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Vitamin D Effect on Ultrasonography and Laboratory Indices and Biochemical Indicators in the Blood: an Interventional Study on 12 to 18-Year-Old Children with Fatty Liver

  • Namakin, Kokab;Hosseini, Mahya;Zardast, Mahmoud;Mohammadifard, Mahyar
    • Pediatric Gastroenterology, Hepatology & Nutrition
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    • v.24 no.2
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    • pp.187-196
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    • 2021
  • Purpose: The rising prevalence of childhood obesity in the past decades has caused non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) to become the most common cause of pediatric chronic liver disease worldwide. This study was aimed at determining the effect of vitamin D (Vit D) on ultrasonography and laboratory indices of NAFLD and some blood biochemical indicators in children. Methods: In this interventional study liver ultrasonography was performed in 200 children with overweight and obesity. A 108 had fatty liver among which 101 were randomly divided into two groups of study (n=51) and control (n=50). The study group was treated with Vit D, 50000 U once a week whereas the control group received placebo with the same dose and package, both for 12 weeks. At the end of the intervention lab tests and ultrasound study was performed once again to evaluate the response to treatment. Results: It was found out that Vit D supplementation improved the fatty liver grade in the study group. The mean changes in hemoglobin (Hb), uric acid, highdensity lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL-C), low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C), insulin, albumin and alanine aminotransferase (ALT) was significantly higher in the study group compared to controls (p<0.05). After the intervention and means adjustment, a significant difference was obtained in HDL-C, insulin, LDL-C and homeostasis model assessment of insulin resistance (HOMA-IR) between the two groups. Conclusion: Vit D supplementation in addition to improving the fatty liver grade in ultrasonography and increasing the blood Vit D level, increases the HDL and Hb level besides decreasing uric acid, LDL, HOMA-IR, insulin and ALT levels.

Optimal design of homogeneous earth dams by particle swarm optimization incorporating support vector machine approach

  • Mirzaei, Zeinab;Akbarpour, Abolfazl;Khatibinia, Mohsen;Siuki, Abbas Khashei
    • Geomechanics and Engineering
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    • v.9 no.6
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    • pp.709-727
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    • 2015
  • The main aim of this study is to introduce optimal design of homogeneous earth dams with oblique and horizontal drains based on particle swarm optimization (PSO) incorporating weighted least squares support vector machine (WLS-SVM). To achieve this purpose, the upstream and downstream slopes of earth dam, the length of oblique and horizontal drains and angle among the drains are considered as the design variables in the optimization problem of homogeneous earth dams. Furthermore, the seepage through dam body and the weight of dam as objective functions are minimized in the optimization process simultaneously. In the optimization procedure, the stability coefficient of the upstream and downstream slopes and the seepage through dam body as the hydraulic responses of homogeneous earth dam are required. Hence, the hydraulic responses are predicted using WLS-SVM approach. The optimal results of illustrative examples demonstrate the efficiency and computational advantages of PSO with WLS-SVM in the optimal design of homogeneous earth dams with drains.

Health monitoring of pressurized pipelines by finite element method using meta-heuristic algorithms along with error sensitivity assessment

  • Amirmohammad Jahan;Mahdi Mollazadeh;Abolfazl Akbarpour;Mohsen Khatibinia
    • Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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    • v.87 no.3
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    • pp.211-219
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    • 2023
  • The structural health of a pipeline is usually assessed by visual inspection. In addition to the fact that this method is expensive and time consuming, inspection of the whole structure is not possible due to limited access to some points. Therefore, adopting a damage detection method without the mentioned limitations is important in order to increase the safety of the structure. In recent years, vibration-based methods have been used to detect damage. These methods detect structural defects based on the fact that the dynamic responses of the structure will change due to damage existence. Therefore, the location and extent of damage, before and after the damage, are determined. In this study, fuzzy genetic algorithm has been used to monitor the structural health of the pipeline to create a fuzzy automated system and all kinds of possible failure scenarios that can occur for the structure. For this purpose, the results of an experimental model have been used. Its numerical model is generated in ABAQUS software and the results of the analysis are used in the fuzzy genetic algorithm. Results show that the system is more accurate in detecting high-intensity damages, and the use of higher frequency modes helps to increase accuracy. Moreover, the system considers the damage in symmetric regions with the same degree of membership. To deal with the uncertainties, some error values are added, which are observed to be negligible up to 10% of the error.

Hybrid of topological derivative-based level set method and isogeometric analysis for structural topology optimization

  • Roodsarabi, Mehdi;Khatibinia, Mohsen;Sarafrazi, Seyyed R.
    • Steel and Composite Structures
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    • v.21 no.6
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    • pp.1389-1410
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    • 2016
  • This paper proposes a hybrid of topological derivative-based level set method (LSM) and isogeometric analysis (IGA) for structural topology optimization. In topology optimization a significant drawback of the conventional LSM is that it cannot create new holes in the design domain. In this study, the topological derivative approach is used to create new holes in appropriate places of the design domain, and alleviate the strong dependency of the optimal topology on the initial design. Furthermore, the values of the gradient vector in Hamilton-Jacobi equation in the conventional LSM are replaced with a Delta function. In the topology optimization procedure IGA based on Non-Uniform Rational B-Spline (NURBS) functions is utilized to overcome the drawbacks in the conventional finite element method (FEM) based topology optimization approaches. Several numerical examples are provided to confirm the computational efficiency and robustness of the proposed method in comparison with derivative-based LSM and FEM.

