly cited papers are related to arsenic contamination). Climate-change-related topics have been showing an increasing trend in research publications over the last 5 years. Bangladesh Delta Plan 2100, prepared recently, is a visionary master plan that is expected to shape water management in Bangladesh in the coming decades to adapt to climate change. A set of recommendations is made here to achieve sustainable water management in Bangladesh.

PurposeOwing to religious and economic preferences in Muslim-dominated countries, middle-income customers are at the heart of banks’ strategic targeting. This study aims to investigate selected middle-income Islamic bank customers from Sylhet, one of Bangladesh’s top religious and cultural cities, to examine their perceptions of the Islamic banking services.Design/methodology/approachThis study forwards three determinants of overall satisfaction. These are perceived relative advantage (PRA), perceived risk management (PRM) and perceived customer engagement (PCE). The study has used structured questionnaire and collected complete data on 300 middle-income Islamic bank users. The data was analysed using exploratory factor analysis (EFA), confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and structural equation modelling (SEM).FindingsWhile all the three selection factors significantly influence overall satisfaction, PCE has greater positive impact on overall customer satisfaction, followed by PRA and PRM. “Convenient location”, “competitive charges” and “return on deposit despite low earnings” are the top three instruments measuring “PCE”. Religion did not qualify as a standalone selection factor. The results are robust across tests conducted by using EFA, CFA and SEM.Practical implicationsGross purchasing power of middle-income class in Bangladesh grew from 7% to over 30% during the past decade, and the purchasing power of this class stood at US$100bn. Having a greater portion of this population as Muslims, banks can design products and marketing campaigns by using the three selection criteria that offer a combination of faith and non-faith-based variables.Originality/valueSimilar studies on the middle-income customer group have been rare, especially from the Islamic banking perspective. These findings offer a concise list of three factors for the bank managers to build their strategies. With respect to the Vision 2021, these findings carry greater socio-economic significance given the transition of Bangladesh to a middle-income country.

This study aims to investigate the impact of halal healthcare attributes, intrinsic value, and extrinsic value on satisfaction, and explores how patient satisfaction with halal healthcare services influences word of mouth (WOM) to others. The cross-sectional survey was conducted in two cities with four Islamic-friendly hospitals across Malaysia. This study used purposive and non-probability random sampling methods. Partial least square (PLS) technique was used for data analysis of 309 Muslim patients with a response rate of 61.8%. Findings revealed that hospital’s halal healthcare attributes (β = 0.225, p < 0.01), hospital’s intrinsic value (β = 0.432, p < 0.01), and hospital’s extrinsic value (β = 0.196, p < 0.01) have significant influence on patient satisfaction with halal healthcare service, which in turn reflects the WOM to others (β = 0.692, p < 0.01). The results identified that satisfaction mediates the effect of hospital’s halal attributes, as well as hospital’s intrinsic and extrinsic values on WOM. These findings will contribute to healthcare service providers and academicians for further study to improve a framework for establishing a standard for halal healthcare service for patient satisfaction and WOM to others in Islamic-friendly hospitals.

Emotion recognition, a challenging computational issue, finds interesting applications in diverse fields. Usually, feature-based machine-learning methods have been used for emotion recognition. However, these conventional shallow machine learning methods often find unsatisfactory results as there is a tradeoff between feature dimensions and classification accuracy. Besides, extraction and selection of features from the spatial and frequency domains could be an additional issue. This work proposes a method that transforms EEG (electroencephalography) signals to topographic images that contain the frequency and spatial information and utilizes a convolutional neural network (CNN) to classify the emotion, as CNN has improved feature extraction capability. According to the proposed method, the topographic images are prepared from the relative power spectral density rather than power spectral density that shows remarkable improvement in classification accuracy. The proposed method is applied to the well-known SEED database and has given outperforming results than the current state-of-the-art.

Learning a language is not possible without cognition as cognition and language are inseparable. Metacognition and autonomy are well-established concepts in the domain of teaching and learning languages. Although these two constructs, metacognition and learner autonomy, introduced by John Flavell (1979) and Henri Holec (1980s) respectively, have received considerable attention, the close relationship of cognition, metacognition, and autonomy and their impact on language learning as a tripartite framework remain under-researched. This paper argues that understanding the role of cognition, metacognition, and autonomy substantiates the understanding of language learning dynamics. It concludes with a proposition of a framework of cognition, metacognition, and autonomy for language learning and an attempt to explain why this framework is essential and how it can be promoted in the language learning process.

