Sir Syed University Research Journal of Engineering & Technology
Waste Polyvinyl Chloride (PVC) pipes from sewerage system, bottles, credit cards etc. is a non-bi... more Waste Polyvinyl Chloride (PVC) pipes from sewerage system, bottles, credit cards etc. is a non-biodegradable material and adds to the quantity of solid wastes on annual basis. This study aims at its useful deployment as an additive to the bitumen which is used to construct pavements. Waste PVC pipes when used as a modifier in bituminous mixtures, satisfied the requirements as per the standards as indicated by the results. The properties of bitumen mixed with PVC were studied and compared with those of the ordinary bitumen. The performance characteristics of the the conventional and modified bituminous mixes were investigated and comparative study was carried out. It was shown by the results that waste PVC has got no issue when utilized in road construction. Flow and Stability of the mix was found to be within the acceptable limits after the PVC waste pipes have been incorporated. On the basis of experimental work it is concluded that the asphalt mixtures with waste PVC modifier can ...
This research paper depicts the experimental investigation of the impact of stone dust as an admi... more This research paper depicts the experimental investigation of the impact of stone dust as an admixture on the geotechnical characteristics of expansive soils that shrink and swell during the wet and dry seasons. As a result, expansive soil causes the differential settlement of structures. Thus the stabilization of expansive soil is important to overcome potential pavement failure. For this purpose research studies were carried out on the reuse of stone industry wastage for the improvement of expansive soil. Also, this research is beneficial to utilize the stone dust waste for strengthening the soil and making the environment pollution-free. Stone dust was used to stabilize the geotechnical characteristics of the weak soil such as shear strength, unconfined compressive strength (UCS), index properties, maximum dry density (MDD), optimum moisture content (OMC), and California bearing ratio (CBR). The percentages of stone dust employed in the studies were 0%, 7%, 14%, 21%, and 28% by d...
Due to the ubiquity of unstructured biomedical data, significant obstacles still remain in achiev... more Due to the ubiquity of unstructured biomedical data, significant obstacles still remain in achieving accurate and fast access to online biomedical content. In lieu of the growing volume of biomedical content on the web, embedding semantic annotations has become key to enhancing search engine context-aware indexing, thereby improving search speeds and retrieval accuracy. We introduce Semantically: a socio-technical framework for semantic biomedical content authoring and publishing. Identifying the appropriate semantic vocabulary for biomedical content annotation is a time-consuming and technically challenging process. Semantically automates this search by recommending highly accurate annotations from a wide range of biomedical ontologies. Furthermore, the framework is integrated with a knowledge-sharing system which allows biomedical authors to collaborate on identifying precise annotations during the content authoring process. Similarly, preserving content-level semantics during and...
Efficient practices to provide access to biomedical publications facilitate the timely transfer o... more Efficient practices to provide access to biomedical publications facilitate the timely transfer of information from the scientific research community to peer investigators and other healthcare practitioners. At present, the portable document format (PDF) is one of the dominating formats to share scientific knowledge offline. Additionally, some HTML-based formats have been introduced to share scientific content online. Online Search engines, e.g., GoogleScholar, require machine-interpretable metadata to correctly index items in a context-aware manner for accurate biomedical literature searches. We have developed a lightweight technical infrastructure (goSemantically) and miniaturized that as Google Docs add-ons that helps authors to add machine-interpretable metadata at the content and structural levels while authoring biomedical content. The infrastructure uses the NCBO Bioportal resources to annotate the biomedical content with appropriate semantic vocabularies. It further utilizes...
This study aimed to determine how radiation attenuation would change when the thickness, density,... more This study aimed to determine how radiation attenuation would change when the thickness, density, and compressive strength of clay bricks, modified with partial replacement of clay by fly ash, iron slag, and wood ash. To conduct this investigation, four distinct types of bricks—normal, fly ash-, iron slag-, and wood ash-incorporated bricks were prepared by replacing clay content with their variable percentages. Additionally, models for predicting the radiation-shielding ability of bricks were created using gene expression programming (GEP) and artificial neural networks (ANN). The addition of iron slag improved the density and compressive strength of bricks, thus increasing shielding capability against gamma radiation. In contrast, fly ash and wood ash decreased the density and compressive strength of burnt clay bricks, leading to low radiation shielding capability. Concerning the performance of the Artificial Intelligence models, the root mean square error (RMSE) was determined as ...
