Earticle

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to identify the effects of aroma inhalation on the anxiety levels of nursing students who are practicing their first intravenous injections. Method: Participants recruited were in sophomore nursing students. Convenient sampling was conducted. The experimental group was exposed to lavender, chamomile roman, bergamot, and geranium inhalations. Three physiologic indicators, systolic blood pressure, diastolic blood pressure, and pulse rate were measured. Two subjective self- reported instruments - ten centimeters bar sharped visual analogue anxiety scale and STAI(State Trait Anxiety Inventory) made by Spielberger - were used also. Results: The pulse rate in control group was 101.8 pulse /min and in the experimental group was 92.3pulse/min. The results were statistically significant between two groups. (t=2.05, p=.04). Conclusion: The effect of aroma inhalation was partially valid. Aroma therapy is recommended as a mean to overcome high stress and anxiety levels that students face in nursing programs.

This article is devoted to different skin diseases on fingertips which have an impact to the process of fingerprint acquirement or recognition. There are many people, who suffer under such dermatologic diseases and are therefore excluded from the set of users of a biometric system. The classification of skin diseases is made from the medical point of view. This classification is followed by the description of acquired images from the point of view of digital processing.

The purpose of this study was to investigate how three types of emotional tension levels affect performance of a cognitive task. Ten university male (age 25.7 ±1.5) and ten female (age 24.5 ±1.8) students participated in this experiment. We used a 3-back task as a cognitive task. Using pictures selected from a group test, three types of tension levels, i.e. tensed, neutral, and relaxed emotions, were induced. The experimental design consisted of six phases; Rest 1 (2 min), Picture 1 (presenting emotion tensioning photos for 2 min), 3-back Task 1 (2 min), Picture 2 (presenting emotion tensioning photos for 2 min), 3-back Task 2 (2 min), and Rest 2 (2 min). Galvanic skin response (GSR) was also measured during all phases of the experiment. The accuracy rate of 3-back task performance was the highest at a neutral emotional state, followed by relaxed and then tensed emotional state. Through this study it could be inferred that tension, induced by stimuli unrelated to cognitive tasks, decreases the performance of cognitive tasks.

Similarity search is one of the most studied research fields in data mining. Given a query data point Q, how to find its closest neighbors efficiently and effectively has always been a challenging research topic. In this paper, we discuss continuous research on data analysis based on our previous work on similarity search problems, and present an approach to improving the scalability of the PanKNN algorithm [13]. This proposed approach can assist to improve the performance of existing data analysis technologies, such as data mining approaches in Bioinformatics.

This paper describes a detailed description of segmentation procedure for fingerprint area detection in a digital fingerprint image. Purpose of this procedure is to extract very precisely the fingerprint area and to separate it from the image background. The precise fingerprint area detection is important not only for vendors of minutiae extraction algorithms but also for semantic conformance testing for finger minutiae data in the newly created international standard. Our segmentation procedure was evaluated for real-world scenario, so the used fingerprints were scanned from real dactyloscopic fingerprint cards. These fingerprints were taken from Ground Truth Database of fingerprints (used subset of GTD originally belongs to NIST SD14 and SD29 databases). Our procedure had to deal with specific problems and properties of these images such as handwritten or printed characters, drawings or specific noise in the background or spread over the fingerprint itself. Our approach was compared with three other methods and yields significantly better results than the best of the benchmarked methods.

Thrombolytic drugs have been used in the clinical arena to treat a wide variety of venous and arterial thromboembolic disorders which are a main cause of death. Thrombolytic molecules are plasminogen activators that convert the inactive plasminogen to the active proteolytic enzyme plasmin which dissolves the blood clot. Fibrin specific plasminoactivators such as tissue – type plasmino activator (t-PA), single chain urokinase type PA, staphylokinase etc. are superior to the non-specific ones such as streptokinase and two chain urokinase-type-PA (tcu-PA). The main advantage of the latest generation of International Journal of Bio-Science and Bio-Technology fibrinolytic drugs for treating acute myocardial infarction (MI) is their ease of administration. Four thrombolytic drugs are currently available in market: alteplase, reteplase, streptokinase and tenecteplase. Streptokinase became the most widely used drug due to its low cost. However, newer agents have a longer half-life, making them easier to deliver, but these also are associated with bleeding complications. In a search to overcome these drawbacks, many efforts have been made to develop the more potent thrombolytic agents without bleeding complications. In this review, different generations of thrombolytic agents have been discussed