Qatar Foundation Annual Research Conference Proceedings Volume 2016 Issue 1
- تاريخ المؤتمر: 22-23 Mar 2016
- الموقع: Qatar National Convention Center (QNCC), Doha, Qatar
- رقم المجلد: 2016
- المنشور: ٢١ مارس ٢٠١٦
461 - 480 of 656 نتائج
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Cathepsin B Induced Cardiomyocyte Hypertrophy Requires Activation of the Na+/+ Exchanger Isoform-1
المؤلفون: Sadaf RiazBackground: Progression of the heart to failure is primarily caused due to significant remodeling of both the extracellular matrix (ECM) and subcellular organelles, a hallmark of cardiac hypertrophy (CH). Uncontrolled ECM remodeling occurs as a result of the activation and increased proteolytic activities of proteases such as Cathepsin B (Cat B) and matrix metalloproteinase-9 (MMP-9) (1, 2). Previous studies have suggested that the activation of Cat B is induced by the acidification of the peri and extracellular space (3-5). In various forms of carcinomas, this pericellular acidification coincides with the activation of the cardiac specific pH regulator, the Na+/H+ exchanger isoform-1 (NHE1) (5, 6). Increased activation of NHE1, similar to Cat B, is involved in the pathogenesis of various cardiac diseases including CH (7-10). Moreover, the activation NHE1 has been shown to activate Cat B in various reports. CD44 was shown to interact with NHE1 which created an acidic microenvironments leading to Cat B activation in a breast cancer model (5). Moreover, NHE1 and Cat B have shown to directly interact with each other and cause ECM degradation in another breast cancer model (4). Taken together, the evidence suggests that NHE1, through its pH regulating property, might be mediating the activity of Cat B in pathological states. A previous report has demonstrated that pericellular acidification redistributed the Cat B containing lysosomes to the cell surface and caused the secretion of Cat B into the extracellular compartment (3). Interestingly, the NHEs have also shown to cause acidic extracellular pH which induced lysosome trafficking and subsequent release of Cat B into the ECM in a prostate cancer cells (11). Moreover, several broad and specific NHE inhibitors were able to inhibit this effect (11). Once into the extracellular compartment, Cat B can degrade the ECM (12) and facilitate further ECM degradation by activating other proteases such as MMP-9 (13, 14). MMP-9 activity has been shown to be increased in various models of heart failure (15, 16) (17, 18). Previous studies have also shown that MMP-9 activity was increased in CCL39 cells upon the stimulation of NHE1 with phenylephrine (19). Interestingly, Cat B and MMP-9 were shown to directly interact with NHE1 and cause ECM degradation in breast cancer (4). Whether NHE1 induces the activation of Cat B, which in turn activates MMP-9 and contributes to cardiomyocyte hypertrophy remains unclear. Methods: H9c2 cardiomyocytes were treated with 10 μM Angiotensin (Ang) II for 24 hours to stimulate NHE1 and to induce cardiomyocyte hypertrophy. Cells were further treated with or without 10 μM EMD, a NHE1 inhibitor, or 10 μM CA-074 methyl ester (CA-074Me), a Cat B inhibitor, for 24 hours. After treatments, Cat B messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) levels were measured through Reverse Transcription-Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR). Furthermore, changes in the cardiomyocyte hypertrophic marker, ANP mRNA, were also assessed by RT-PCR analysis. The localization of Cat B in lysosomes was measured using LysoTracker Red dye. Autophagy was measured through the analysis of the autophagic marker, microtubule associated light chain 3-II (LC3-II). The secretion of Cat B from the intracellular to the extracellular space was assessed by measuring Cat B protein expression in the media. MMP-9 activity was also measured in the media by gelatin zymography and assessed for its contribution to the Cat B hypertrophic response. Results: Immunoblot analysis revealed that Cat B protein expression, both pro and active forms, was significantly elevated at the 10 μM Ang II concentration (136.56 ± 9.4% Ang II vs. 100% control, 37 kDa and 169.84 ± 14.24% Ang II vs. 100% control, 25 kDa; P
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The Social and Spiritual Factors Affecting Chronic Renal Dialysis Patients in Gaza Strip
مزيد أقلBackground: End-Stage Renal Disease (ESRD) is a progressive worsening of kidney function over a period of months or years. It is a complex debilitating disease that needs a lifelong treatment. Because patients with ESRD cannot be cured of their underlying conditions and mostly underwent hemodialysis program, it usually leads to many physical and medical consequences and complications, and beside them, there are lots of concealed social and spiritual factors that can affect people who have this disease or are on renal dialysis. Some studies about medical and clinical consequences of ESRD and renal dialysis were conducted but this study will be the first one to determine the factors affecting the social and spiritual wellbeing of patients who are on renal dialysis in Gaza Strip. Objectives: It is important to give a detailed picture about the social and spiritual wellbeing of patients who are on renal dialysis to help the medical professionals to recognize the social and spiritual variables, so early intensive intervention can be performed once necessary. Methods: A total of 120 patients who had ESRD and were treated with hemodialysis completed face to face questionnaires. A self-designed questionnaire has been used; the end result is a questionnaire consisted of 6 sections including demographic data, physical, social, psychological and spiritual wellbeing, degree of coping with current condition, uncertainties about health in future, self-esteem and dependency, and the impact on marital relationship. Results: Among 120 participants, 55% were females and the mean age was 48.5 (SD: 16.7).
An eighty one point seven percent were unemployed and 81.7% of the participants were of low educational level. Thirty percent of the patients have family history of hemodialysis; 55.6% of them are first degree relatives and 44.4% for the second and third degree relatives. Seventy two point two of patients have co-morbidities, mostly hypertension (49.4%). Fatigue (93.8%) and insomnia (56.2%) are the two major physical complaints after the process of hemodialysis, however, (53.3%) of the patients felt more comfortable after it.
Seventy seven percent of the patients suffered from a financial impact and 60.3% had weak social relationships. Sixty percent considered that the process of hemodialysis makes their life restless to the extent that makes their daily activities to be negatively affected by 73.8%.
Among 85 married patients, the sexual performance and the sexual desire were negatively affected by 54.2% and 52.2% respectively. Only 50% of the patients stated that they have a goal they want to achieve in their life. Seventy eight percent of the patients were uncertain about their health and 67.3% were worried from about the future. However, 70% of the participants claimed that spiritual devotions and stronger faith has made them more able to accept their disease and deals in a positive manner towards being involved in the hemodialysis program. Conclusion: Social and spiritual well-being should be considered as important predictive factors for a better quality of life in hemodialysis patients. Results also suggest that assessing and addressing social and spiritual well-being among hemodialysis patients may help in providing a holistic medical care.