Concrete is an economical and efficient material for attenuating radiation. The potential of conc... more Concrete is an economical and efficient material for attenuating radiation. The potential of concrete in attenuating radiation is attributed to its density, which in turn depends on the mix design of concrete. This paper presents the findings of a study conducted to evaluate the radiation attenuation with varying water-cement ratio (w/c), thickness, density, and compressive strength of concrete. Three different types of concrete, i.e., normal concrete, barite, and magnetite containing concrete, were prepared to investigate this study. The radiation attenuation was calculated by studying the dose absorbed by the concrete and the linear attenuation coefficient. Additionally, artificial neural network (ANN) and gene expression programming (GEP) models were developed for predicting the radiation shielding capacity of concrete. A correlation coefficient (R), mean absolute error (MAE), and root mean square error (RMSE) were calculated as 0.999, 1.474 mGy, 2.154 mGy and 0.994, 5.07 mGy, 5....
Steel fibers are widely extracted from scrap tyres, causing environmental concerns. This paper pr... more Steel fibers are widely extracted from scrap tyres, causing environmental concerns. This paper presents the use of steel fibers in variable proportions extracted from scrap tyres. The enhancement of the confinement was envisaged through the addition of steel fibers obtained from scrap tyres. The study included an experimental program for the development of constitutive material models for ordinary Portland cement (OPC) concrete and concrete with added steel fibers. A mix design was carried out for OPC, targeting a compressive strength of 3000 psi. Steel fibers were added to OPC in ratios of 1.0% to 3.0%, with an increment of 0.5%. Concrete columns, with cross-sectional dimensions of 6 × 6 inches and a length of 30 inches, were cast with both OPC and fiber-reinforced concrete. The column confinement was evaluated with a different spacing of ties (3- and 4-inch center-to-center). Compression tests on the concrete columns indicate that the addition of steel fibers to a concrete matrix ...
2022 IEEE 16th International Conference on Semantic Computing (ICSC), 2022
Significant barriers exist in achieving fast and accurate access to online biomedical content bec... more Significant barriers exist in achieving fast and accurate access to online biomedical content because of the proliferation of unstructured biomedical information. Accompanying semantic annotations with growing biomedical content is critical to enhancing search engines' context-aware indexing, improving search speeds and retrieval accuracy. We have developed “Semantically”: a biomedical structured content authoring and publishing framework to enhance biomedical content FAIR-ness (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability). Finding the appropriate semantic vocabulary to annotate biomed-ical content is time-consuming and technically challenging. “Semantically” automates and streamlines this process for users by recommending highly accurate annotations from an array of biomedical ontologies. Similarly, preserving content-level se-mantics at the content publishing stage to foster semantic search remains a critical research challenge. “Semantically” addresses this obstacle by extending schema.org, a community-agreed and research engine endorsed guideline for publishing structured content on the web. In future works, we aim to improve the biomedical content annotation process through a socio-technical approach by enabling a collaborative annotation scheme. The demo of the system is accessible at: https://gosemantically.com/
Proceedings of the 17th Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services, 2019
Wellness platform plays a vital role to prevent chronic disease. In this paper, we have introduce... more Wellness platform plays a vital role to prevent chronic disease. In this paper, we have introduced wellness smartphone application within the ambit of the Mining Mind project, which aims to support the people to adopt healthy behavior and lifestyle. When an unhealthy behavior is detected, personalized physical recommendations are generated automatically by the Mining Mind wellness platform. Recommendations are delivered through Push notification and display on the application main screen for the user. The application has feedback functionalities on the effectiveness of recommendation and education. The application also supports descriptive analytics of wellness goals achieved on a monthly, weekly and daily basis.
