Review of Applied Management and Social Sciences, 2020
This paper attempts to analyse the myths about the Durand Line Agreement between the British Indi... more This paper attempts to analyse the myths about the Durand Line Agreement between the British India and Afghanistan in 1893. Nineteenth century is considered as the century of imperialism. The two great powers i.e Great Britain and Russia were in competition to fulfill their imperialistic designs. Great Britain succeeded in taking full control of India and Russia annexed Khiva, Bokhara and Khokand currently Central Asian republics until 1870. Afghanistan was the only state left between the two giants. The British India tested its muscles in Afghanistan in 1839 and 1878 but failed to consolidate. The fear of Russian advancement during the Great Game compelled the British India to declare Afghanistan a buffer state and demarcate its boundaries. They started working on it immediately after the second Anglo-Afghan war in 1885. Resultantly the western boundaries of India were secured through the famous Durand Line Agreement in 1893 between Afghanistan and British India. After the independ...
IEEE INFOCOM 2020 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications, 2020
Recent studies have suggested that the BitTorrent’s rarest-first protocol, owing to its work-cons... more Recent studies have suggested that the BitTorrent’s rarest-first protocol, owing to its work-conserving nature, can become unstable in the presence of non-persistent users. Consequently, in any stable protocol, many peers are at some point endogenously forced to hold off their file-download activity. In this work, we propose a tunable piece-selection policy that minimizes this (undesirable) requisite by combining the (work-conserving) rarest-first protocol with only an appropriate share of the (non-work conserving) mode-suppression protocol. We refer to this policy as "Rarest-First with Probabilistic Mode-Suppression" or simply RFwPMS.We study RFwPMS under a stochastic model of the BitTorrent network that is general enough to capture multiple swarms of non-persistent users - each swarm having its own altruistic preferences that may or may not overlap with those of other swarms. Using a Lyapunov drift analysis, we show that RFwPMS is provably stable for all kinds of inter-swarm behaviors, and that the use of rarest-first instead of random-selection is indeed more justified. Our numerical results suggest that RFwPMS is scalable in the general multi-swarm setting and offers better performance than the existing stabilizing schemes like mode-suppression.
Biophotonics Congress: Optics in the Life Sciences Congress 2019 (BODA,BRAIN,NTM,OMA,OMP), 2019
Combined with chemometrics algorithms, Raman spectroscopy was used to identify clinical samples l... more Combined with chemometrics algorithms, Raman spectroscopy was used to identify clinical samples like bacteria and tumor. Based on proposed methods, the correct classification rate reached a high value, which improved the diagnostic accuracy.
INTRODUCTION: Blood loss after transurethral resection of the prostate (TUR -P) is supposed to be... more INTRODUCTION: Blood loss after transurethral resection of the prostate (TUR -P) is supposed to be related with rise in urinary fibrinolytic activity. Tranexamic acid (TXA) is urokinase activators as well as a potent inhibitor of plasminogen and due to its low molecular weight, the substance excreted unchanged from kidneys into the urinary tract. It can be administered in to the bodyvia oral route, intravenously and topical application through irrigation fluid. We studied the effect of TXA on the amount of blood loss during and after transurethral resection of the prostate (TURP). OBJECTIVE: To determine the Role of Intravenous Tranexamic acid in decreasing blood loss during transurethral resection of the prostate (TUR -P) METHODOLOGY: This was randomized controlled trial conducted on 70 patients with serial numbers ending in even numbers were allocated to the treatment group; and those ending in odd numbers were used as controls and received no treatment. The treatment group receive...