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Origanum Syriacum Inhibits Proliferation, Migration, Invasion and Induces Differentiation of Human Aortic Smooth Muscle Cells
المؤلفون: Sara AlDisi and Ali EidCardiovascular diseases (CVDs) are still the number one cause of morbidity and mortality both in Qatar and worldwide. A major risk factor of CVDs is atherosclerosis, the hardening of blood vessels caused by decreased diameter and formation of plaque. A key player in atherosclerosis prognosis is the switch of vascular smooth muscle cells (VSMCs) phenotype from their undifferentiated state to a synthetic one. The synthetic state of VSMCs is characterized by an increase in proliferation, migration and invasion to the lumen of blood vessels, contributing to the atherosclerotic plaque. Ineffectiveness of current treatments has lead to an increasing interest in herbal medicine, possibly because they are cheap and produce little side effects. Origanum syriacum, commonly known as Zataar, is an important constituent of the Mediterranean diet; a diet correlated with lower risk of CVDs. O. syriacum is also reported for its antioxidant and anti-inflammatory activities, an indication of its possible anti-atherosclerotic activities. However, O. syriacum effect on atherosclerosis or CVDs is not well studied. This is why we chose to study the effect of the ethanolic extract of O. syriacum (OSEE) on the proliferation, migration, invasion and differentiation of human aortic smooth muscle cells (HASMCs). Cell Titer-Glu assay was used to study OSEE effect on HASMCs viability. Cells were incubated with OSEE (0, 0.5, 0.1 and 0.2 mg/ml) for 24, 48 and 72 hours. OSEE has showed to exert a significant anti-proliferative effect on HASMCs. This effect, though, seems to be concentration-dependent, but not time-dependent. The optimum concentration, 0.2 mg/ml, significantly decreased HASMCs viability at 24 and 72 hours by 52.5 ± 10.39% and 47.6 ± 9.83% compared to control, respectively. A scratch-wound assay was used to determine OSEE's effect on migration of HASMCs. A monolayer of cells was scratched and wound size was measured every 2 hours for 24 hours. OSEE significantly inhibited the migratory capacity of HASMCs compared to untreated cells. Cells that were incubated with 0.2 mg/ml of OSEE for 24 hours showed 65.07 ± 12.58% less migration than the control. To measure the invasive capacity of HASMCs, Matrigel-coated BD BioCoatTM filter inserts were used. Cells were incubated in serum free media with or without 0.2 mg/ml of OSEE, and number of invasive cells was counted after 24 hours. OSEE has shown to significantly decrease the invasive capacity of HASMCs by 79.82 ± 5.69% compared to control. To study effect of OSEE on differentiation of HASMCs, western blotting was used to measure calponin-h1 activity. Cells were incubated with or without 0.2 mg/ml OSEE for 24 hours and lysate was analyzed. OSEE increased the expression of calponin-h1 by 147.19 ± 72.33% compared to control. These results indicate that OSEE possess anti-atherosclerotic abilities by modulating the phenotype of HASMCs. This modulation returns HASMCs to their differentiated state, as shown by calponin-h1 increase. It also exhibits this modulation by inhibition of the synthetic state phenotypes of proliferation, migration and invasion of HASMCs. This anti-atherosclerotic effect should be further studied by possibly investigating OSE's effect on specific pathways that leads to migration and invasion of HASMCs, such as ERK1/2 and MAPK pathways, as well as MMPs expression.
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Self-assessed Attitude, Perception, Preparedness and Perceived Barriers to Provide Pharmaceutical Care in Practice Among Final Year Pharmacy Students: A Comparative Study between Qatar and Kuwait
المؤلفون: Rasha Abdullkader Mousa Bacha and Alaa Talal El-GergawiBackground: Pharmaceutical care (PC) is changing pharmacy practice in to patient -centered care and personalized medicine approach. It focuses on maximizing drug therapy outcomes and improving patient's quality of life (QOL). Pharmacy students who are the future pharmacy practitioner, need to have adequate knowledge, skills and positive attitudes to apply PC when they graduate. However, comparative studies are limited among pharmacy students from different pharmacy schools within the Middle East region about the PC teaching received, preparedness to deliver the service in practice, and expected barriers. Objectives: This study's aims are exploring the attitudes and perceptions of final year pharmacy students in the College of Pharmacy at Qatar University (QU-CPH) and Faculty of Pharmacy in Kuwait University (KU-FoP) towards PC, assessing students’ preparedness to provide PC when they graduate and investigating the perceived barriers against the application of PC. Methods: Descriptive, cross-sectional, web based survey was used to collect data. The study instrument was developed based on validated tools: Pharmaceutical Care Attitude Survey (PCAS) and Preparedness to Provide Pharmaceutical Care (PREP). The data were analyzed using the IBM Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS®) Version 22. Chi-Square tests and independent t-test were used to compare between the 2 universities for categorical data. P ≤ 0.05 was considered statistical significant. The results were summarized using tables and figures generated by Excel. The final questionnaire included five sections: demographics of the students (6 items); perception of PC (7 items); attitudes towards PC (13 items); preparedness to deliver PC (25 items) and; barriers that may affect applying PC (5 items). The survey was administered using SurveyMonkey®. Results: Of a total of 77 students, 63 students completed the questionnaire (21 students from QU and 42 students from KU) overall response rate 82%. The mean age of the students was similar between the two universities. The majority of the respondents (95.2%) from both universities were female (QU-CPH is female-only college). KU-FoP had significantly higher proportion of national students than QU-CPH. Both QU-CPH and KU-FoP students prefer to work in the hospital setting in the future (57.1%, 64.3% respectively). No significant differences between the two universities in terms of students’ confidence and perception in applying PC (P ≥ 0.05). There were no significant differences between the students’ attitude in the two programs about the provision of PC (P ≥ 0.05), and all respondents believed that PC services will improve health outcomes. There was a statistically significant differences in documenting information related to detecting, resolving and preventing drug-related problem (p = 0.044). Some of the barriers identified by students from both institutions include: lack of private counseling area, limited pharmacists time, lack of patients records, lack of policy for pharmacists’ patient care role. No differences in opinions between QU and KU students regarding the most important barrier that may affect PC provision above. There was statistical significant difference between students’ opinions in considering poor image of pharmacists role in society as barrier. Conclusion: Final year pharmacy from Qatar and Kuwait had demonstrated positive attitudes towards PC and its potential application in practice when they graduate. They have, however, identified some potential barriers. Students in KU-FoP placed low expectation of the pharmacist's role by the society and within health care team as important barrier; while students in QU-CPH thought that documentation and communication between pharmacists and healthcare providers can have an impact on PC services. More efforts should be directed to resolve the perceived barriers in order to optimize PC provision and ultimately patient care outcomes.
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Applying a Novel Smart Insole System that Reduces Re-Ulceration Risk among Diabetics with Peripheral Neuropathy: Do Users Adhere and Comply?
المؤلفون: Eyal Ron, Javad Razjouyan, Bijan Najafi and David ArmstrongBackground & Aim: People with diabetes carry a 25% lifetime risk of foot ulceration. It is well-established that high plantar pressures increase the risk of developing foot ulcers, and that managing peak pressure is an important strategy in reducing such risk. This study tested a novel smart insole system designed to reduce ulceration risk by alerting patients using a smartwatch when their plantar pressure was too high. The device was tested for degree of adherence, compliance, and successful offloading responses among users. Outcomes of users triggering many alerts were compared to those triggering few alerts to see if alert frequency affected adherence and compliance to a novel mobile health device. Method: Participants with diabetes, peripheral neuropathy, and a history of foot ulcers were instructed to wear a smart insole system. Pressure sensors inside the insole were placed in strategic areas where foot ulceration risk has been shown to be high. The sensors were wirelessly connected to a smartwatch through a transmitter. The smartwatch alerted participants when plantar pressure exceeded 50 mmHg over 95% of a moving 15 minute window. Adherence, defined as the number of hours the device was worn, was determined with sensor data and via questionnaires. A successful response to an alert was recorded when patient-initiated offloading occurred within 20 minutes. The length of time an alert lasted (measured as the median time between alert onset and successful offloading) served as a measure of compliance. Results: Participants who increased adherence over time tended to have more alerts (0.82 ± 0.31 alerts/hr) than those who did not improve (0.36 ± 0.46 alerts/hr, p = 0.09). Users receiving a high number of alerts (HA) began with similar levels of successful response to those receiving a low number of alerts (LA), but the HA group successfully offloaded significantly more often than the LA group by the last segment of the study (55.0 ± 6.6% vs. 16.6 ± 11.9%, p < 0.01). Median alert durations increased for LA relative to HA (p = 0.10). Participants tended to overestimate their adherence compared to objective sensor measurements (7.60 ± 2.50 hours/day vs. 5.38 ± 3.43 hours/day, p = 0.10). Conclusion: The results of this study suggests that there appears be to a minimum number of alerts that a user must experience (1 alert every 2 hours of wear time) to maintain adherence and successful response to alerts over time. Above this level, median alert durations decrease, user adherence improves, and successful response rates increase. This suggests that within the range of alerts typically received by someone wearing a smart insole system, relatively more alerts may be preferred, and increasing the number of alerts a user receives by lowering the pressure threshold may be a viable path to maintaining adherence. In addition, self-reported adherence measures may exaggerate usage of novel mobile health devices.
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Applying Novel Body-Worn Sensors to Measure Stress: Does Stress Affect Wound Healing Rates in the Diabetic Foot?