Evaluation of General Dentists' and Dental Specialists' Knowledge about Oral Cancer in South Khorasan-Iran 2014

  • Akbari, Narjes;Raeesi, Vajehallah;Khazaei, Tahereh;Ramezanzadeh, Khaironnesa;Ebrahimipour, Sediqe
    • Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention
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    • v.16 no.16
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    • pp.6987-6990
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    • 2015
  • Background: Oral cancer is one of the most prevalent cancers and one of the top ten causes of death in the whole world. Most oral cancers are diagnosed at late stages. Since dentists play a critical role in early detection of oral cancer, they should be knowledgeable and skillful in oral cancer diagnosis. The aim of this study was to survey dentist knowledge about oral cancer in Southern Khorasan Province. Materials and Methods: This descriptive, cross-sectional study was conducted with dentists who participated in an in-service educational program at the Faculty of Dentistry of Birjand University of Medical Sciences in spring 2014. A questionnaire including demographic information with 11 questions regarding oral cancer was prepared. The participants were required to be complete the questionnaires within a specific time span. The data were analyzed using SPSS 15 software by t-test and one-way ANOVA at 0.05 confidence level. Results: A total of 73 dentists out of 80 answered the questionnaires - 36 (49.3%) were females and 37 (50.7%) were males. Total mean score of knowledge was $7.91{\pm}1$ of 11. Mean scores of knowledge of male and female participants were $7.70{\pm}1.83$ and $8.13{\pm}1.94$ respectively. Mean knowledge score of general dentists was $7.41{\pm}1.79$ and of dental specialists was $9.44{\pm}1.0$ In spite of higher knowledge score of women compared to men and general dentists compared to dental specialists, these differences were not statistically significant (p=0.09). Tukey testing showed a significant difference between groups with 1-4 years of experience (8.74) and over twenty years of experience (6.50) ( p=0.001). Conclusions: Considering the good knowledge level of young dentists and the specialists and the importance of early diagnosis of oral cancer, it seems necessary to pay more attention to academic education for dentistry students, as well as holding retraining courses for experienced dentists, so that their knowledge not be reduced over time.

THE KARUSH-KUHN-TUCKER OPTIMALITY CONDITIONS IN INTERVAL-VALUED MULTIOBJECTIVE PROGRAMMING PROBLEMS

  • Hosseinzade, Elham;Hassanpour, Hassan
    • Journal of applied mathematics & informatics
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    • v.29 no.5_6
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    • pp.1157-1165
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    • 2011
  • The Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) necessary optimality conditions for nonlinear differentiable programming problems are also sufficient under suitable convexity assumptions. The KKT conditions in multiobjective programming problems with interval-valued objective and constraint functions are derived in this paper. The main contribution of this paper is to obtain the Pareto optimal solutions by resorting to the sufficient optimality condition.

A numerical study on optimal FTMD parameters considering soil-structure interaction effects

  • Etedali, Sadegh;Seifi, Mohammad;Akbari, Morteza
    • Geomechanics and Engineering
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    • v.16 no.5
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    • pp.527-538
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    • 2018
  • The study on the performance of the nonlinear friction tuned mass dampers (FTMD) for the mitigation of the seismic responses of the structures is a topic that still inspires the efforts of researchers. The present paper aims to carry out a numerical study on the optimum tuning of TMD and FTMD parameters using a multi-objective particle swarm optimization (MOPSO) algorithm including soil-structure interaction (SSI) effects for seismic applications. Considering a 3-story structure, the performances of the optimized TMD and FTMD are compared with the uncontrolled structure for three types of soils and the fixed base state. The simulation results indicate that, unlike TMDs, optimum tuning of FTMD parameters for a large preselected mass ratio may not provide a best and optimum design. For low mass ratios, optimal selection of friction coefficient has an important key to enhance the performance of FTMDs. Consequently, a free parameter search of all FTMD parameters provides a better performance in comparison with considering a preselected mass ratio for FTMD in the optimum design stage of the FTMD. Furthermore, the SSI significant effects on the optimum design of the TMD and FTMD. The simulation results also show that the FTMD provides a better performance in reducing the maximum top floor displacement and acceleration of the building in different soil types. Moreover, the performance of the TMD and FTMD decrease with increasing soil softness, so that ignoring the SSI effects in the design process may give an incorrect and unrealistic estimation of their performance.

Comparison of viscous and kinetic dynamic relaxation methods in form-finding of membrane structures

  • Labbafi, S. Fatemeh;Sarafrazi, S. Reza;Kang, Thomas H.K.
    • Advances in Computational Design
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    • v.2 no.1
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    • pp.71-87
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    • 2017
  • This study focuses on the efficiency and applicability of dynamic relaxation methods in form-finding of membrane structures. Membrane structures have large deformations that require complex nonlinear analysis. The first step of analysis of these structures is the form-finding process including a geometrically nonlinear analysis. Several numerical methods for form-finding have been introduced such as the dynamic relaxation, force density method, particle spring systems and the updated reference strategy. In the present study, dynamic relaxation method (DRM) is investigated. The dynamic relaxation method is an iterative process that is used for the static equilibrium analysis of geometrically nonlinear problems. Five different examples are used in this paper. To achieve the grading of the different dynamic relaxation methods in form-finding of membrane structures, a performance index is introduced. The results indicate that viscous damping methods show better performance than kinetic damping in finding the shapes of membrane structures.