Alzheimer’s disease the most common form of dementia in the elderly is a neurodegenerative diseas... more Alzheimer’s disease the most common form of dementia in the elderly is a neurodegenerative disease that affects 44 million of people worldwide. The first treatments against Alzheimer’s disease are acetylcholinesterase inhibitors; however, these medications are associated with many side effects. Withania somnifera is a traditional herb widely used to treat and prevent Alzheimer’s disease and for memory improvement. Withaferin-A was isolated and loaded with PLGA nanoparticles using solvent evaporation method. The nanoparticles were characterized for particle size, zeta potential, surface morphology, loading efficiency, and in vitro drug release studies. The average size of developed formulation was found to be 121 ± 2 nm, and zeta potential was found to be − 25 mV. Drug loading efficiency of formulation was found to have 54% at 500 μg/ml concentration of Withaferin-A. Particles were spherical in shape. A steady release of Withaferin-A was observed from the nanoparticle. Withaferin-A could be a good alternative choice for neurodegenerative diseases.
В среде глобальной конкуренции, доминировать на мировом экономическом пространстве могут только с... more В среде глобальной конкуренции, доминировать на мировом экономическом пространстве могут только страны, обладающие мощным научно-производственным потенциалом, емким рынком и внутренними Источниками развития. Для относительно небольших государств, возможность к обретению этих преимуществ, лежит через интеграцию – процесс соединения экономических потенциалов государств с целью обеспечения эффекта развития для национальных экономик [2, c. 211].
Journal of Ayub Medical College, Abbottabad : JAMC, 2019
BACKGROUND Radical nephrectomy (RN) is a standard treatment of cure for non-metastatic renal cell... more BACKGROUND Radical nephrectomy (RN) is a standard treatment of cure for non-metastatic renal cell carcinoma (NMRCC). Long-term outcome data are limited for Pakistani population. Our aim was to assess the long-term outcomes of RCC treated with curative intent with radical nephrectomy (RN) and to study the 5 & 10years survival outcomes in patients with NMRCC who underwent radical nephrectomy. METHODS This is a retrospective review and analysis of the data between December 2006 and February 2017. We included all the adult patients (age ≥18 years) with NMRCC from both genders irrespective of their histologic subtypes who underwent radical nephrectomy (RN) with a curative intent. The data was analysed for overall survival and recurrence rates at 5- and 10-years using Kaplan-Meier survival analysis. Multivariate analysis was performed using Cox-regression to identify risk factors associated with poor overall outcome in terms of recurrence and mortality. RESULTS Three hundred and forty-fou...
To connect the semantic space between various related ontologies, computer scientists and special... more To connect the semantic space between various related ontologies, computer scientists and specialists in the field of Semantic Web have suggested and executed different ontology matching systems. In any case, these strategies have a great space for improvement and continuous research should be done to get better results in terms of precision, recall and F-measure for the purpose of aligning ontologies. This work analysed various string similarity metrics for the task of ontology alignment whose definitions are taken from two libraries that are Alignment API and secondstring library. These metrics are used to align different ontologies provided with Alignment API package and then evaluated the performance of these metrics with regard to precision, recall and F-measure. Further, different ontology alignment systems are studied which used string similarity metrics in combination of structural similarity metrics and linguistic similarity metrics. The role of string similarity metrics is...
Modern world is being revolutionized with more and more powerful electronic components and equipm... more Modern world is being revolutionized with more and more powerful electronic components and equipment the process of making everything smarter is under way. With the increasing higher performance in more compact electronic equipment, the problem of heat dissipation in those equipment is of great interest since the effectiveness of electronics depends on the dissipation of the excess amount of heat generated in the electronics. This excess amount of heat changes the physical and chemical properties of the materials used in electronics components, which affect the performance and the required functioning of the components. Heat sink has been found to be an effective solution to dissipate the excess heat produced in electronic components. Heat Sink is defined as a thermal conductor that is used in electronics components to carry the excess heat away from the component into the environment through fins, having large surface area to increase heat transfer. Heat sinks are often designed to...