المؤلفون: Eyal Ron, Javad Razjouyan, Talal K Talal, David G Armstrong and Bijan NajafiBackground and Aim: In the United States alone, diabetic limb complications and amputations are estimated to cost $17 billion. Significant risk factors that may lead to amputation of the diabetic foot include ineffective wound healing and infection of a wound or ulcer. Previous studies have shown that wound healing is slowed and patient's susceptibility to infection is increased when a patient is under chronic stress. To date, objective measures of stress have not been used to determine if stress affects the rate at which wounds heal. Our study used novel real-time monitoring of patient's heart rate variability to objectively determine the stress levels of patients visiting a surgery clinic for wound dressing changes. The wound healing rates of patients with high stress levels were compared to healing rates of low-stress individuals to assess the effect of stress on rates of wound healing among diabetics with a history of foot ulceration. Methods: Twenty patients (age: 56.7 ± 12.2 years) with diabetic foot ulcers were equipped with a chest-worn sensor (Bioharness 3, Zephyr Technology Corp., Annapolis, MD) during their 45-minute appointments where the patients’ wound was re-dressed. The chest sensor contained a uni-channel ECG recorder, and a novel algorithm was developed to determine heart rate variability from sensor output. Low frequency (0.04 to 0.15 Hz) HRV signals were isolated from high frequency signals (0.15 to 0.40 Hz), and the ratio of their amplitudes was used as a measure of stress. Patients were categorized as low-stress if the ratio of the signals was less than 1, and were otherwise categorized as high-stress individuals. Regardless of classification, each patient's wound size (length, width, depth) was recorded at baseline and in follow-up visits. High and low-stress patients were compared to see if wound sizes decreased more rapidly in either group. Results: Results indicate that patients with low levels of stress reduced their wound size by 79% between baseline and the first follow-up appointment (1.36 mm3 to 0.28 mm3). In contrast, patients with high levels of stress had adverse outcomes, with their wound sizes increasing nearly four times between baseline and follow-up (0.17 mm3 vs 0.84 mm3). Although high stress individuals had smaller wound sizes than low stress individuals initially (0.17 mm3 vs. 1.36 mm3, p < 0.05), the wound sizes of high stress individuals were nearly 3 times larger by the first follow-up (0.84 mm3 vs. 0.28 mm3, p = 0.10). Conclusion: Our research proposes that an individual's stress level can be objectively measured using an algorithm that processes ECG data from a single body-worn sensor that is lightweight and comfortable to wear. The stress levels measured with our algorithm are predictive of positive clinical outcomes. Specifically, individuals with low levels of recorded stress at baseline have faster healing rates and greater reductions in wound size by their second clinical appointment. This indicates that real-time patient stress monitoring using body-worn sensors may help clinicians identify risk factors that prolong wound healing times. In addition, it can be inferred that managing stress in diabetic patients will quicken the pace of wound healing. Surprisingly, however, our results suggest that initial wound sizes are not good indicators of stress levels in patients during initial clinical appointments. In fact, wound sizes of high stress individuals were significantly lower than low-stress individuals at baseline.
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Dexamethasone-induced MicroRNA Regulation for Pancreatic Cancer Progression
المؤلفون: Alia AbukiwanPancreatic cancer is one of the leading causes of cancer-related mortality worldwide and is highly therapy-resistant, e.g. toward the standard chemotherapy gemcitabine. Glucocorticoids like dexamethasone (DEX) are often co-medicated to reduce inflammation and side effects of tumor growth and therapy. Our group showed DEX to be a potent stimulator of epithelial to mesenchymal transition (EMT), cancer progression and metastasis, but the underlying mechanisms are poorly understood. MicroRNAs are a group of small non-coding RNAs that post transcriptionally regulate gene expression. In this study, I evaluated the effect of DEX on the microRNA profile of pancreatic cancer cell lines. By microRNA array I observed a deregulation of several miRNAs. The most significantly deregulated miRNA, miR-XYZ was predicted to target key members of the TGFß pathway. Forced expression of this miR-XYZ by liposomal transfection of mimicsresulted in significant repression of TGFß-2 mRNA and protein levels. 3’UTR luciferasereporter- and site-directed mutagenesis assays confirmed TGFß-2 to be a direct target of miR-XYZ. Functionally, I found that miR-XYZ significantly reduced proliferation, migration and colony formation. My preliminarily in vivo data show that miR-XYZ reduces tumor xenografttumor growth and abolishes the teratogenic effect of DEX. I conclude that miR-XYZ is a tumor suppressor gene that inhibits EMT by regulating oncogenes and/or genes that control EMT, and DEX is able to activate EMT by suppressing miR-XYZ.
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Gliptins: Does this New Class of Antidiabetic Drugs Possess Endothelial-Vasculoprotective Effects?
Background & objective: The gliptins, dipeptidyl peptidase inhibitors (DPP-4 inhibitors) are a relatively new class of antidiabetic drugs that, via their inhibition of DPP-4, a cell membrane–associated serine-type protease enzyme, promote the effects of the endogenous incretins such as glucagon-like peptide 1 (GLP-1) and enhance glucose disposal. The advantage of the gliptins over GLP-1 analogues is that they are orally effective whereas the clinically used incretins, exenatide and liraglutide, have to be administered via sub-cutaneous injection. The first gliptin, sitagliptin, was approved by the FDA in 2006 and six other gliptins have subsequently been approved – vildagliptin (2007 in Europe); saxagliptin (2009, FDA); linagliptin (2011, FDA); anagliptin (2012, Japan); teneligliptin (2012, Japan); alogliptin (2013, FDA). There is a close association between diabetes and cardiovascular disease (CVD) and vascular complications associated with diabetes are responsible for 75% of the deaths of diabetics. Therefore it is important that for any new class of antidiabetic drugs introduced for clinical use that we determine whether such drugs not only show therapeutic efficacy as antidiabetic drugs, but also that they are vasculoprotective and reduce both cardiovascular morbidity and mortality. Endothelial dysfunction that can be functionally defined as a reduced vasorelaxation response to an endothelium-dependent vasodilator, such as acetylcholine, or, at the molecular level, a reduction in the bioavailability of nitric oxide (NO) and/or reduced activity of the enzyme responsible for the generation of NO, namely, endothelial nitric oxide synthase (eNOS). Endothelial dysfunction is a very early indicator of the onset of vascular disease and thus determining whether the gliptins also reduce endothelial dysfunction is very important. The literature concerning the vasculoprotective effects of the gliptins is contradictory with some of the clinical data suggesting a negative effect of the gliptins on vascular function. Thus, the objective of this study was to determine whether the gliptins possess positive or negative effects on endothelial function. Materials & methods: In the present study we used a cell culture protocol with mouse vascular endothelial endothelial cells (MS1-VEGF; CRL-2460, from ATCC, USA) of micro-vascular endothelial origin. The endothelial cells, MMECs, were either cultured under normoglycaemic (NG) conditions for a mouse, 11 mM, or high glucose 40 mM (HG) – a level that equates to the plasma glucose levels that are seen in mouse models of type 2 diabetes, such as the db/db leptin receptor mutant model of type 2 diabetes. The gliptin, alogliptin was chosen for this study and the protocols were designed to determine whether this gliptin reduced, or prevented, the high glucose induced reduction in eNOS phosphorylation at serine 1177 (p-eNOSser1177) as determined by western immunoblot densitometry quantification. A reduction in p-eNOSser1177 will result in a reduced activity of eNOS and hence a reduction in the generation of NO. Thus, the quantification of p-eNOSser1177 serves as a measure of endothelial function. The band densities of the western blot images for eNOS and p-eNOSser1177 were quantified using the basic Quantity One software (Biorad, Inc. CA, USA). Statistical analysis was performed using one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) and post-hoc comparisons between groups were performed by Tukey's multiple comparison tests. ‘p’ values less than 0.05 were considered to be statistically significant. Results: Our data indicates that a 24-hour exposure to HG reduced p-eNOSser1177 phosphorylation, but the presence of alogliptin reverses the effects of HG and significantly increased the phosphorylation of eNOS, suggesting that this gliptin does protect the microvascular endothelium against hyperglycaemia-induced endothelial dysfunction. Furthermore, the effects of alogliptin were concentration-dependent and were significant with 50 or 100 μM, but not 10 μM alogliptin. Conclusion: Our findings indicate that, in a concentration-dependent manner, alogliptin protects endothelial cells against the negative effects that hyperglycaemia (high glucose) has on endothelial function as measured by alogliptin-induced changes in the phosphorylation of eNOS at serine 1177. Further studies are underway, using a functional myograph assay, to determine whether alogliptin can also prevent hyperglycaemia-induced endothelial dysfunction in mouse aortic vessels.