The mobile phone is no longer just a communication device, but also an essential part of people’s entertainment and daily life. Now android system in the electronics market is becoming more and more popular, especially in the smartphone market. The most popular smartphone application is games followed by listening to music, watching videos, communicating with social media, exploring photos, taking selfies, etc. Mobile apps also become more popular than desktop computer-based software. The mobile phone is used for different purposes activities from simple communication to video conferencing, from playing games to the utilization of apps for day to day life. Since Mobile networks reach every corner of Bangladesh, it is now a potential time to use the mobile phone for providing need-based information to the farming communities for their benefit. Since Bangladesh is an agriculture-based country and most of the farming communities subsist in the northern part of Bangladesh. It was found that Nilphamari (Northern district of Bangladesh) suitable area for providing benefits to the farming communities by developing a mobile app. The researchers chose the disease identification and their’ management for the Maize crop as Maize is the 3rd most common in that area. This paper mainly discussed two sections; 1. The application interface in the Bengali language with multimodal function; text, voice with the local language, and images; 2. Feedback from the users about the app. It was found that most of the end-users were able to properly identify the diseases and manage them well.

In this age of natural language processing, most of the sentiment analysis tasks are done by polarization, for example, 0 for negative or 1 for positive of the given context/text. In some work, the tasks are done using fine-grained polarization, such as very negative or very positive. The proposed system of this paper includes the categorization of the paragraphs using its nature. All the paragraphs are self-narrated, and the number of words in those self-narrated paragraphs contains 50–4200 words. The paragraphs are categorized using three categorizations: “work stress,” “bullying,” and “sexual harassment” in both real and cyber worlds. Artificial neural network paragraph vectors, a distributed bag-of-words and distributed memory, are used to get the embedding of each paragraph and later for classification by data mining techniques. The accuracy of each algorithm lies between 70 and 94%. The best model gives a 77.46% F1 score in the test set.

Now a day’s Globalization has become a familiar issue in terms of every area related to human civilization and particularly in the English language. English is the soul media of communication in the modern world and globalization has brought new dimensions in that field. The present study is an attempt to reflect on the contribution f globalization for spreading English language everywhere. During this research one questionnaire has been developed to collect relevant information on the issue. The paper includes analysis on the various contributing factors of globalization. DOI: 10.1313/aijelr.v1i1.27

The increasing demand for advanced services in wireless networks raises the problem for quality of service (QoS) provisioning with proper resource management. In this research work, such a provisioning technique for wireless networks is performed by Call Admission Control (CAC). A new approach in CAC named by Defined Limited Fractional Channel (DLFC) is proposed in this work for the wireless networks in order to provide proper priority between the new calls and handover calls. This DLFC scheme is basically a new style of handover priority scheme. Handover priority is provided by two stages in this scheme which helps the network to utilize more resources. The first priority stage is a fractional priority and the second stage is an integral priority. Fractional priority is provided by the uniform fractional acceptance factor that accepts new calls with the predefined acceptance ratio throughout the fractional priority stage. The two significant parameters of QoS: new call blocking probability and handover call dropping probability of single service wireless network have been analyzed under this DLFC scheme. Besides, the results of the proposed scheme have been compared with the conventional new thinning scheme and cut-off priority scheme and we found that our proposed scheme outperforms than the conventional schemes. Integral priority is given to the handover calls by reserving some channels only for handover calls. In this work, it is shown that DLFC scheme proves itself as optimal call admission controlling technique which is concerned about not only the QoS but also the proper channel utilization with respect to conventional thinning scheme and fractional channel schemes. The handover call rate estimation and its impact on QoS provisioning is discussed widely to attain the optimum QoS in the proposed handover priority scheme. We hope this proposed DLFC scheme will contribute to design high performance CAC in the wireless cellular network.

Sukuk is a highly appealing alternative instrument of conventional bond in the financial market over the last two decades. To a certain extent, the market players assume sukuk as the same as bond. However, sukuk has its own fundamental asset backed principles, whereas bond is backed by debt. The objective of the study is to examine the Granger-causality and lead–lag relationship between sukuk and bond by using the data of the Malaysian Government securities return for both conventional and Islamic instruments. The data for every working day of 7 years covering the period from January 31, 2007 to December 31, 2013 were collected from Bloomberg database. The yield returns of both securities have been plotted for each six months of a year. This study applied both Granger-causality and dynamic co-movement techniques such as, continuous wavelet transforms (CWT) coherence for analyzing the temporal evolution of the frequency content of both securities by decomposing each period into different time scales. The empirical findings of the paper reveal that with a bit of exception, there is a causal relationship between sukuk securities and conventional bonds for a given period of time. For robustness, this study applied the wavelet coherence approach and found that bond is led by sukuk in the long term investment horizon rather than in the short term. Our findings relating to the lead-lag relationship between sukuk and bonds have important implications in terms of policy regulations and investment management. Future research and market practices could reinvestigate the differences between these two securities across different markets and types.