International Journal of Recent Technology and Engineering, 2021
SMA has drawn massive interest and hobby in today’s years in a great form of an extensive sort of... more SMA has drawn massive interest and hobby in today’s years in a great form of an extensive sort of commercial applications, due to their precise and superior properties, this concern improvement has been bearing with the useful resource of way of improvement and carried out research studies. SMA can heal its original shape at a certain temperature even under maximum loads applied and huge inelastic deformation. In this overview, we describe the primary functions of SMAs, their constitutive models, and their features. We also explained various properties that help to build a device/system. These devices help in cueing health issues such as heart treatment emptying urine so on. SMA has important in reducing the vibration of structures by increasing damping of the materials and this has effective in energy dissipating comparing with other materials. In the aerospace industry wing aircraft, rotorcraft, spacecraft, and micro-electromechanical systems are made up of SMA. In the automobile ...
Handbook of Research on Intrusion Detection Systems, 2020
Continuous authentication systems are considered as a promising solution to secure access to mobi... more Continuous authentication systems are considered as a promising solution to secure access to mobile devices. Their main benefit is the improvement of the users' experience when they use the services or applications of their mobile device. Specifically, continuous authentication avoids having to remember or possess any key to access an application or service that requires authentication. In this sense, having the user authenticated permanently increases the security of the device. It also allows the user interaction with applications to be much more fluid, simple, and satisfactory. This chapter proposes a new continuous authentication system for mobile devices. The system acquires data from the device sensors and the GPS location to create a dataset that represents the user's profile or normal behaviour. Then, the proposed system uses Machine Learning algorithms based on anomaly detection to perform user identification in real time. Several experiments have been carried out t...
Spur gears are used to transmit power and motion from one shaft to another shaft when the shafts ... more Spur gears are used to transmit power and motion from one shaft to another shaft when the shafts are parallel. While running, gear drives are subjected to variable speed and load. Imperfection in the gears leads to an increase in the sound level and vibration level. The imperfections which cause the vibration are eccentricity, pitting, broken gear tooth, and crack. The best design practice of spur gear leads to a decrease in the vibration level in the gear drive. In the present work 20MnCr5 alloy steel is considered as gear and pinion material. Two different gears are modelled using Solid Works one is healthy gear and another is single tooth broken gear then it is analysed for modal response and harmonic response at three different torque values. The results show that natural frequency is higher at 6th mode and the corresponding mode shape is torsion and bending. Deformation and stress amplitude at Y-axis is more with a high amplitude of vibration. Also, total deformation is supreme in single tooth broken gear at the torque of 58875 N-mm.
Abstract In this investigation we report comparative study on the quantum dot sensitized solar se... more Abstract In this investigation we report comparative study on the quantum dot sensitized solar sells (QDSSCs) using polysulfide and iodide/triiodide as redox liquid electrolytes aimed for the improvement in performance of CdS sensitized solar cell. The CdS films were deposited upon bare FTO and nanocrystalline mesoporous TiO2 coated FTO substrates by following a successive ionic layer adsorption and reaction (SILAR) method. The films were characterized by using atomic force microscopy (AFM) measurements and UV–Visible (UV–vis) spectroscopy. Analysing the AFM images height of the nanocrystals was found to be less than 2.84 nm. The estimated size of the CdS quantum dots (QDs) obtained using the UV–vis data and hyperbolic band model (HBM) was 4.94 nm. Photovoltaic performance and impedance spectroscopic measurements were performed on these FTO/TiO2/CdS/Electrolyte/Carbon type QDSSCs under an AM1.5 illumination (100 mW.cm−2) and dark, respectively. The overall power conversion efficiency, short circuit current and the fill factor of polysulfide based device were observed higher than the iodide/triiodide based cell by 280%, 123%, and 95%, respectively. Improvement in series resistance (Rs) and shunt resistance (Rsh) values of polysulfide based device were observed by 830%, and 348%, respectively. The results achieved using low cost ploysulfide electrolyte and carbon as counter electrode are observed higher than the results of the recent attempts made by other research groups for enhancing performance of the CdS QDSSCs using platinum as counter electrode. The better performance of FTO/TiO2/CdS/Polysulfide/Carbon type QDSSC could be attributed to the higher hole-recovery rate of polysulfide leading to a lower probability for charge recombination and the higher electrocatalytic activity at the CE/electrolyte interface resulting the fast electron injection and transfer from CdS QDs into the photoanode substrate.