Acknowledgement
This work was supported by a Summer Student Research Fellowship (SSRF) from Weill Cornell Medicine-Qatar and an Undergraduate Research Experience Program grant, UREP 18-055-3-012 from the Qatar National Research Fund (QNRF). The statements made herein are solely the responsibility of the authors.
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Analysis of Date Pits and Food Product Development from Date Pits
المؤلفون: Eman Faisal Mushaima, Rehab Hussain Taradah and Sara Mohammed AlhajiriBackground: In Qatar and GCC countries, palm trees are considered as a symbol of culture due the great number of palm trees. Qatar classified as the third country import the dates for consumption among the world, it produces around 16,500 tons of dates every year mostly for local consumption. Though the high production and consumption of dates in GCC countries, there are no enough studies and investigations of the date's pits despite its high nutritional values and content that the few studies and analysis proved in some countries. This study aim to produce innovative food products from date pits as there are no investment for date pits and its nutritional value in Qatar. Therefore, proximate analysis and minerals analysis were done before developing a product containing date pits powder as the main ingredient to have accurate data about the chemical composition of each product. The main purpose of mineral analysis is to measure and determine mineral composition in general and lead content in date pits to which is related to safety of the food product that we will produce.
Objective: The main objectives of this research are:
1. To do proximate and minerals analysis of date pits (Phoenix dactylifera) that are cultivated in GCC countries (three varieties: khalas, khunaizi, sagei)
2. Developing a food product from date pits powder (cookies and muffin).
Method: • Minerals: mineral constituents present in the date pits of three varieties (Saqei, Khalas and Khunaizi) were analyzed using Inductively Coupled Plasma Spectrometer.
• Proximate analysis:
1. Seed Material and sample preparation: Date pits were obtained from Qatar and Bahrain. The pits of the two countries under investigation (Saqei and Khunaizi) (Khalas dates pit were excluded due to the high content of lead), they were directly isolated from 60 kg of date fruit, collected at the “Tamr” stage which is in the full ripeness. Date pits of each variety have been separated and milled in a heavy duty grinder to get homogenous blended mixture. Date pits powder was kept in a durable and leak proof containers.
2. Analytical methods: All analytical determination were performed in triple trials for each analysis. Values were expressed in the form of mean ± standard deviation (Chemical analysis of powdered pits (determined by AOAC- Association of Official Analytical Chemists)).
3. Fat content: The weight of total fat extracted from date pits was determined using Soxhlet Extraction Method. Results were expressed as percentages.
4. Protein content: The total protein was determined by Kjeldahl method and it was calculated by using the general factor (6.25).
5. Ash content: Ash was determined by removing carbon through taking 2 g of each variety, then it has been incinerated in the muffle furnace for 30 min at 600°C. After breaking up the ash with drops of water, put in the furnace for 3 hours.
6. Carbohydrate content: The total carbohydrate with fiber was calculated by subtracting from 100% the summation of the percent of total moisture, protein, fat and ash.
• Food product development: cookies and muffin have been produce from four different percentages of date pits (100%, 75%, 50% and 25%).
Results: Proximate analysis: Average of two trials for each variety. For khunaizi: CHO (84.32 %), protein (5.89), fat (3.8%), ash (0.48%) and moisture (5.39%). For sagei: CHO (79.81%), protein (5.57%), fat (2.89%), ash (0.72%) and moisture (0.86%). Minerals analysis (ppm): for Khalas: Mn: 22.881, Pb: 0.498, Cr: 40.827, Zn: 29.212, Mg: 838.983, Fe: 207.078, Cu:ND, Cd: 0.348, Ca: 438.434. For Khunaizi (PPM): Mn: 19.288, Pb: ND, Cr: 11.193, Zn: 15.540, Mg: 859.984, Fe: 77.003, Cu:ND, Cd: ND,Ca: 328.652. For Sagei (PPM): Mn: 8.202, Pb: ND, Cr: 0.323, Zn: 13.686, Mg: 559.365, Fe: 309.465, Cu:ND, Cd: 18.925, Ca: ND.
Quality rating for food product development using date pits (muffin and cookies): total quality number (out of 20 points) For muffin and cookies containing 25% date pits powder = 20 points; for 50% = 19 points; for 75% = 15 points; and 3 points for muffin and cookies containing 100% date pits powder.
Conclusion: Pits of date palm could be an excellent source of functional foods components as it is inexpensive and rich source of carbohydrate (mostly fiber) as shown in the analysis results of date pits from two leading varieties in Qatar (Sagei and Khunazi). The results also prove that date pits powder from Khalas variety of date is unsafe for production of food as it contain significant amount of lead.
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Pharmacoeconomic Evaluations of Oral Anticancer Agents. Thematic Systematic Review
المؤلفون: Ahmad Amer Alkadour, Daoud Al-Badriyeh and Wafa Al-MarridiBackground: Around 14.1 million new cancer cases and 8.2 million deaths caused by cancer were reported in 2012, expected to rise up to 22 million within the next 2 decades. The parenteral route (intravenous dosage form) has been the most common administration route for chemotherapeutic agents, which is associated with the need for hospitalization and a range of significant adverse drug reaction. A new generation of chemotherapies that is orally administered has been introduced to practices as a superior and more efficient therapeutic alternative. Oral anticancer drugs (OACDs) have shown to be eliminating the need for hospitalization, decreasing the rate of adverse drug reactions and, ultimately, improving patients' quality of life. Economically, this translates into reduction in inpatient hospitalization costs, including several of the associated costs, such as the cost of treating side effects. A disadvantage of OACDs however, is the increased acquisition costs as compared to those for the intravenously administered alternatives. This resulted into resistance to include OACDs by several international insurance schemes and drug formulary practices, including in Qatar. Objectives: The current project sought to analyze the medical literature in relation to published economic evaluations (pharmacoeconomics) of OACDs, especially as compared to the parenteral alternatives. This will identify the decision analytic modeling conducted as well as the variety of methods used. Strengths and weaknesses of study designs will be determined, including gaps in knowledge. Methodology: A thematic systematic review was conducted using the search engines: PubMed, Medline, EconLit, Embase and Economic Evaluation Database. The following 3 categories were considered: (i) therapy (chemotherapy [Mesh]); (ii) dosage form (oral [Mesh]); and (iii) research design (economics [Mesh] OR cost-benefit analysis [Mesh]). These included full-text, English articles incorporating comparative economic evaluations of oral chemotherapies. Excluded studies were: non-comparative, non-economic based models, of secondary indications (not cancer), and/or reviews. This process was followed by two stages of manual exclusion; based on title/abstract content and, then, the full-text article content. A data extraction form was developed and pilot tested for the purpose of data collection. Article inclusion and data collection was conducted twice, each by a different investigator. Included articles were finally summarized according to methodological themes of interest. Results: A total of 235 records were identified. After screening and removing duplicates, only 18 studies were deemed eligible study inclusion. It was found that the pharmacoeconomics evaluations were mostly of cost-utility analyses (13 out of 18), measuring cost per quality adjusted life years (QALY) gained, and from the payer perspective (15 out of 18). Primary sources of clinical and economic data were randomized clinical trials, expert panels and medical charts. Other sources included medicine databases, reimbursement schedules, drug policies and price lists, treatment guidelines, case reports and patient interviews. In 13 out of 18 cases, dominance status was reported in favor of OACDs, in relation to cost and/or clinical effect. Decision analytic modeling was used in the majority of studies, mostly constituting Markov modeling for the simulation of life long use of drugs. Sensitivity analyses were conducted in most studies, mostly constituting one-way sensitivity analysis to ensure robustness of study results. The types of cancers, where the effect of OACDs was studied, were the metastatic renal carcinoma, gastrointestinal tumors, colon cancer, chronic myeloid leukemia and non-small cell lung cancer. Most included articles were published during the last seven years. Most studies were conducted in the UK, US and Europe, while none were conducted in Australia or the Middle East. Conclusion: This is first systematic review of the economic methods used in the evaluation of OACDs. There seems to be a recent increasing interest of this type of research, whereby the QALYs measurement is of priority for the decision making in relation to the comparative value of OACDs in practices. Most important, is that despite the higher acquisition cost, OACDs were demonstrated to be mostly superior over the parenteral alternatives. Furthermore, the decision analytic modeling, mostly constituting Markov modeling, is valued and enables a structured decision analyses of therapies. The pharmacoeconomics research is difficult to generalize, whereby published economic evaluations are locally specific, especially for the purpose of practical interpretation. The current review of literature proposes valuable methods for the local Qatari implementation and guidance of decision makers. This is most relevant to National Center for Cancer Care & Research (NCCCR), which is the only tertiary service provider of cancer therapy in Qatar, where confusion in relation to the use of oral chemotherapies exists, particularly the therapies vinorelbine and capacitabine.