Objective: To discuss the presentation stages of Cholesteatoma in patients of various areas of Ko... more Objective: To discuss the presentation stages of Cholesteatoma in patients of various areas of Kohat division. Study Design: Case series study. Place and Duration of Study: Combined Military Hospital Kohat, from Nov 2015 to Nov 2017. Methodology: A total of 60 patients having Chronic Suppurative otitis media with Cholesteatoma were selected from outpatient department. Disease process was evaluated by otomicroscopy as well as radiologically. Perioperative disease spread pattern was also assessed and documented. Results: Out of 28 patients with pars tensa cholesteatoma 28.5% were in stage II and 53.5% were in stage III disease. Out of 32 patients with pars flaccid cholesteatoma, 3.1% presented with stage 1 disease, 37.5% with stage II disease, 50% with stage III disease and 9.3% with stage IV disease. Conclusion: Appropriate measures should be taken for training of general physicians as well as otologists at National level to help early diagnosis and better outcome.
Objective: To find out the association of multiple diseases of external ear with the use of vario... more Objective: To find out the association of multiple diseases of external ear with the use of various objects and cotton buds. Study Design: Case control study. Place and Duration of Study: Ear Nose Throat Department, Pakistan Naval Ship Shifa Karachi, from Jan to Oct 2020. Methodology: All the patients having multiple diseases of external ear were included as cases. Controls were selected from the healthy volunteers from general populations. Results: Total number of subjects in this study was 140 with the mean age 25.11 ± 11.21 years (2-55 years of age range). Out of them, 82 were male and 58 were female. Odds ratio was 16.07. Conclusion: There is a solid relationship of illnesses of external ear with the utilization of cotton buds. This detrimental practice should be incapacitated by featuring the notice by brands owners of cotton bud and safety instructions at different instructive levels.
Objective: To compared efficacy of alpha lipoic acid (antioxidant medication) and aloe vera gel t... more Objective: To compared efficacy of alpha lipoic acid (antioxidant medication) and aloe vera gel together versus intralesional steroids (hydrocortisone) in management of oral submucous fibrosis by evaluating post treatment clinical features of mouth opening and burning sensation. Study Design: A prospective comparative study. Place and Duration of Study: Department of ENT, Combined Military Hospital, Malir Karachi, from Jul 2018 to Mar 2020. Methodology: Twenty-eight patients were involved in the research and were distributed into two groups, I and II. Alpha lipoid acid with aloe vera gel was given in group I and hydrocortisone was given in group II. Burning sensation and mouth opening were recorded both at start and at monthly interval later on for three consecutive months. The data collected were statistically analyzed by using SPSS-22. Results: A significant lessening in burning sensation (p<0.001) and improvement in mouth opening were noticed in both groups. However, compariso...
Objective: To compared efficacy of alpha lipoic acid (antioxidant medication) and aloe vera gel t... more Objective: To compared efficacy of alpha lipoic acid (antioxidant medication) and aloe vera gel together versus intralesional steroids (hydrocortisone) in management of oral submucous fibrosis by evaluating post treatment clinical features of mouth opening and burning sensation. Study Design: A prospective comparative study. Place and Duration of Study: Department of ENT, Combined Military Hospital, Malir Karachi, from Jul 2018 to Mar 2020. Methodology: Twenty-eight patients were involved in the research and were distributed into two groups, I and II. Alpha lipoid acid with aloe vera gel was given in group I and hydrocortisone was given in group II. Burning sensation and mouth opening were recorded both at start and at monthly interval later on for three consecutive months. The data collected were statistically analyzed by using SPSS-22. Results: A significant lessening in burning sensation (p<0.001) and improvement in mouth opening were noticed in both groups. However, compariso...
To support evidence-based precision medicine and clinical decision-making, we need to identify ac... more To support evidence-based precision medicine and clinical decision-making, we need to identify accurate, appropriate, and clinically relevant studies from voluminous biomedical literature. To address the issue of accurate identification of high impact relevant articles, we propose a novel approach of attention-based deep learning for finding and ranking relevant studies against a topic of interest. For learning the proposed model, we collect data consisting of 240,324 clinical articles from the 2018 Precision Medicine track in Text REtrieval Conference (TREC) to identify and rank relevant documents matched with the user query. We built a BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) based classification model to classify high and low impact articles. We contextualized word embedding to create vectors of the documents, and user queries combined with genetic information to find contextual similarity for determining the relevancy score to rank the articles. We compare ...
