Blast has been the leading cause of injury, particularly traumatic brain injury and visual system injury, in combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. We determined the effect of shock tube-generated primary blast on retinal electrophysiology and on retinal and brain optic tract histopathology in a rat model. The amplitude of a- and b-waves on the electroretinogram (ERG) for both right and lef...

Blast injuries are an increasing problem in both military and civilian practice. Primary blast injury to the lungs (blast lung) is found in a clinically significant proportion of casualties from explosions even in an open environment, and in a high proportion of severely injured casualties following explosions in confined spaces. Blast casualties also commonly suffer secondary and tertiary blas...

Blast exposure is an increasingly significant health hazard and can have a range of debilitating effects, including auditory dysfunction and traumatic brain injury. To assist in the development of effective treatments, a greater understanding of the mechanisms of blast-induced auditory damage and dysfunction, especially in the central nervous system, is critical. To elucidate this area, we subj...

PURPOSE To evaluate retina and optic nerve damage following experimental blast injury. METHODS Healthy adult mice were exposed to an overpressure blast wave using a custom-built blast chamber. The effects of blast exposure on retina and optic nerve function and structure were evaluated using the pattern electroretinogram (pERG), spectral domain optical coherence tomography (OCT), and the chro...

Explosions occur in military conflicts as well as in various industrial applications. Air blast waves generated by large explosions move outward with high velocity, pressure and temperature. The blast waves not only incapacitate military and civilian personnel, but also damages buildings, vehicles, and other properties. Hence, there has been extensive research on how to mitigate blast wave effe...

A detection scheme for uplink massive MIMO, dubbed massive-BLAST or M-BLAST, is proposed. The derived algorithm is an enhancement of the well-known soft parallel interference cancellation. Using computer simulations in massive MIMO application scenarios, M-BLAST is shown to yield a substantially better error performance with reduced complexity, compared to the benchmark alternative of a one-sho...

We developed a fast method to construct local sub-databases from the NCBI-nr database for the quick similarity search and annotation of huge metagenomic datasets based on BLAST-MEGAN approach. A three-step sub-database annotation pipeline (SAP) was further proposed to conduct the annotation in a much more time-efficient way which required far less computational capacity than the direct NCBI-nr ...

The amount of biosequence data being produced each year is growing exponentially. Extracting useful information from this massive amount of data is becoming an increasingly difficult task. This thesis focuses on accelerating the most widely-used software tool for analyzing genomic data, BLAST. This thesis presents Mercury BLAST, a novel method for accelerating searches through massive DNA datab...

A number of technologies have emerged for accelerating similarity search algorithms in bioinformatics, including the use of field programmable gate arrays (FPGA), graphics processing units (GPU), and clusters of standard multicore CPUs. Here we present Tera-BLASTTM, an FPGA-accelerated implementation of the BLAST algorithm, and compare the performance to GPU-accelerated BLAST and the industry s...

M. Szega, W. Stanek Silesian University of Technology, Gliwice, Poland L. Blacha Silesian University of Technology, Katowice, Poland The reduction of energy consumption in the blast furnace is still the subject of investigations using mathematical modelling of a blast furnace plant. Theoretical-empirical hybrid models of a blast furnace and its equipment have been presented. This model is built...