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Assessment of HER2 Status of Metastatic Breast Carcinoma on Cell Block Preparations of Fine Needle Aspirates is Unreliable
المؤلفون: Vignesh Shanmugam, Syed Hoda, Thomas Dilcher, Adam Pacecca and Rana HodaObjectives: HER2 status of breast carcinoma is a powerful prognostic and predictive biomarker-particularly in the metastatic setting. Limited data is available regarding assessment of HER2 on cell block preparations (CBP). The primary objective of this study was to assess correlation between HER2 results obtained via immunohistochemistry (IHC) and fluorescence in-situ hybridization (FISH) in cases of metastatic breast carcinoma (MBC) on CBP. Secondary objectives included study of inter-observer variability in interpretation of HER2 on IHC, and concordance between HER2 results on CBP and formalin-fixed paraffin embedded material (FFPEM). Materials and Methods: Cases of MBC diagnosed on fine needle aspirates (FNA) with HER2 testing performed via IHC and FISH on CBP over 5 years (2010-2015) were reviewed. CBP material was fixed in an ethanol-based fixative (CytoRich Red Fixative system, BD). HER2 IHC was performed using polyclonal antibodies against Cerb-2 (Dako 0485). HER2 FISH testing was performed using the LSI HER2/neu/CEP17 probes (Vysis/Abbott Molecular Inc., Des Plaines, IL). Results: Seventeen cases (all female, median age: 59) were analyzed. 41% of CBP were products of bone FNA (7/17). Other sites included lymph node (3), lung (2), pleural fluid (2), liver (1), skeletal muscle (1) and mesentery (1). Median interval between diagnosis of primary carcinoma and FNA of metastasis was 5 years (range: 10 months-32 years). FISH was inconclusive due to suboptimal specimen quality in 2 cases. Correlation between IHC and FISH results was as follows: IHC 0/1+ (0/2; 0% amplification), IHC 2+ (2/12; 16.7% amplification) and IHC 3+ (0/1; 0% amplification). Inter-observer agreement of IHC scoring between 2 pathologists who independently reviewed IHC slides was fair (66.7% agreement, κ = 0.31). Comparison of HER2 results on CBP with FFPEM (primary carcinoma or metastasis) showed a high discordance and slight agreement (discordance rate = 37.5%; κ = 0.02). Conclusions: In this study, (a) 16.7% of MBC cases that scored 2+ on IHC showed amplification on FISH, (b) there was poor inter-observer agreement in HER2 scoring of IHC on CBP, and (c) there was high discordance between HER2 results obtained on CBP and FFPEM. Our results indicate that HER2 testing of MBC on CBP may be unreliable.
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Decision-Analytic Modeling in the Economic Evaluations of Systemic Antifungals for the Prophylaxis against Invasive Fungal Infections – A Thematic Systematic Review
المؤلفون: Wafa Ziad Al-MarridiBackground: The interest in the economic evaluations of “prophylactic” systemic antifungals is on the rise, especially with the emergence of newer expensive agents for prophylaxis of invasive fungal infections (IFI). Decision analytic modeling is a systematic approach that has become integral in the economic evaluation process for the purpose of simplifying the decision making. This systematic review aims to identify the prevalence of decision-analytic modeling in the pharmacoeconomic literature regarding prophylactic therapies for systemic fungal infections, and to identify variations in model designs used along with defining specific areas of strengths and weaknesses. Method: A systematic literature search was conducted using the e-databases Pubmed, Medline, Embase, Economic Evaluation, Econlit, and Cochrane to obtain all model-based economic evaluations of antifungal agents. Search terms were under three categories: (i) therapy (antifungal agent [Mesh] OR Prophylaxis); (ii) disease (mycosis [Mesh] OR fungal disease [Mesh] OR invasive OR systemic); and (iii) research design (economics [Mesh] OR decision analysis [Mesh] OR costs and cost analysis [Mesh]). Publications were included if they were journal articles, full text publications, human studies, English language. Study articles were excluded if they were reviews, studying topical antifungal, non-invasive infections, or non-economic models. Journal article inclusion and data extraction, via a data collection form, were conducted twice, each by different researcher. Results: Out of 841 citations, only 19 articles were eligible for inclusion. Most of studies were relatively recent, conducted in 2008–2013. Seventeen of them used sources of clinical data from pooled randomized control trials. Evaluations were mostly in USA (7), the remaining in Australia, Canada, Spain, The Netherland, Korea, Greece, France, Germany, and Switzerland (1–2 articles each). All articles utilized the cost-effectiveness method using decision tree models; including 10 using Markov modeling for simulating future use of medications. This was, as appropriate, associated with discounting type of cost adjustment. Drug comparisons in included studies (27/29) were mostly between an old cheaper antifungals and more expensive newer ones. The 19 articles incorporated 15 studies with cost per life year gained measure, six with cost per IFI avoided, one with cost per Quality Adjusted Life Year, and four included cost saving per patient measure. Most important, is that same clinical measures were defined differently in different studies. Most studies reported dominance state, the majority were in favor of posaconazole (9 out of 12), and five studies required incremental cost effectiveness ratio analysis. Only direct medical costs were considered in studies despite that six articles had social perspectives instead of the hospital perspective. All articles had adjusted costs either for inflation (9/19 articles) or discounting. Fourteen articles used only one way sensitivity analysis while few used a combination with multivariate (2) or scenario (3) analyses. Conclusion: Decision making in relation to prophylactic antifungals is not complex, including the economic considerations; whereby straightforward therapy dominance status was demonstrated in the majority of studies. Most important, is that the literature evidence in relation the cost-effectiveness of systematic antifungals is not cumulative in nature, which is due to that same outcomes are defined differently in studies. This also meant that literature economic models are incomparable and not generalizable since different decision makers appear to be interested in different outcomes, including for the same antifungal agent. Studies are limited by not considering cost of side effects and alternative therapy options. Further studies are needed to compare among the newer more expensive agents, where evidence is lacking. Also, studies should be enhanced by better adhering to guidelines in relation to standardized definitions of health states, enabling a cumulative evidence generation and generalizability of findings.
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Criminalizing Domestic Violence in Qatar: A Case Study of Student Activism
Globally, gender based violence effects one out of every three women. Recently, the alarming rise in reported cases of domestic violence in Qatar has led to a national call to find an effective way to deal with the issue. This paper documents the efforts of a group of Qatar University students to do just that: draft legislation to criminalize domestic violence. The research project involves eight Qatar University male and female undergraduate students from five different countries (Bahrain, Pakistan, Egypt, Nigeria and Qatar), and three faculty members from different countries (Palestine, Egypt and Saudi Arabia).
