Let-7a, miR-34a, and miR-199 a/b have gained a great attention as master regulators for cellular processes. In particular, these three micro-RNAs act as potential onco-suppressors for hepatocellular carcinoma. Bioinformatics can reveal the functionality of these micro-RNAs through target prediction and functional annotation analysis. In the current study, in silico analysis using innovative servers (miRror Suite, DAVID, miRGator V3.0, GeneTrail) has demonstrated the combinatorial and the individual target genes of these micro-RNAs and further explored their roles in hepatocellular carcinoma

Ultrasound hyperthermia has become one of the new therapeutic modalities for breast cancer treatment, since ultrasound appears to selectively affect malignant cells without causing any deleterious effects to the surrounding normal tissues. The main objective of this study is to numerically simulate the interaction of therapeutic ultrasound with a multi- tissue type system, and to develop an analytical model for calculating the temperature rise in these tissues due to ultrasound. First, the Finite-Element Method has been used to compute the radiated power density produced by a circular

Suffix array is one of the most important data structures in bioinformatics. Much effort has been devoted to find efficient sequential algorithms for its construction, but little is done to introduce parallel construction algorithms. The bucket pointer refinement algorithm is one of the efficient suffix sorting algorithms that is tuned for genomic datasets. In this paper, we introduce a parallel version of this algorithm running on (shared memory) multicore computers. We present experimental results comparing our algorithms to other parallel algorithms running on similar architecture. Our

Egyptians are at a crossroad between Africa and Eurasia, providing useful genomic resources for analyzing both genetic and environmental factors for future personalized medicine. Two personal Egyptian whole genomes have been published previously by us and here nine female whole genome sequences with clinical information have been added to expand the genomic resource of Egyptian personal genomes. Here we report the analysis of whole genomes of nine Egyptian females from different regions using Illumina short-read sequencers. At 30x sequencing coverage, we identified 12 SNPs that were shared in

Fundus fluorescein angiography (FFA) is a standard screening and diagnosis technique for several retinal diseases. The analysis of FFA images is performed qualitatively by skilled observers, and thus is vulnerable to inter- and intra-observer variability. In this study, the authors present a method for computer-aided analysis of FFA images. The method is based on generating quantitative colour fluorescein leakage maps (FLM) that mimic the thickness maps generated by the optical coherence tomography (OCT). Results from 64 patients show strong correlation between the FLM and OCT thickness maps

The recent outbreak of COVID-19 has taken the world by surprise, forcing lockdowns and straining public health care systems. COVID-19 is known to be a highly infectious virus, and infected individuals do not initially exhibit symptoms, while some remain asymptomatic. Thus, a non-negligible fraction of the population can, at any given time, be a hidden source of transmissions. In response, many governments have shown great interest in smartphone contact tracing apps that help automate the difficult task of tracing all recent contacts of newly identified infected individuals. However, tracing

Traditionally, tamper-proof steganography involves using efficient protocols to encrypt the stego cover image and/or hidden message prior to embedding it into the carrier object. However, as the inevitable transition to the quantum computing paradigm beckons, its immense computing power will be exploited to violate even the best non-quantum, i.e., classical, stego protocol. On its part, quantum walks can be tailored to utilise their astounding ‘quantumness’ to propagate nonlinear chaotic behaviours as well as its sufficient sensitivity to alterations in primary key parameters both important

Imaging of the heart anatomy and function using Strain Encoded (SENC) magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a powerful tool for diagnosing a number of heart diseases. Despite excellent sensitivity to tissue deformation, the technique inherently suffers from elevated noise level which hinders proper automatic segmentation using conventional techniques. In this work, we propose a method to accurately segment the left ventricle myocardium from strain encoded-MR short axis images. The method is based on a modified formulation of the graph cuts algorithm. A novel cost function based on a

Based registration of retinal images proved to be very successful especially for minimally overlapping images. The most commonly used transformation method uses a quadratic model to represent the geometry of the retinal surface. Although this model has been used for more than one decade, there is no literature that studies the model errors for abnormal eye geometries. In this work, we present a study of the registration errors of the quadratic model in case of diseased eyes. The study includes two basic models of the retinal surface for eyes suffering from: myopia; and retinal diseases (e.g

Liver disease causes millions of deaths per year worldwide, and approximately half of these cases are due to cirrhosis, which is an advanced stage of liver fibrosis that can be accompanied by liver failure and portal hypertension. Early detection of liver fibrosis helps in improving its treatment and prevents its progression to cirrhosis. In this work, we present a novel noninvasive method to detect liver fibrosis from tagged MRI images using a machine learning-based approach. Specifically, coronal and sagittal tagged MRI imaging are analyzed separately to capture cardiac-induced deformation