Earticle

When the cochlea in the inner ear hair cell has functional problems, a sensorineural hearing loss (SNHL) occurs, and we called ‘cochlea dead region’. Cochlea dead region is that no (or very few) functioning in inner hair cell or neurons. In this paper, we tested word recognition score (WRS) to know an effective amplification of hearing aids with different location of dead region and gain (dB). The test signal was mixed with white and babble noise (SNR = 0 dB) for eight people who had normal hearing ability. We divided three conditions by location of dead region in low, middle and high frequency. Low frequency dead region was defined under 1100Hz in frequency. Middle frequency dead region was between 1350Hz and 2700Hz. High frequency dead region was over 3100Hz. In addition, gain was various such as 6 dB, 11.5 dB and 14.5 dB in each dead region. The results were different by locations and gains of dead region. Firstly, the result of WRS with middle frequency and high frequency dead region were higher than low frequency dead region. Secondly, the result of WRS was high score, when low gain in low frequency dead region, high gain in middle and high frequency dead region.

Medical images such as computed tomography (CT) are degraded by different types of blur due to the imperfect resolution of the imaging system, data loss at the acquisition time and other technical reasons. The fastest way to deblur an image is by convolving a special kernel to the corrupted image. Laplacian kernels are famous and widely used in this field, but the issue is only few kernels are presented. This paper is trying to simulate the blur problem using various types of blur and attempt to restore the degraded images by using twenty novel kernels. Moreover, these kernels were tested with five types of blur that are: Average, Box, Gaussian, Pillbox and Atmospheric turbulence blur to determine which type of blur is suitable to be employed with kernels the most. The accuracy of the experimental results is measured with five diverse methods along with the success and the failure ratios. Finally, these kernels are applied to naturally degraded images obtained from different CT imaging systems.

To improve the security weaknesses in user authentication system, many biometrics-based user authentication schemes using smart cards have been proposed. Das in 2011, proposed an effective biometric-based remote user authentication scheme using smart cards that can provide strong authentication and mutual authentication, while eliminating the security flaws of Li-Hwang’s scheme. In this paper, we analyze the security of Das’s scheme, and we have shown that Das’s scheme is still insecure against the user impersonation attack, the server masquerading attack, the off-line password guessing attack, the man-in-the-middle attack and the insider attack. In addition, Das’s scheme does not provide mutual authentication between the user and the server.

Carbon management is a serious concern confronting the world today. The significance of role of biomass of tree species in carbon sequestration has long been recognized, but very little attempts have been made to estimate the biomass accumulation and their contribution for sequestration of carbon, especially in mined out areas. Carbon sequestration rates vary by tree species, soil type, regional climate, and topography and management practice. In the present paper, attempts were made to work out biomass accumulation and carbon sequestration by Dalbergia sissoo raised on coal mine overburden of Singrauli, M.P adopting non harvest technique. Over burden plantations of different years raised at different project sites of NCL Singrauli were taken for estimating the standing volumes and consequently biomass accumulation and carbon sequestration at different diameter and height of trees. The growth data was collected for 248 trees (above 4 cm DBH) covering the over burden plantations of Amlohri, Nigahi, Bina, Kakari and Khadia Open Cast Projects (OCP). The age of plantation varied from 2 to 19 years. The trees were selected in plantations of all available ages representing different diameters and height. The correlation between basal area vs volume, DBH vs volume and basal area vs total biomass was found to be significant. On the basis of results obtained, the Dalbergia sissoo proved as an efficient species pertaining to biomass and carbon accumulation, owing to high energy conversion efficiency.

Human obesity has become a global epidemic. Body mass index (BMI) is clinically useful data for the diagnosis of overall adiposity. The purpose of this study was to identify normal and overweight patients based on facial characteristics extracted from subject image data, irrespective of the measurement of weight and height. In this paper, we propose a prediction method for normal and overweight from morphological facial characteristics that are associated with overweight and normal BMI statuses. A total of 1244 subjects participated in this study. The subjects were divided into 6 groups based on age- and gender-specific differences. The area under the receiver operating characteristics curve (AUC) and kappa of the prediction model ranged from 0.760 to 0.931, and from 0.401 to 0.586, respectively, for all groups, except for the group comprising females aged ≥61 years. Statistical analysis revealed many features that were significantly different between overweight and normal in the 6 groups. Furthermore, compact and useful feature sets were identified for BMI prediction using facial features in gender- and age-specific groups. We identified a relationship between facial morphology and BMI status, and the possibility of predicting the BMI status of individuals. Our results will facilitate the development of improved applications for age- and gender-specific groups in the fields of adiposity, facial recognition, and medicine.

Employing an efficient contrast enhancement technique is considered as an essential step to improve the overall visual representation of clinical images, and as a consequence provides better diagnosis results. This paper employs an easy, fast and reliable technique to improve the contrast of different types of computed tomography (CT) medical images by applying the technique directly to the entire image and normalize it depending on its size in the spatial domain. The experiment is conducted on naturally degraded CT images collected from diverse medical imaging repositories. Likewise, a comparison is presented between the suggested approach and other popular contrast enhancement techniques. Besides, the accuracy is measured using the universal image quality index (UIQI) metric.

With the planned increase in coal production, more and more land is being brought under mining operation. This result in drastic changes in land use patterns, as mined lands, prior to mining operations, may have been used for forestry, agriculture and any other productive purpose. The most serious impact of mining is the land degradation. Besides, serious impacts of coal mining are impact on top fertile soil, microbial population, heavy metal toxicity, ecology and vegetation, habitat destruction and degradation of ecosystem as a whole. The mine spoils or overburdens created during opencast mining are devoid of nutrients and have low water holding capacity. These are chemically, physically and biologically unstable. In the present study, an attempt has been made to assess the changes on nutritional and microbial characteristics brought about by afforestation on overburden dumps of coal mine spoil at Jhingurda, Singrauli (M.P.). Different years overburden plantations raised by Madhya Pradesh Forest Development Corporation has been undertaken for study. For comparison, age series of plantations raised on adjoining areas outside the overburden dumps (mentioned as plain plantations) have been studied on the same attributes. The results were found encouraging with respect to amelioration of sites undertaken for rehabilitation activity.

Microbial nitrilases are biocatalysts of industrial interest and being used for the production of amides and acids from their respective nitriles. The production of nitrilases from various sources has been reported with specific catalytic properties at flask level. We attempted the nitrilase production from a Streptomyces sp. MTCC 7546 in a lab scale stirred tank bioreactor under various physiological conditions. The effect of temperature, inducer concentration, agitation, cultivation time and aeration respectively were optimized and it was found that benzonitrile at a concentration of 10 mM, aeration rate in the range of 0.7-1.0 vvm and an agitation of 200 rpm were most suitable conditions for maximum synthesis of intracellular nitrilase. At optimal conditions, the produced dry cell biomass and the productivity of the process were 10.26 g/L and 0.43 g/L/h repectively.