In this study, Multiwalled Carbon Nanotubes (MWCNTs) and Marble Powder (MP) have been utilized in... more In this study, Multiwalled Carbon Nanotubes (MWCNTs) and Marble Powder (MP) have been utilized in reinforced concrete columns to assess their structural behavior. The nanotubes from 0.025% to 0.20% and 5% MP by weight of cement were used. The compressive strength of reinforced concrete columns and cubes was analyzed as the main property. The incorporation of MWCNTs and marble powder was able to increase the compressive strength of columns by 72.69% and mortar by 42.45% as compared to reference concrete. The ductility was noted to be improved by 42.04%. The load-deformation and stress-strain behaviors were also analyzed. The Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) analysis revealed the formation of a strong compact bridge (90–100 layers), Calcium Silicate Hydrate (C-S-H) gel, evenly dispersion, and bridging effect caused by MWCNTs. The incorporation of 0.20% MWCNTs by weight of cement was recommended to be effectively used as a reinforcing agent in concrete.
Medical concept and entity extraction from the medical narrative unstructured documents is the cr... more Medical concept and entity extraction from the medical narrative unstructured documents is the crucial step in most of the contemporary health systems. For the extraction of medical concepts and entities, the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) Metathesaurus is a big source of biomedical and health-related concepts. Recently various tools like Sophia, MetaMap and cTAKES, and many other rules-based methods and algorithm like Quick UMLS etc. have been developed which are performing a successful role in the process of medical concept extraction. The goal of this paper is to design a generic algorithm to identify a package consisting of standard concepts, their semantic types, and entity types on the basis of medical phrases and terms used in the clinical unstructured documents. The proposed algorithm implements the UMLS terminology service (UTS) and customizes to extract concepts for all the meaningful phrases and terms used in the narratives and determine their semantic and entity ...
Journal of Ayub Medical College, Abbottabad : JAMC, 2020
BACKGROUND Commonest surgical emergency presenting to emergency departments with abdominal pain i... more BACKGROUND Commonest surgical emergency presenting to emergency departments with abdominal pain is acute appendicitis. Thus, to enable quick and accurate diagnosis of the condition various scoring systems have been developed. Among these, Alvarado and its modified version (Modified Alvarado) are the commonest. Whereas Raja Isteri Pengiran Anak Saleha Appendicitis (RIPASA) score showed promising results in Asian population. Similarly, Lintula score, which was initially developed for paediatric population, has now been validated for elderly too. This study is aimed to compare these in our regional population. METHODS Project included consecutive 125 clinically suspected acute appendicitis patients. All were scored using Modified Alvarado, RIPASA and Lintula systems. Final diagnosis was based on histopathologic evaluation of excised specimen. Sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value (PPV), negative predictive value (NPV) and diagnostic accuracy were computed for all these sy...
2021 15th International Conference on Ubiquitous Information Management and Communication (IMCOM), 2021
Recent evidence shows that occurrence of Non-Communicable Diseases (NCDs) are the leading cause o... more Recent evidence shows that occurrence of Non-Communicable Diseases (NCDs) are the leading cause of death in low and middle-income countries. The fitness applications are not capable enough to help persons with NCDs to change their lifestyle behavior for improving life quality. Currently, the major focus of the existing healthcare applications is towards general public fitness. However, existing solutions lacks in monitoring and adaptation of healthy behaviors. The rehabilitation of person with NCDs is very demanding and challenging to avoid and reduce the advert impacts. In this paper, we argue that the context based behavior adaption observing multiple factors provides an appropriate solution. We have developed a methodology of context-based Just-in-Time actionable interventions for adopting healthy behavior. The risk factors defining the target context are obtained from literature and evaluated by 7 experts with inter-rater agreement kappa value of 0.5 based on 3 categories. The result shows the effectiveness of our proposed approach and depicts the usefulness of context-based intervention in terms of higher receptivity and user satisfaction level. The implicit feedback from 142 persons with different NCDs highlighted the effectiveness of methodology with 82.37% of responded intervention. Whereas, the explicit UEQ benchmark result indicated that the application got excellent responses in the categories of attractiveness, motivation, and novelty.