Graphene quantum dots (GQDs) were prepared using a single-step hydrothermal treatment of glucose ... more Graphene quantum dots (GQDs) were prepared using a single-step hydrothermal treatment of glucose (C6H12O6) powder. X-ray diffraction patterns confirmed the random stacking or amorphous character of GQDs. Additionally, the UV-vis spectra confirmed the formation of GQDs with evident absorption peaks at 237 and 305 nm, which is attributed to π- π* and n- π* transitions correspondingly. The average size and surface roughness of graphene quantum dots were estimated by atomic force microscopy images and found to be 27.0 ± 1.0 and 2.3 nm, respectively. Afterwards, the effect of increasing relative humidity (RH) from 0%–95%, and frequency, was analyzed using the capacitive and resistive responses of synthesized GQDs. The capacitive output at 0.1 kHz revealed that initially capacitance remains constant (15.0 ± 1.0 pF) up to a humidity level ranging between 0%–50%. Likewise, capacitance also displayed stabilized behavior after frequency levels were increased i.e., 1.0 and 10 kHz, at a humidit...
Candida albicans is a pervasive commensal fungus that is the most common pathogen responsible for... more Candida albicans is a pervasive commensal fungus that is the most common pathogen responsible for invasive fungal infection (IFI). With incidence of IFI on the rise due to increasing susceptible populations, it is imperative that we investigate how Candida albicans interacts with blood components. When stimulating either human or mouse whole blood with thrombin we saw a significant decrease in C. albicans survival. We then repeated Candida killing assays with thrombin-stimulated or unstimulated washed platelets and saw a similar decrease in CFU. To investigate whether killing was mediated through surface components or releasable products, platelets were pretreated with an inhibitor of actin polymerization (CytochalasinD, CytoD). CytoD was able to abrogate C. albicans killing. Moreover, dilution of releasates from thrombin-stimulated platelets showed that the toxicity of the releasates on C. albicans is concentration dependent. We then investigated C. albicans actions on platelet act...
Background: A high number of clinical T1 (cT1) stage renal cell carcinoma (RCC) is upstaged to pa... more Background: A high number of clinical T1 (cT1) stage renal cell carcinoma (RCC) is upstaged to pathological T3a (pT3a) stage on histopathological findings. Several study results show that there is no survival difference among those cT1 stage who are upstaged on histopathological findings to those who remain pT1 stage RCC.Objectives: The objectives of this study were to assess any survival difference for cT1 stage renal cell carcinoma (RCC) which is upstaged to pT3a stage as compared to those which remain pT1 stage RCC on histopathological findings.Materials and Methods: It was a retrospective cohort study looking at patient aged ≥18 years with cT1 RCC who underwent nephrectomy between January 2006 and December 2016. Patients were divided into two groups based on histopathological findings (pT1 vs. pT3a). Survival was analysed for the two groups using Kaplan–Meier method, and the difference in survival was calculated using log-rank model.Results: The study included 187 patients. The...
