Probiotic microorganisms have attracted a growing interest for prevention and therapy of gastrointestinal disorders. Many probiotic strains have been shown to inhibit growth and metabolic activity of enteropathogenic bacteria as well as their adhesion and invasion to intestinal cells. In the present study, we evaluated the interference of bacteria-free supernatants (BFS) of cultures belonging t...

The physicochemical structure of the mixing water used in concrete has a significant effect on physical and mechanical properties cementitious composites. studies magnetized (MW) FA/BFS-based composites are still their infancy. This study explores MW fresh hardened fly ash (FA)/blast furnace slag (BFS)-based A total 22 different mixture groups having FA/BFS (0, 5, 10, 15, 20, 25%) by weight cem...

In this study, novel and cost-effective alkali-activated materials (AAMs) for catalytic applications were developed by using an industrial side stream, i.e., blast furnace slag (BFS). AAMs can be prepared from aluminosilicate precursors under mild conditions (room temperature non-hazardous chemicals). synthesized mixing BFS a 50 wt % sodium hydroxide (NaOH) solution at different BFS/NaOH ratios...

PURPOSE The aim of this study was to determine the agreement between Pentacam HR (Scheimpflug imaging, Oculus) and Orbscan II (scanning slit topography, Bausch and Lomb) in measuring corneal parameters after photorefractive keratectomy (PRK) for hyperopia. METHODS In this prospective cross-sectional study, 38 hyperopic eyes undergoing PRK were examined before refractive surgery and 8 to 10 mo...

As a problem-solving method, neural networks have shown broad success for medical applications, speech recognition, and natural language processing. Current hardware implementations of neural networks exhibit high energy consumption due to the intensive computing workloads. This paper proposes a methodology to design an energy-efficient neural network that effectively exploits computation reuse...

Boolean functions (BFs) are central in many fields of engineering and mathematics, such as cryptography, circuit design, and combinatorics. Moreover, they provide a simple framework for studying neural computation mechanisms of the brain. Many representation schemes for BFs exist to satisfy the needs of the domain they are used in. In neural computation, it is of interest to know how many input...

A fault-tolerant structure for a network is required to continue functioning following the failure of some of the network’s edges or vertices. This paper considers breadth-first search (BFS) spanning trees, and addresses the problem of designing a sparse fault-tolerant BFS tree, or FT-BFS tree for short, namely, a sparse subgraph T of the given network G such that subsequent to the failure of a...

PURPOSE The aim of this study was to evaluate the biaxial flexural strength (BFS) of one zirconia-based ceramic used with various veneering ceramics. MATERIALS AND METHODS Zirconia core material (Katana) and five veneering ceramics (Cerabien ZR; CZR, Lava Ceram; LV, Cercon Ceram Kiss; CC, IPS e.max Ceram; EM and VITA VM9; VT) were selected. Using the powder/liquid layering technique, bilayere...

INTRODUCTION Prostate cancer is now the third most frequent noncutaneous malignancy in Iranian men and the fifth most common cancer worldwide. Measurement of total serum prostate specific antigens (PSAs) has been one of the strongest predictors of biochemical progression and overall survival in determining the efficacy of definitive external beam radiation therapy in patients with localized pro...