Sir Syed University Research Journal of Engineering & Technology
Waste Polyvinyl Chloride (PVC) pipes from sewerage system, bottles, credit cards etc. is a non-bi... more Waste Polyvinyl Chloride (PVC) pipes from sewerage system, bottles, credit cards etc. is a non-biodegradable material and adds to the quantity of solid wastes on annual basis. This study aims at its useful deployment as an additive to the bitumen which is used to construct pavements. Waste PVC pipes when used as a modifier in bituminous mixtures, satisfied the requirements as per the standards as indicated by the results. The properties of bitumen mixed with PVC were studied and compared with those of the ordinary bitumen. The performance characteristics of the the conventional and modified bituminous mixes were investigated and comparative study was carried out. It was shown by the results that waste PVC has got no issue when utilized in road construction. Flow and Stability of the mix was found to be within the acceptable limits after the PVC waste pipes have been incorporated. On the basis of experimental work it is concluded that the asphalt mixtures with waste PVC modifier can ...
This research paper depicts the experimental investigation of the impact of stone dust as an admi... more This research paper depicts the experimental investigation of the impact of stone dust as an admixture on the geotechnical characteristics of expansive soils that shrink and swell during the wet and dry seasons. As a result, expansive soil causes the differential settlement of structures. Thus the stabilization of expansive soil is important to overcome potential pavement failure. For this purpose research studies were carried out on the reuse of stone industry wastage for the improvement of expansive soil. Also, this research is beneficial to utilize the stone dust waste for strengthening the soil and making the environment pollution-free. Stone dust was used to stabilize the geotechnical characteristics of the weak soil such as shear strength, unconfined compressive strength (UCS), index properties, maximum dry density (MDD), optimum moisture content (OMC), and California bearing ratio (CBR). The percentages of stone dust employed in the studies were 0%, 7%, 14%, 21%, and 28% by d...
Due to the ubiquity of unstructured biomedical data, significant obstacles still remain in achiev... more Due to the ubiquity of unstructured biomedical data, significant obstacles still remain in achieving accurate and fast access to online biomedical content. In lieu of the growing volume of biomedical content on the web, embedding semantic annotations has become key to enhancing search engine context-aware indexing, thereby improving search speeds and retrieval accuracy. We introduce Semantically: a socio-technical framework for semantic biomedical content authoring and publishing. Identifying the appropriate semantic vocabulary for biomedical content annotation is a time-consuming and technically challenging process. Semantically automates this search by recommending highly accurate annotations from a wide range of biomedical ontologies. Furthermore, the framework is integrated with a knowledge-sharing system which allows biomedical authors to collaborate on identifying precise annotations during the content authoring process. Similarly, preserving content-level semantics during and...
Efficient practices to provide access to biomedical publications facilitate the timely transfer o... more Efficient practices to provide access to biomedical publications facilitate the timely transfer of information from the scientific research community to peer investigators and other healthcare practitioners. At present, the portable document format (PDF) is one of the dominating formats to share scientific knowledge offline. Additionally, some HTML-based formats have been introduced to share scientific content online. Online Search engines, e.g., GoogleScholar, require machine-interpretable metadata to correctly index items in a context-aware manner for accurate biomedical literature searches. We have developed a lightweight technical infrastructure (goSemantically) and miniaturized that as Google Docs add-ons that helps authors to add machine-interpretable metadata at the content and structural levels while authoring biomedical content. The infrastructure uses the NCBO Bioportal resources to annotate the biomedical content with appropriate semantic vocabularies. It further utilizes...
This study aimed to determine how radiation attenuation would change when the thickness, density,... more This study aimed to determine how radiation attenuation would change when the thickness, density, and compressive strength of clay bricks, modified with partial replacement of clay by fly ash, iron slag, and wood ash. To conduct this investigation, four distinct types of bricks—normal, fly ash-, iron slag-, and wood ash-incorporated bricks were prepared by replacing clay content with their variable percentages. Additionally, models for predicting the radiation-shielding ability of bricks were created using gene expression programming (GEP) and artificial neural networks (ANN). The addition of iron slag improved the density and compressive strength of bricks, thus increasing shielding capability against gamma radiation. In contrast, fly ash and wood ash decreased the density and compressive strength of burnt clay bricks, leading to low radiation shielding capability. Concerning the performance of the Artificial Intelligence models, the root mean square error (RMSE) was determined as ...