A 70-year-old gentleman underwent prostatectomy for bladder outlet obstruction due to enlarged pr... more A 70-year-old gentleman underwent prostatectomy for bladder outlet obstruction due to enlarged prostate and was found to have primary extragastrointestinal stromal tumour (EGIST). He has been started on imatinib therapy and is presently on follow-up. Prostatic EGIST should be one of the differential diagnoses in patients with enlarged prostate with normal prostate-specific antigen levels.Key words: Prostate, gastrointestinal stromal tumour, PSA
Review of Applied Management and Social Sciences, 2020
This paper attempts to analyse the myths about the Durand Line Agreement between the British Indi... more This paper attempts to analyse the myths about the Durand Line Agreement between the British India and Afghanistan in 1893. Nineteenth century is considered as the century of imperialism. The two great powers i.e Great Britain and Russia were in competition to fulfill their imperialistic designs. Great Britain succeeded in taking full control of India and Russia annexed Khiva, Bokhara and Khokand currently Central Asian republics until 1870. Afghanistan was the only state left between the two giants. The British India tested its muscles in Afghanistan in 1839 and 1878 but failed to consolidate. The fear of Russian advancement during the Great Game compelled the British India to declare Afghanistan a buffer state and demarcate its boundaries. They started working on it immediately after the second Anglo-Afghan war in 1885. Resultantly the western boundaries of India were secured through the famous Durand Line Agreement in 1893 between Afghanistan and British India. After the independ...
IEEE INFOCOM 2020 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications, 2020
Recent studies have suggested that the BitTorrent’s rarest-first protocol, owing to its work-cons... more Recent studies have suggested that the BitTorrent’s rarest-first protocol, owing to its work-conserving nature, can become unstable in the presence of non-persistent users. Consequently, in any stable protocol, many peers are at some point endogenously forced to hold off their file-download activity. In this work, we propose a tunable piece-selection policy that minimizes this (undesirable) requisite by combining the (work-conserving) rarest-first protocol with only an appropriate share of the (non-work conserving) mode-suppression protocol. We refer to this policy as "Rarest-First with Probabilistic Mode-Suppression" or simply RFwPMS.We study RFwPMS under a stochastic model of the BitTorrent network that is general enough to capture multiple swarms of non-persistent users - each swarm having its own altruistic preferences that may or may not overlap with those of other swarms. Using a Lyapunov drift analysis, we show that RFwPMS is provably stable for all kinds of inter-swarm behaviors, and that the use of rarest-first instead of random-selection is indeed more justified. Our numerical results suggest that RFwPMS is scalable in the general multi-swarm setting and offers better performance than the existing stabilizing schemes like mode-suppression.
Biophotonics Congress: Optics in the Life Sciences Congress 2019 (BODA,BRAIN,NTM,OMA,OMP), 2019
Combined with chemometrics algorithms, Raman spectroscopy was used to identify clinical samples l... more Combined with chemometrics algorithms, Raman spectroscopy was used to identify clinical samples like bacteria and tumor. Based on proposed methods, the correct classification rate reached a high value, which improved the diagnostic accuracy.
INTRODUCTION: Blood loss after transurethral resection of the prostate (TUR -P) is supposed to be... more INTRODUCTION: Blood loss after transurethral resection of the prostate (TUR -P) is supposed to be related with rise in urinary fibrinolytic activity. Tranexamic acid (TXA) is urokinase activators as well as a potent inhibitor of plasminogen and due to its low molecular weight, the substance excreted unchanged from kidneys into the urinary tract. It can be administered in to the bodyvia oral route, intravenously and topical application through irrigation fluid. We studied the effect of TXA on the amount of blood loss during and after transurethral resection of the prostate (TURP). OBJECTIVE: To determine the Role of Intravenous Tranexamic acid in decreasing blood loss during transurethral resection of the prostate (TUR -P) METHODOLOGY: This was randomized controlled trial conducted on 70 patients with serial numbers ending in even numbers were allocated to the treatment group; and those ending in odd numbers were used as controls and received no treatment. The treatment group receive...