In order to determine the status of current societal and legal protection provided to victims of domestic violence, interviews were conducted with law enforcement authorities, judges, religious scholars/leaders, medical professionals and victims of domestic violence themselves. After analyzing the interviews, along with the official documentation provided by institutions (such as hospitals, police departments, and shelters) systematic weaknesses and legal loopholes were identified. A benchmarking of legislation in the Arab and Muslim world was then conducted in order to come up with a conceptual framework for a comprehensive protection system for female victims of domestic violence in Qatar.
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Knowledge of MERS-Corona Virus among Female Students at Qatar University
المؤلفون: Zahra Al-Muhafda, Maryam Qaher, Eman Faisal, Heba Abushahla, Rana Kurdi and Ghadir Al-JayyousiMiddle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) is a severe, acute respiratory illness caused by Corona Virus (CDC, 2015). Globally, there are 1599 cases diagnosed with MERS Corona virus and at least 574 related death cases were reported in the year 2012 (WHO, 2015). In Qatar, a total of 17 cases were reported between November 2013–May 2015 (WHO, 2015). The routes of transmission of MERS-COV includes direct contact with an infected person, touching contaminated objects or surfaces then touching your mouth, nose or eyes and direct contact with infected camels. A study in Qatar showed that MERS-COV was detected in 3 camels out of 14 from nose swabs taken from these camels. It also showed that the virus fragments were similar to what was found in two human cases from the same farm (Haagmans et al., 2014). Another study was conducted at Al-Shahaniya-Qatar in 2014 confirmed the presence of MERS-CoV in the milk of five camels. This explains that camels are a source of transmission of MERS-COV in the State of Qatar (Reusken et al., 2014). The purpose of this study is to examine knowledge of MERS-CoV transmission, symptoms and prevention techniques among female students at Qatar University, and further evaluate the effect of an awareness event organized by the Public Health Program. Participants (N = 33) were female students at Qatar University aged from 18–26 years old. Public health students designed a survey to test the knowledge of MERS-CoV transmission, symptoms and prevention techniques among female students at Qatar University. A pre-test survey was distributed in an awareness event of MERS-CoV that was held on the 19th of November 2015 at the college of Arts and Sciences. The survey included questions about demographics such as age, college, and nationality. It also included five questions to examine the level of knowledge about transmission routes for the virus, symptoms associated with the infection, the prevention techniques and the preferred strategy to be educated about the disease among students. Later, participants attended activities organized by public health students to be educated about MERS-CoV. They were exposed to epidemiological facts through distributed flyers and screen slides. The transmission routes were explained to the students using a creative and meaningful poster, Moreover, students were informed about the symptoms by another poster and a demonstration of MERS-CoV model. The prevention techniques regarding MERS-CoV were also explained through a poster and attractive, colorful brochures. The same recipients answered same questions as a post-test to measure changes in knowledge about MERS-CoV. For the analysis, SPSS software was used to analyze the pre- and post-test data. The McNemar's Test was used to compare the pre- and post-test results. P-value less than 0.05 was considered to be significant. The results showed the percentage of recipients aged (18-20) years and (21-23) years was the same (45.5%) for both age groups. The majority of the recipients were from the college of Science (57.6%); however, neither was from the college of Medicine nor the college of Law. Moreover, due to the high diversity in Qatar University, students form different nationalities participated in our survey such as, Qatari, Gulf countries, Egyptian, Palestinian, Iranian, Jordanian, Sudanese, Pakistani and Others. Most of the students were Qatari (21.2%), whereas Iranian and Pakistani had the lowest number of recipients (3.0%), (see Table 1). The results showed that prior to the educational event, the majority of the recipients thought that they didn't have enough knowledge about MERS-Corona Virus (54.5%). However, after the event, the majority agreed that they have enough knowledge about MERS-CoV, McNemar's Test (P = 0.000). In addition, the findings regarding transmission routes showed that the majority of recipients didn't know any of the transmission routes (33.3%), on the other hand, after the event 78% of the recipients were aware of all the transmission routes, McNemar's Test (P = 0.000). The next result showed that, most recipients knew about the symptoms associated with MERS-Corona Virus in pretest (51.5%), additively, the majority showed that they knew about these symptoms, but their knowledge improved compared to pre-test (90.9%), McNemar's Test (P = 0.001). When it comes to prevention, most recipients chose washing hands as preventive methods (33.3%) in pretest. However, the results after the event showed that recipients were aware of all of the preventive methods, but without statistical significance, McNemar's Test (P = 0.424). Finally, the pretest regarding the best educational methods showed that all the strategic methods were effective to educate about MERS-Corona Virus (75.8%). The percentage increased in the post-test (84.4%) but without statistical significance, McNemar's Test (P = 0.375) (see Table 2). Future research should focus more on comprehensive educational interventions that are needed to facilitate adoption of precautions associated with MERS-COV, and more follow up studies to see if these educational interventions promote changes in knowledge and behavior of students.
References
Center of Disease and Control (2015). Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS). Retrieved from: http://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/mers/.
Haagmans, B. L., Al Dhahiry, S. H., Reusken, C. B., Raj, V. S., Galiano, M., Myers, R.,… & Koopmans, M. P. (2014). Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus in dromedary camels: an outbreak investigation. The Lancet infectious diseases, 14(2), 140–145.
Reusken, C. B., Farag, E. A., Jonges, M., Godeke, G. J., El-Sayed, A. M., Pas, S. D., & Koopmans, M. P. (2014). Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) RNA and neutralising antibodies in milk collected according to local customs from dromedary camels, Qatar, April 2014. Euro Surveill, 19(23), pii20829.
World Heath Organization (2015). Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) – Qatar. Retrieved from: http://www.who.int/csr/don/11-february-2015-mers-qatar/en/. On: November 12, 2015.
World Heath Organization (2015). Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) – Republic of Korea. Retrieved from: http://www.who.int/csr/don/25-october-2015-mers-korea/en/. On: November 12, 2015.
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Picture Archive Communication (PAC) System with extended Image Analysis and 3D Visualization for Cardiac Abnormality
المؤلفون: Rahmita Wirza RahmatPAC system is extending increasingly from the now well-established radiology applications into a hospital-wide PACS. New challenges are accompanying its spread into other clinical fields. With awareness of the importance of PAC systems among various medical experts, this system has been enhanced through the PAC system's pipeline, and simplification of image display for analysis via an interaction with the user. Generally PAC system consists of medical image, patients' data acquisition, storage, and display subsystems integrated by digital networks and application software. PAC system facilitates the systematic utilization of medical imaging for patient care. However, even though PAC system consist of medical image, data acquisition, storage and display subsystems, most of available PAC system does not have image analysis as required by the clinical expert. If the PAC system do have this element, it need interaction or interference from the clinical expert as user, and the PAC system storage mostly is an unstructured storage with no analysis element and report modules. And unfortunately in most cases, for the web-based PAC system, there are delayed in retrieval and visualize the required image from outside of the hospital. Most of the PACS with function of 3D display, it did not communicate information clearly and efficiently to users (clinical expert). Most of the visualization did not visual accurate information as required by the clinical expert. These listed constraints limited the clinical expert perspective regarding his/her decision.
From market validation observation we concluded that most of the PAC system available in market does not have medical image processing functions for the purposes of decision analysis with minimum user interaction. Research towards this limitation has been conducted in accordance with the needs of clinical experts. Among these studies are: (i) angiography image processing for stenosis position detection and measurement of its dimensions, (ii) echocardiography image processing for detection of ventricular cardiac abnormalities (walls and volume) and (iii) 2D angiography images reconstructed to 3D images for display purposes and to identify the location of artery tree.
With the result of these studies, the PAC system will integrate with extra modules, which are: i) 3D reconstruction function from single image angiogram with identification of the stenosis location, ii) Identification of abnormality heart wall chamber, iii) 3D reconstruction echocardiography left and right ventricular heart, and iv) 3D fused within CTA, angiography and MRI.
As stated above, the common limitation for the web-based PAC system is the delayed in retrieval and visualize the required image from outside of the hospital/clinics. To overcome this limitation, we proposed a technique and integrated a related function for faster transmission of the processed image without sacrifice any importance information. And to complete the PAC system so that the new PAC system able to compete with current PAC system that available in market, we link the PACS with our Patients Clinical Record Database with report modules as required by the medical expert.
