wireless sensor networks are the new generation of networks that typically are formed great numbers of nodes and the communications of these nodes are done as wireless. the main goal of these networks is collecting data from neighboring environment of network sensors. since the sensor nodes are battery operated and there is no possibility of charging or replacing the batteries, the lifetime of ...

A Two-phase model for configuring a cellular manufacturing system is proposed. In phase (I), for the first time, number of cells is considered as a decision variable. In phase (II), pursing two different objectives, one minimization of underload and the other, maximization of similarity of parts within a group, the design procedure is performed. As one cannot have these two objects together, a ...

In this study an efficient meta-heuristic is proposed for layout optimization of truss structures by combining cellular automata (CA) and firefly algorithm (FA). In the proposed meta-heuristic, called here as cellular automata firefly algorithm (CAFA), a new equation is presented for position updating of fireflies based on the concept of CA. Two benchmark examples of truss structures are presen...

Features of the retinal vasculature, such as vessel widths, are considered biomarkers for systemic disease. The aim of this work is to present a supervised approach to vessel segmentation in ultra-wide field of view scanning laser ophthalmoscope (UWFoV SLO) images and to evaluate its performance in terms of segmentation and vessel width estimation accuracy. The results of the proposed method ar...

The C. elegans AWC olfactory neuron pair communicates to specify asymmetric subtypes AWCOFF and AWCON in a stochastic manner. Intercellular communication between AWC and other neurons in a transient NSY-5 gap junction network antagonizes voltage-activated calcium channels, UNC-2 (CaV2) and EGL-19 (CaV1), in the AWCON cell, but how calcium signaling is downregulated by NSY-5 is only partly under...

The calcium-gated potassium channel SLO-1 in Caenorhabditis elegans was recently identified as key component for action of emodepside, a new anthelmintic drug with broad spectrum activity. In this study we identified orthologues of slo-1 in Ancylostoma caninum, Cooperia oncophora, and Haemonchus contortus, all important parasitic nematodes in veterinary medicine. Furthermore, functional analyse...

Many of the virulence factors that have been characterized for group A streptococci (GAS) are not expressed in all clinical isolates. One putative virulence factor that is present among most is streptolysin O (Slo), a protein with well-characterized cytolytic activity for many eukaryotic cells types. In other bacterial pathogens, proteins homologous to Slo have been shown to be essential for vi...

Virtual navigation in remote environments can be achieved by building an image-based model made of multiple panoramas gathered from cameras moving around the scene. In such models, it could be useful to acquire knowledge of the 3D structure of the scene. In this paper, we propose a method that constructs a sparse but rich 3D representation of a scene, given a set of calibrated panoramic images....

in this paper the conditional location problem is discussed. conditional location problems have a wide range of applications in location science. a new meta-heuristic algorithm for solving conditional p-median problems is proposed and results are compared to those of the previous studies. this algorithm produces much better results than the previous formulations.