Alzheimer’s disease the most common form of dementia in the elderly is a neurodegenerative diseas... more Alzheimer’s disease the most common form of dementia in the elderly is a neurodegenerative disease that affects 44 million of people worldwide. The first treatments against Alzheimer’s disease are acetylcholinesterase inhibitors; however, these medications are associated with many side effects. Withania somnifera is a traditional herb widely used to treat and prevent Alzheimer’s disease and for memory improvement. Withaferin-A was isolated and loaded with PLGA nanoparticles using solvent evaporation method. The nanoparticles were characterized for particle size, zeta potential, surface morphology, loading efficiency, and in vitro drug release studies. The average size of developed formulation was found to be 121 ± 2 nm, and zeta potential was found to be − 25 mV. Drug loading efficiency of formulation was found to have 54% at 500 μg/ml concentration of Withaferin-A. Particles were spherical in shape. A steady release of Withaferin-A was observed from the nanoparticle. Withaferin-A could be a good alternative choice for neurodegenerative diseases.
В среде глобальной конкуренции, доминировать на мировом экономическом пространстве могут только с... more В среде глобальной конкуренции, доминировать на мировом экономическом пространстве могут только страны, обладающие мощным научно-производственным потенциалом, емким рынком и внутренними Источниками развития. Для относительно небольших государств, возможность к обретению этих преимуществ, лежит через интеграцию – процесс соединения экономических потенциалов государств с целью обеспечения эффекта развития для национальных экономик [2, c. 211].
Journal of Ayub Medical College, Abbottabad : JAMC, 2019
BACKGROUND Radical nephrectomy (RN) is a standard treatment of cure for non-metastatic renal cell... more BACKGROUND Radical nephrectomy (RN) is a standard treatment of cure for non-metastatic renal cell carcinoma (NMRCC). Long-term outcome data are limited for Pakistani population. Our aim was to assess the long-term outcomes of RCC treated with curative intent with radical nephrectomy (RN) and to study the 5 & 10years survival outcomes in patients with NMRCC who underwent radical nephrectomy. METHODS This is a retrospective review and analysis of the data between December 2006 and February 2017. We included all the adult patients (age ≥18 years) with NMRCC from both genders irrespective of their histologic subtypes who underwent radical nephrectomy (RN) with a curative intent. The data was analysed for overall survival and recurrence rates at 5- and 10-years using Kaplan-Meier survival analysis. Multivariate analysis was performed using Cox-regression to identify risk factors associated with poor overall outcome in terms of recurrence and mortality. RESULTS Three hundred and forty-fou...
To connect the semantic space between various related ontologies, computer scientists and special... more To connect the semantic space between various related ontologies, computer scientists and specialists in the field of Semantic Web have suggested and executed different ontology matching systems. In any case, these strategies have a great space for improvement and continuous research should be done to get better results in terms of precision, recall and F-measure for the purpose of aligning ontologies. This work analysed various string similarity metrics for the task of ontology alignment whose definitions are taken from two libraries that are Alignment API and secondstring library. These metrics are used to align different ontologies provided with Alignment API package and then evaluated the performance of these metrics with regard to precision, recall and F-measure. Further, different ontology alignment systems are studied which used string similarity metrics in combination of structural similarity metrics and linguistic similarity metrics. The role of string similarity metrics is...
Modern world is being revolutionized with more and more powerful electronic components and equipm... more Modern world is being revolutionized with more and more powerful electronic components and equipment the process of making everything smarter is under way. With the increasing higher performance in more compact electronic equipment, the problem of heat dissipation in those equipment is of great interest since the effectiveness of electronics depends on the dissipation of the excess amount of heat generated in the electronics. This excess amount of heat changes the physical and chemical properties of the materials used in electronics components, which affect the performance and the required functioning of the components. Heat sink has been found to be an effective solution to dissipate the excess heat produced in electronic components. Heat Sink is defined as a thermal conductor that is used in electronics components to carry the excess heat away from the component into the environment through fins, having large surface area to increase heat transfer. Heat sinks are often designed to...