Concrete is an economical and efficient material for attenuating radiation. The potential of conc... more Concrete is an economical and efficient material for attenuating radiation. The potential of concrete in attenuating radiation is attributed to its density, which in turn depends on the mix design of concrete. This paper presents the findings of a study conducted to evaluate the radiation attenuation with varying water-cement ratio (w/c), thickness, density, and compressive strength of concrete. Three different types of concrete, i.e., normal concrete, barite, and magnetite containing concrete, were prepared to investigate this study. The radiation attenuation was calculated by studying the dose absorbed by the concrete and the linear attenuation coefficient. Additionally, artificial neural network (ANN) and gene expression programming (GEP) models were developed for predicting the radiation shielding capacity of concrete. A correlation coefficient (R), mean absolute error (MAE), and root mean square error (RMSE) were calculated as 0.999, 1.474 mGy, 2.154 mGy and 0.994, 5.07 mGy, 5....
Steel fibers are widely extracted from scrap tyres, causing environmental concerns. This paper pr... more Steel fibers are widely extracted from scrap tyres, causing environmental concerns. This paper presents the use of steel fibers in variable proportions extracted from scrap tyres. The enhancement of the confinement was envisaged through the addition of steel fibers obtained from scrap tyres. The study included an experimental program for the development of constitutive material models for ordinary Portland cement (OPC) concrete and concrete with added steel fibers. A mix design was carried out for OPC, targeting a compressive strength of 3000 psi. Steel fibers were added to OPC in ratios of 1.0% to 3.0%, with an increment of 0.5%. Concrete columns, with cross-sectional dimensions of 6 × 6 inches and a length of 30 inches, were cast with both OPC and fiber-reinforced concrete. The column confinement was evaluated with a different spacing of ties (3- and 4-inch center-to-center). Compression tests on the concrete columns indicate that the addition of steel fibers to a concrete matrix ...
2022 IEEE 16th International Conference on Semantic Computing (ICSC), 2022
Significant barriers exist in achieving fast and accurate access to online biomedical content bec... more Significant barriers exist in achieving fast and accurate access to online biomedical content because of the proliferation of unstructured biomedical information. Accompanying semantic annotations with growing biomedical content is critical to enhancing search engines' context-aware indexing, improving search speeds and retrieval accuracy. We have developed “Semantically”: a biomedical structured content authoring and publishing framework to enhance biomedical content FAIR-ness (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability). Finding the appropriate semantic vocabulary to annotate biomed-ical content is time-consuming and technically challenging. “Semantically” automates and streamlines this process for users by recommending highly accurate annotations from an array of biomedical ontologies. Similarly, preserving content-level se-mantics at the content publishing stage to foster semantic search remains a critical research challenge. “Semantically” addresses this obstacle by extending schema.org, a community-agreed and research engine endorsed guideline for publishing structured content on the web. In future works, we aim to improve the biomedical content annotation process through a socio-technical approach by enabling a collaborative annotation scheme. The demo of the system is accessible at: https://gosemantically.com/
Proceedings of the 17th Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services, 2019
Wellness platform plays a vital role to prevent chronic disease. In this paper, we have introduce... more Wellness platform plays a vital role to prevent chronic disease. In this paper, we have introduced wellness smartphone application within the ambit of the Mining Mind project, which aims to support the people to adopt healthy behavior and lifestyle. When an unhealthy behavior is detected, personalized physical recommendations are generated automatically by the Mining Mind wellness platform. Recommendations are delivered through Push notification and display on the application main screen for the user. The application has feedback functionalities on the effectiveness of recommendation and education. The application also supports descriptive analytics of wellness goals achieved on a monthly, weekly and daily basis.