The outputs of all those said researches will be integrated with the PAC system where each research output has been tested and validate by numbers of cardiac expert, the patients clinical record database has been tested in UKMMC and the PAC system currently being beta tested in a Private Clinic in Kelang, Selangor, Malaysia. Eventually the PAC system with the Patients Clinical Record Database will be integrated with these image analysis and 3D image visualization and it is plan to be tested in Veterinary Hospital of Universiti Putra Malaysia.
To forward this project to commercialization activity, we have distributed questioners to Clinics in area Bangi (Selangor, Malaysia) and Nilai (Negeri Sembilan, Malaysia). There are 58 Medical, Veterinary and Dental Clinics received the questioner (currently we expand the distribution towards Serdang and Kajang (Selangor, Malaysia). Out of 58 clinics; a) 16% interested to collaborate and looking forward to see PAC system, b)8% interested with the PAC system but do not willing to have any demo, c) 44% not interested but open for demo of system, d) 28% not interested and not willing to have demo system and e) 4% return the form without answered for that particular question.
To secure and protect the ownership, each research output has been submitted for Patent filed in Malaysia and with three chosen country, where 2 of the patent filed has been granted in Malaysia. We also copyrighted each module. This project has been selected by Universiti Putra Malaysia to be commercialized by a startup company seeded by UPM (CASD Medical Private Limited) under program INNOHUB.
We realize to implement the complete PAC system in Hospital there are 10 main problems exist that we might need to overcome or try to minimize the consequences. These problems are; i) Integration with the Hospital Information System. Although a lack of inter-vendor device and IT integration can often make the problem worse, the market is improving as providers and meaningful use demand greater integration. Unfortunately, still, many radiologists and PACS administrators prefer to make full use of hospital IT to configure their own systems and achieve a bit more autonomy, ii) Every system has downtime where we need to establish alternate workflows. Both scheduled and unscheduled, but they need not have to be too serious to minimize the effect on patient care, iii) Non-standardized hanging protocol display is a common and pesky challenge for PACS users. Images from different modalities are not organized by default even though each of them generally will be transmitted through DICOM format getaway, each study takes a little longer to read. As the number of scanners increases and the sample of vendors expands, the problem grows worse, iv) Integration problems concern hardware, from digitizing pre-DICOM modalities to integrating systems for advanced image reconstruction. Add-ons like a DICOM converter can help squeeze out additional value from older CT, angiography and fluoroscopy systems, v) As with downtime, failures are unavoidable, there is a need to demonstrate strong support activities, vi) Effective training can be a cost-effective way to demonstrate to administrators and physicians many of PACS' underused and undervalued features. Training wil help to expose staff to what the system can do to make their jobs easier and more efficient, vii) The migration of data to the new PACS is often the most challenging part of the process, both in negotiating the release of data from the current PACS and in sorting out all the data entry errors that have accumulated over the lifespan of the system, viii) As other specialties realize the value of PACS, the system is slowly being taken out of radiologists' hands. PACS has become a mission-critical enterprise-wide tool used by nearly all specialties. With this change, decision-making for PACS-related purchases, upgrades and configurations has, in some cases, shifted from radiologists to a more central process, ix) Hiring a certified public ergonomist to evaluate the department's workstations can ease radiologists' repetitive stress symptoms and contribute substantially to productivity. Despite accelerating advances in technology, many interface tools have changed little since the introduction of PACS, and finally x) Like business continuity, disaster recovery can prevent a painful experience from becoming fatal. Many hospitals opt for either redundant servers, cloud storage or both. At the very least, preparation for downtime can spare physicians and patients from experiencing significant losses.
To minimize the consequences of the listed 10 main problems, this project (in early stage) targeting potential customers among the owner of the small private clinics where the numbers of patients is less and the bureaucracy of the administration is limited.
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Public-Key Cryptosystem Based on Invariants of Groups
المؤلفون: Frantisek Marko, Martin Juras and Alexandr N. ZubkovThe presented work falls within one of Qatar's Research Grand Challenges, namely the area of Cyber Security. We have designed a new public-key cryptosystem that can improve the security of communication networks. This new cryptosystem combines two important ideas. The first idea is the difficulty of finding an invariant of infinite diagonalizable group. More specifically, for the coding purposes, we build an infinite diagonalizable group that has a given polynomial invariant of high degree. One possible attack on this cryptosystem is to find an invariant of this group. However, during the design of the system we guarantee that the minimal degree of invariants of this group is very high which makes the direct attempt to find any invariant using linear algebra techniques computationally expensive. The second idea is based on our discovery that when working over the ring Z of integers, another attack to break the cryptosystem is possible. This attack is based on replacing the prime factorization of integers by finding a factorization of “atoms” and can be implemented using the Euclidean algorithm. Similar algorithm works for rings that are unique factorization domains. To prevent this type of attack, we work over number fields that are not unique factorization domains (there are many such suitable number fields of small degrees). By doing so we invoke the well-known problem of prime factorization (used in commercial cryptosystems like RSA) which becomes principally more complicated over number fields that are not unique factorization domains. We have also showed that similar system based on finite diagonalizable groups are not secure against attack because such a system can be broken in polynomial time using an algorithm that finds a root of every polynomial p(x) with complex coefficients such that all of its roots are roots of unity. All invariants considered for diagonalizable groups are linear combinations of monomial invariants. The situation is more complicated for diagonalizable supergroups. Since it could improve the safety of the cryptosystem, we also investigated the case of supergroups and derived theoretical results about the minimal degrees of invariants. Since the diagonalizable supergroups enjoy more complicated structural properties, a cryptosystem based on them would be even more secured. In order to move to the supergroups, a better understanding of general linear supergroups was desired. We have established theoretical results describing and proving the linkage principle for these supergroups and we gained an understanding how are the composition factors of highest weight modules related. For the future work, we plan to implement the algorithm for the public-key cryptosystem that we have designed and test the speed of coding and test the security of the system by determining the time and space complexities of known attacks of the system.