International Journal of Recent Technology and Engineering, 2021
SMA has drawn massive interest and hobby in today’s years in a great form of an extensive sort of... more SMA has drawn massive interest and hobby in today’s years in a great form of an extensive sort of commercial applications, due to their precise and superior properties, this concern improvement has been bearing with the useful resource of way of improvement and carried out research studies. SMA can heal its original shape at a certain temperature even under maximum loads applied and huge inelastic deformation. In this overview, we describe the primary functions of SMAs, their constitutive models, and their features. We also explained various properties that help to build a device/system. These devices help in cueing health issues such as heart treatment emptying urine so on. SMA has important in reducing the vibration of structures by increasing damping of the materials and this has effective in energy dissipating comparing with other materials. In the aerospace industry wing aircraft, rotorcraft, spacecraft, and micro-electromechanical systems are made up of SMA. In the automobile ...
Handbook of Research on Intrusion Detection Systems, 2020
Continuous authentication systems are considered as a promising solution to secure access to mobi... more Continuous authentication systems are considered as a promising solution to secure access to mobile devices. Their main benefit is the improvement of the users' experience when they use the services or applications of their mobile device. Specifically, continuous authentication avoids having to remember or possess any key to access an application or service that requires authentication. In this sense, having the user authenticated permanently increases the security of the device. It also allows the user interaction with applications to be much more fluid, simple, and satisfactory. This chapter proposes a new continuous authentication system for mobile devices. The system acquires data from the device sensors and the GPS location to create a dataset that represents the user's profile or normal behaviour. Then, the proposed system uses Machine Learning algorithms based on anomaly detection to perform user identification in real time. Several experiments have been carried out t...
Spur gears are used to transmit power and motion from one shaft to another shaft when the shafts ... more Spur gears are used to transmit power and motion from one shaft to another shaft when the shafts are parallel. While running, gear drives are subjected to variable speed and load. Imperfection in the gears leads to an increase in the sound level and vibration level. The imperfections which cause the vibration are eccentricity, pitting, broken gear tooth, and crack. The best design practice of spur gear leads to a decrease in the vibration level in the gear drive. In the present work 20MnCr5 alloy steel is considered as gear and pinion material. Two different gears are modelled using Solid Works one is healthy gear and another is single tooth broken gear then it is analysed for modal response and harmonic response at three different torque values. The results show that natural frequency is higher at 6th mode and the corresponding mode shape is torsion and bending. Deformation and stress amplitude at Y-axis is more with a high amplitude of vibration. Also, total deformation is supreme in single tooth broken gear at the torque of 58875 N-mm.
Abstract In this investigation we report comparative study on the quantum dot sensitized solar se... more Abstract In this investigation we report comparative study on the quantum dot sensitized solar sells (QDSSCs) using polysulfide and iodide/triiodide as redox liquid electrolytes aimed for the improvement in performance of CdS sensitized solar cell. The CdS films were deposited upon bare FTO and nanocrystalline mesoporous TiO2 coated FTO substrates by following a successive ionic layer adsorption and reaction (SILAR) method. The films were characterized by using atomic force microscopy (AFM) measurements and UV–Visible (UV–vis) spectroscopy. Analysing the AFM images height of the nanocrystals was found to be less than 2.84 nm. The estimated size of the CdS quantum dots (QDs) obtained using the UV–vis data and hyperbolic band model (HBM) was 4.94 nm. Photovoltaic performance and impedance spectroscopic measurements were performed on these FTO/TiO2/CdS/Electrolyte/Carbon type QDSSCs under an AM1.5 illumination (100 mW.cm−2) and dark, respectively. The overall power conversion efficiency, short circuit current and the fill factor of polysulfide based device were observed higher than the iodide/triiodide based cell by 280%, 123%, and 95%, respectively. Improvement in series resistance (Rs) and shunt resistance (Rsh) values of polysulfide based device were observed by 830%, and 348%, respectively. The results achieved using low cost ploysulfide electrolyte and carbon as counter electrode are observed higher than the results of the recent attempts made by other research groups for enhancing performance of the CdS QDSSCs using platinum as counter electrode. The better performance of FTO/TiO2/CdS/Polysulfide/Carbon type QDSSC could be attributed to the higher hole-recovery rate of polysulfide leading to a lower probability for charge recombination and the higher electrocatalytic activity at the CE/electrolyte interface resulting the fast electron injection and transfer from CdS QDs into the photoanode substrate.