Objective: To discuss the presentation stages of Cholesteatoma in patients of various areas of Ko... more Objective: To discuss the presentation stages of Cholesteatoma in patients of various areas of Kohat division. Study Design: Case series study. Place and Duration of Study: Combined Military Hospital Kohat, from Nov 2015 to Nov 2017. Methodology: A total of 60 patients having Chronic Suppurative otitis media with Cholesteatoma were selected from outpatient department. Disease process was evaluated by otomicroscopy as well as radiologically. Perioperative disease spread pattern was also assessed and documented. Results: Out of 28 patients with pars tensa cholesteatoma 28.5% were in stage II and 53.5% were in stage III disease. Out of 32 patients with pars flaccid cholesteatoma, 3.1% presented with stage 1 disease, 37.5% with stage II disease, 50% with stage III disease and 9.3% with stage IV disease. Conclusion: Appropriate measures should be taken for training of general physicians as well as otologists at National level to help early diagnosis and better outcome.
Objective: To find out the association of multiple diseases of external ear with the use of vario... more Objective: To find out the association of multiple diseases of external ear with the use of various objects and cotton buds. Study Design: Case control study. Place and Duration of Study: Ear Nose Throat Department, Pakistan Naval Ship Shifa Karachi, from Jan to Oct 2020. Methodology: All the patients having multiple diseases of external ear were included as cases. Controls were selected from the healthy volunteers from general populations. Results: Total number of subjects in this study was 140 with the mean age 25.11 ± 11.21 years (2-55 years of age range). Out of them, 82 were male and 58 were female. Odds ratio was 16.07. Conclusion: There is a solid relationship of illnesses of external ear with the utilization of cotton buds. This detrimental practice should be incapacitated by featuring the notice by brands owners of cotton bud and safety instructions at different instructive levels.
Objective: To compared efficacy of alpha lipoic acid (antioxidant medication) and aloe vera gel t... more Objective: To compared efficacy of alpha lipoic acid (antioxidant medication) and aloe vera gel together versus intralesional steroids (hydrocortisone) in management of oral submucous fibrosis by evaluating post treatment clinical features of mouth opening and burning sensation. Study Design: A prospective comparative study. Place and Duration of Study: Department of ENT, Combined Military Hospital, Malir Karachi, from Jul 2018 to Mar 2020. Methodology: Twenty-eight patients were involved in the research and were distributed into two groups, I and II. Alpha lipoid acid with aloe vera gel was given in group I and hydrocortisone was given in group II. Burning sensation and mouth opening were recorded both at start and at monthly interval later on for three consecutive months. The data collected were statistically analyzed by using SPSS-22. Results: A significant lessening in burning sensation (p<0.001) and improvement in mouth opening were noticed in both groups. However, compariso...
Objective: To compared efficacy of alpha lipoic acid (antioxidant medication) and aloe vera gel t... more Objective: To compared efficacy of alpha lipoic acid (antioxidant medication) and aloe vera gel together versus intralesional steroids (hydrocortisone) in management of oral submucous fibrosis by evaluating post treatment clinical features of mouth opening and burning sensation. Study Design: A prospective comparative study. Place and Duration of Study: Department of ENT, Combined Military Hospital, Malir Karachi, from Jul 2018 to Mar 2020. Methodology: Twenty-eight patients were involved in the research and were distributed into two groups, I and II. Alpha lipoid acid with aloe vera gel was given in group I and hydrocortisone was given in group II. Burning sensation and mouth opening were recorded both at start and at monthly interval later on for three consecutive months. The data collected were statistically analyzed by using SPSS-22. Results: A significant lessening in burning sensation (p<0.001) and improvement in mouth opening were noticed in both groups. However, compariso...
To support evidence-based precision medicine and clinical decision-making, we need to identify ac... more To support evidence-based precision medicine and clinical decision-making, we need to identify accurate, appropriate, and clinically relevant studies from voluminous biomedical literature. To address the issue of accurate identification of high impact relevant articles, we propose a novel approach of attention-based deep learning for finding and ranking relevant studies against a topic of interest. For learning the proposed model, we collect data consisting of 240,324 clinical articles from the 2018 Precision Medicine track in Text REtrieval Conference (TREC) to identify and rank relevant documents matched with the user query. We built a BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) based classification model to classify high and low impact articles. We contextualized word embedding to create vectors of the documents, and user queries combined with genetic information to find contextual similarity for determining the relevancy score to rank the articles. We compare ...