Due to increased globalization and economic integration in the global economy, contagion effects have been considered an important matter for the investors and policymakers. In the wake of the global financial crisis of September 2008, Islamic financial products were thrust into the spotlight as alternatives to the shaken conventional equity markets. The objective of this study is to discover the Islamic stock market dynamics of Bangladesh with the global Islamic stock markets such as Saudi Arabia, UAE, Kuwait, Europe, UK and Japan. For understanding long run relationship or the theoretical relationships among the Islamic stock market and short run co-movements among Islamic stocks, Johansen co-integration test and Vector Error Correction model (VECM) have been applied respectively. Furthermore, the investigation on short run dynamics is also carried through Impulse Response Function (IRF) analyses. The study found that the Japanese Islamic Stock market is affected to changes in other Islamic stock markets while Kuwait stock market is the leader in the sense it affects other stock market greatly. Bangladeshi Islamic stock market is found to be marginally affecting other stock markets but not as strong as Kuwait. Global Islamic stock market seems to have very little impact to Bangladesh Islamic stock market. The evidence of co-integration and short run dynamics help a diversification benefit may be derived from the cross boarder investment. The empirical evidence of co-integration and short run dynamic relationship found in this study will help investors in making efficient investment decisions and also enhance their understanding of market behavior.

The proliferation of banking sector is an indicator of economic growth in Bangladesh. Conventional Banks as well as the Islamic Banks significantly influence the national economy although there are a number of dissimilarities between the two banking systems. This study was carried out to identify the differences of Conventional and Islamic Banking sectors in terms of ratio analysis. A total of 10 banks in which 5 Conventional and 5 Islamic banks were selected for the study. Some key financial ratios were being used for the analysis. It is found from the study that the Conventional and Islamic Banks had much influence on the national economy as they hold the deposit of general public and invest the funds in profitable projects. The earnings per share (EPS), return on asset (ROA), return on equity (ROE) and return on capital employed (ROCE) were greater in Islamic Banks. It clearly indicates that the Islamic Banks were more profitable and performing a good job in the context of Bangladesh although people preferred Conventional Banking most. JEL Classification Code: G 21

This study is the first attempt to conduct a comparative analysis of the internal and external determinants of the Islamic banks’ profitability in the GCC region applying dynamic GMM, quantile regr...

Water management is an important issue in urban design due to the growing concern of water scarcity. As a result, rainwater harvesting system has received notable attention as an alternative water source. Rainwater is one of purest form of waters and can easily be accessed via a rainwater harvesting system. In general, performance of a rainwater harvesting system is estimated based on historical rainfall data without the possible impacts of climate change on rainfall. However, rainfall pattern is likely to change in the future as a consequence of climate change that may affect the performance of a rainwater harvesting system. But research on climate change impacts on rainwater harvesting is limited. The objective of this study is to understand the plausible impacts of climate change on the performances (i.e. water savings, reliability and water security) of a residential rainwater harvesting system, based on the projected future rainfall conditions. A continuous daily simulation water balance model is developed based on behavioural analysis and yield-after-spillage criteria to simulate the performances of a rainwater harvesting system. The analysis is conducted at five locations in the Greater Sydney region, Australia. The results indicate that performances of a rainwater harvesting system will be impacted negatively due to climate change conditions in the future. It is found that a given tank size at the selected locations would not be able to supply expected volume of water under changing climate conditions in future. Water savings is going to be reduced from a rainwater harvesting system in future (e.g. 2%–14% reduction for 3 kL tank for indoor water demand). Moreover, number of days in a year to meet the water demand by a rainwater harvesting system (i.e. reliability) is likely to be reduced (e.g. 3%–16% reduction for 3 kL tank for indoor water demand). Also, the percentage of days a rainwater tank would remain completely empty is likely to increase in future (e.g. 12% in future climate conditions in comparison to 8% in historical conditions for indoor water demand). Furthermore, it is found that the performance of a rainwater harvesting system will be more affected in dry season than the wet season. The findings of the study will help water authorities and policy makers, as well the home owners to improve their understanding of climate change impact on residential rainwater harvesting system, and will assist them in selecting appropriate rainwater tank size in the context of climate change.