Graphene quantum dots (GQDs) were prepared using a single-step hydrothermal treatment of glucose ... more Graphene quantum dots (GQDs) were prepared using a single-step hydrothermal treatment of glucose (C6H12O6) powder. X-ray diffraction patterns confirmed the random stacking or amorphous character of GQDs. Additionally, the UV-vis spectra confirmed the formation of GQDs with evident absorption peaks at 237 and 305 nm, which is attributed to π- π* and n- π* transitions correspondingly. The average size and surface roughness of graphene quantum dots were estimated by atomic force microscopy images and found to be 27.0 ± 1.0 and 2.3 nm, respectively. Afterwards, the effect of increasing relative humidity (RH) from 0%–95%, and frequency, was analyzed using the capacitive and resistive responses of synthesized GQDs. The capacitive output at 0.1 kHz revealed that initially capacitance remains constant (15.0 ± 1.0 pF) up to a humidity level ranging between 0%–50%. Likewise, capacitance also displayed stabilized behavior after frequency levels were increased i.e., 1.0 and 10 kHz, at a humidit...
Candida albicans is a pervasive commensal fungus that is the most common pathogen responsible for... more Candida albicans is a pervasive commensal fungus that is the most common pathogen responsible for invasive fungal infection (IFI). With incidence of IFI on the rise due to increasing susceptible populations, it is imperative that we investigate how Candida albicans interacts with blood components. When stimulating either human or mouse whole blood with thrombin we saw a significant decrease in C. albicans survival. We then repeated Candida killing assays with thrombin-stimulated or unstimulated washed platelets and saw a similar decrease in CFU. To investigate whether killing was mediated through surface components or releasable products, platelets were pretreated with an inhibitor of actin polymerization (CytochalasinD, CytoD). CytoD was able to abrogate C. albicans killing. Moreover, dilution of releasates from thrombin-stimulated platelets showed that the toxicity of the releasates on C. albicans is concentration dependent. We then investigated C. albicans actions on platelet act...
Background: A high number of clinical T1 (cT1) stage renal cell carcinoma (RCC) is upstaged to pa... more Background: A high number of clinical T1 (cT1) stage renal cell carcinoma (RCC) is upstaged to pathological T3a (pT3a) stage on histopathological findings. Several study results show that there is no survival difference among those cT1 stage who are upstaged on histopathological findings to those who remain pT1 stage RCC.Objectives: The objectives of this study were to assess any survival difference for cT1 stage renal cell carcinoma (RCC) which is upstaged to pT3a stage as compared to those which remain pT1 stage RCC on histopathological findings.Materials and Methods: It was a retrospective cohort study looking at patient aged ≥18 years with cT1 RCC who underwent nephrectomy between January 2006 and December 2016. Patients were divided into two groups based on histopathological findings (pT1 vs. pT3a). Survival was analysed for the two groups using Kaplan–Meier method, and the difference in survival was calculated using log-rank model.Results: The study included 187 patients. The...
A 70-year-old gentleman underwent prostatectomy for bladder outlet obstruction due to enlarged pr... more A 70-year-old gentleman underwent prostatectomy for bladder outlet obstruction due to enlarged prostate and was found to have primary extragastrointestinal stromal tumour (EGIST). He has been started on imatinib therapy and is presently on follow-up. Prostatic EGIST should be one of the differential diagnoses in patients with enlarged prostate with normal prostate-specific antigen levels.Key words: Prostate, gastrointestinal stromal tumour, PSA
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Papers by Nouman Khan