In this study, Multiwalled Carbon Nanotubes (MWCNTs) and Marble Powder (MP) have been utilized in... more In this study, Multiwalled Carbon Nanotubes (MWCNTs) and Marble Powder (MP) have been utilized in reinforced concrete columns to assess their structural behavior. The nanotubes from 0.025% to 0.20% and 5% MP by weight of cement were used. The compressive strength of reinforced concrete columns and cubes was analyzed as the main property. The incorporation of MWCNTs and marble powder was able to increase the compressive strength of columns by 72.69% and mortar by 42.45% as compared to reference concrete. The ductility was noted to be improved by 42.04%. The load-deformation and stress-strain behaviors were also analyzed. The Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) analysis revealed the formation of a strong compact bridge (90–100 layers), Calcium Silicate Hydrate (C-S-H) gel, evenly dispersion, and bridging effect caused by MWCNTs. The incorporation of 0.20% MWCNTs by weight of cement was recommended to be effectively used as a reinforcing agent in concrete.
Medical concept and entity extraction from the medical narrative unstructured documents is the cr... more Medical concept and entity extraction from the medical narrative unstructured documents is the crucial step in most of the contemporary health systems. For the extraction of medical concepts and entities, the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) Metathesaurus is a big source of biomedical and health-related concepts. Recently various tools like Sophia, MetaMap and cTAKES, and many other rules-based methods and algorithm like Quick UMLS etc. have been developed which are performing a successful role in the process of medical concept extraction. The goal of this paper is to design a generic algorithm to identify a package consisting of standard concepts, their semantic types, and entity types on the basis of medical phrases and terms used in the clinical unstructured documents. The proposed algorithm implements the UMLS terminology service (UTS) and customizes to extract concepts for all the meaningful phrases and terms used in the narratives and determine their semantic and entity ...
Journal of Ayub Medical College, Abbottabad : JAMC, 2020
BACKGROUND Commonest surgical emergency presenting to emergency departments with abdominal pain i... more BACKGROUND Commonest surgical emergency presenting to emergency departments with abdominal pain is acute appendicitis. Thus, to enable quick and accurate diagnosis of the condition various scoring systems have been developed. Among these, Alvarado and its modified version (Modified Alvarado) are the commonest. Whereas Raja Isteri Pengiran Anak Saleha Appendicitis (RIPASA) score showed promising results in Asian population. Similarly, Lintula score, which was initially developed for paediatric population, has now been validated for elderly too. This study is aimed to compare these in our regional population. METHODS Project included consecutive 125 clinically suspected acute appendicitis patients. All were scored using Modified Alvarado, RIPASA and Lintula systems. Final diagnosis was based on histopathologic evaluation of excised specimen. Sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value (PPV), negative predictive value (NPV) and diagnostic accuracy were computed for all these sy...
2021 15th International Conference on Ubiquitous Information Management and Communication (IMCOM), 2021
Recent evidence shows that occurrence of Non-Communicable Diseases (NCDs) are the leading cause o... more Recent evidence shows that occurrence of Non-Communicable Diseases (NCDs) are the leading cause of death in low and middle-income countries. The fitness applications are not capable enough to help persons with NCDs to change their lifestyle behavior for improving life quality. Currently, the major focus of the existing healthcare applications is towards general public fitness. However, existing solutions lacks in monitoring and adaptation of healthy behaviors. The rehabilitation of person with NCDs is very demanding and challenging to avoid and reduce the advert impacts. In this paper, we argue that the context based behavior adaption observing multiple factors provides an appropriate solution. We have developed a methodology of context-based Just-in-Time actionable interventions for adopting healthy behavior. The risk factors defining the target context are obtained from literature and evaluated by 7 experts with inter-rater agreement kappa value of 0.5 based on 3 categories. The result shows the effectiveness of our proposed approach and depicts the usefulness of context-based intervention in terms of higher receptivity and user satisfaction level. The implicit feedback from 142 persons with different NCDs highlighted the effectiveness of methodology with 82.37% of responded intervention. Whereas, the explicit UEQ benchmark result indicated that the application got excellent responses in the categories of attractiveness, motivation, and novelty.
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Papers by asim Abbas