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Fast Prototyping of KNN Based Gas Discrimination System on the Zynq SoC
Electronic noses (EN) or machine olfaction are systems used for the detection and identification of odorous compounds and gas mixtures. The accuracy of such systems is as important as the processing time. Therefore, the choice of the algorithm and the implementation platform are both crucial. In this abstract, a design and implementation of a gas identification system on the Zynq platform which shows promising results is presented. The Zynq-7000 based platforms are increasingly being used in different applications including image and signal processing. The Zynq system on chip (SoC) architecture combines a processing system based on a dual core ARM Cortex processor with a programmable logic (PL) based on a Xilinx 7 series field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). Using the Zynq platform, real-time hardware acceleration of classification algorithms can be performed on the PL and controlled by a software running on the ARM-based processing system (PS). The gas identification system is based on a 16-Array SnO2 in-house fabricated gas sensor and k-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) for classification. The KNN algorithm is executed on the PL for hardware acceleration. The implementation takes the form of an IP developed in C and synthesized using Vivado High Level Synthesis (HLS), the synthesis includes the conversion from C to register transfer level (RTL). The implementation requires the creation of a hardware design for the entire system that allows the execution of the IP on the PL and the remaining parts of the identification system on the PS. The hardware design is developed in Vivado using IP Integrator. The communication between the PS and PL is performed using advanced extensible interface protocol (AXI). A software application is written and executed on the ARM processor to control the hardware acceleration on the PL of the previously designed IP core and the board is programmed using Software Development Kit (SDK). An overview of the system architecture can be seen in Figure 1. The system is designed to discriminate five types of gases including C6H6, CH2O, CO, NO2 and SO2 at various concentrations, from 0.25 to 5 parts per million (ppm) for C6H6 and CH2O, from 5 to 200 ppm for CO, from 1 to 10 ppm for NO2 and finally from 1 to 25 ppm for SO2. The experimental setup used in the laboratory to collect the data is shown in Figure 2. It consists of a gas chamber where the sensor array is placed. The gas chamber has two orifices, one to serve as an input for the in-flow of gases and the other one as an exhaust to evacuate the gases. Multiple gases are stored in various cylinders and connected to the gas chamber individually through several Mass Flow Controllers (MFCs). A control unit is connected to the MFCs to control the in-flow of gases and to the sensor array via a Data Acquisition (DAQ) system to collect and sample the response of the sensor array. In total, 192 samples are collected, 50% is used for training and the other 50% is used for testing. Simulations were performed in MATLAB environment prior to the implementation on the hardware where different k values have been used. The Euclidean distance has been used as a metric for the computation of distances between various points. The best results were obtained for k = 1 and k = 2 with a classification accuracy of 97.91% and 98.95% respectively. The system implemented on hardware is based on k = 1 since the accuracies are almost similar while the hardware resources required for k = 2 are much higher than for k = 1. This can be explained by the fact that in the case of k = 2 we need to sort the vector of distances to be able to find the nearest two neighbours while in k = 1 we only need to find the smallest distance. The target hardware implementation platform of the proposed KNN is the heterogeneous Zynq SoC. The implementation is based on the use of Vivado HLS. A summary of the design flow is presented in Figure 3. The starting point is Vivado HLS where the KNN block is converted from C/C++ implementation to a RTL based IP core. This allows a considerable gain in development time without scarifying on high parallelism characteristics because Vivado HLS provides a large number of powerful optimization directives. The generated IP-core is then exported and stored in the Xilinx IP Catalog before being used in Vivado IP Integrator to create the hardware block design with all needed components and interconnections. The next step is to export the generated hardware along with IP drivers to the SDK tool. The SDK tool is used to program the Xilinx ZC702 prototyping board via joint test action group (JTAG) interface and the terminal in SDK is used to communicate with the board via universal asynchronous receiver/transmitter (UART) interface. The KNN IP is implemented on the PL of the Zynq SoC and communicates with the PS part via the Xilinx AXI-Interconnect IP. A software is written in C/C++ and executed on the PS to manage the IP present in the PL in terms of sending the input data, waiting for the interrupt and then reading the output data. The block design and the resulting chip layout are shown in Figure 4. It is worth mentioning that the running frequency for the ARM processor is set to the maximum 667MHz while the PL frequency is set to 100 MHz which is the maximum for the KNN IP generated in HLS. The real execution of KNN on the PL side of the ZC702 board shows that one sample can be processed for gas identification in 0.0078 ms while the same sample requires 0.9228 ms if executes on the PS side in the ARM processor in a pure software manner. This means that a speed up of 118 times has been achieved. The main directive in Vivado HLS that helped to reach these performances is the “Loop pipelining” which allows the operations in a loop to be implemented in a concurrent manner. The hardware resources usage can be seen in Figure 5, it shows that 24% of lookup tables (LUT), 12% of flip-flops (FF), 6% of BRAM and 58% DSP have been used. As shown in Figure 6, the total power consumption is 1.895 W, 1.565 W is consumed by the PS and the remaining 0.33W is consumed by the PL.
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Robust Controller and Fault Diagnoser Design for Linear Systems with Event-based Communication
المؤلفون: Nader Meskin, Mohammadreza Davoodi and Kash KhorasaniIn order to improve the effectiveness and safety of control systems, the problem of integrated fault diagnosis and control (IFDC) design has attracted significant attention in the recent years, both in the research and in the application domains. The integrated design unifies the control and diagnosis units into a single unit which leads to less complexity as compared to the case of separate designs. Nowadays, the IFDC modules are implemented on digital platforms. However, in almost all of these implementations, the IFDC task is executed periodically with a constant sampling period, which is called “time-triggering” sampling. However, the time-triggering sampling scheme produces many useless messages if the current sampled signal has not significantly changed in contrast to the previous sampled signal, which leads to a conservative usage of the communication bandwidth. This is especially disadvantageous in applications where the measured outputs and/or the actuator signals have to be transmitted over a shared (and possibly wireless) communication network, where the bandwidth of the network (and power consumption of the wireless radios) should be constrained. To mitigate the unnecessary waste of computation and communication resources in conventional time-triggered IFDC design, the problem of event-triggered integrated fault diagnosis and control (E-IFDC) for discrete-time linear systems is considered in this paper. A single E-IFDC module based on a dynamic filter is proposed which produces two signals, namely the residual and the control signals. The parameters of the E-IFDC module should be designed such that the effects of disturbances on the residual signals are minimized (for accomplishing the fault detection objective) subject to the constraint that the mapping matrix function from the faults to the residuals is equal to a pre- assigned diagonal mapping matrix (for accomplishing the fault isolation objective), while the effects of disturbances and faults on the specified control output are minimized (for accomplishing the fault-tolerant control objective). Two event-triggered conditions are proposed and designed to reduce the transmissions from the sensor to the E- IFDC module and from the E-IFDC module to the actuator. These event-triggered conditions determine whether the newly measured data or control output, respectively, should be transmitted or not. Indeed, the sensor measurement (controller output) is sent to the E-IFDC module (actuator) only when the difference between the latest transmitted sensor (controller) value and the current sensor measurement (controller output) is sufficiently large as compared to the current sensor (controller) value. This property reduces the burden on the network communication and saves the communication bandwidth in the network. Consequently, it is possible to significantly reduce the usage of communication resources for diagnosis and control tasks as compared to a conventional time-triggered IFDC approach. A multi-objective formulation of the problem is presented based on the H∞ and H- performance indices. The sufficient conditions for solvability of the problem are obtained in terms of linear matrix inequality (LMI) feasibility conditions. Indeed, the filter parameters and the event-triggered conditions are simultaneously obtained using strict LMI conditions. The main advantage of the proposed LMI formulation is that it is convex, and is therefore solved effectively using interior-point methods. Application of our methodology to a linearized model of the Subzero III ROV is presented to illustrate the effectiveness and capabilities of our proposed methodology. Remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) are underwater robotic platforms that have become increasingly important tools in a wide range of applications including offshore oil operations, fisheries research, dam inspection, salvage operations, military applications, among others. Since transmission resources are limited under water, using an event-triggered scheme for communication is more efficient. Therefore, the results of this paper are applied for designing an event-triggered IFDC module for the Subzero III ROV.
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Annotation Guidelines and Framework for Arabic Machine Translation Post-Edited Corpus
المؤلفون: Wajdi Zaghouani, Nizar Habash, Ossama Obeid, Behrang Mohit, Houda Bouamor and Kemal Oflazer1. Introduction
Machine translation (MT) became widely used by translation companies to reduce their costs and improve their speed. Therefore, the demand for quick and accurate machine translations is growing. Machine translation (MT) systems often produce incorrect output with many grammatical and lexical choice errors. Correcting machine-produced translation errors, or MT Post-Editing (PE) can be done automatically or manually.
The availability of annotated resources is required for such approaches. When it comes to the Arabic language, to the best of our knowledge, there is no MT manually post-edited corpora available to build such systems. Therefore, there is a clear need to build such valuable resources for the Arabic language. In this abstract, we present our guidelines and annotation procedure to create a human corrected MT corpus for the Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). The creation of any manually annotated corpus usually presents many challenges. In order to address these challenges, we created a comprehensive and simplified annotation guidelines which were used by a team of five annotators and one lead annotator. In order to ensure a high annotation agreement between the annotators, multiple training sessions were held and regular inter annotator agreement (IAA) measures were performed to check the annotation quality
2. Corpus
We collected a corpus of 100K of English news article taken from the collaborative journalism Wikinews website. Afterwards, the corpus collected was automatically translated from English to Arabic using the Google Translate API paid service.
3. Guidelines
In order to annotate the MT corpus, we use the general annotation correction guidelines we designed previously for L1 described in Zaghouani et al. (2014) and we add specific MT post-editing correction rules. In the general correction guidelines we place the errors to be corrected into seven categories: spelling, word choice, morphology, syntax, proper names, dialectal usage and punctuation. We refer to Zaghouani et al. (2014) for more details about these errors. In the MT post-editing guidelines, we provide the annotators with detailed annotation procedure and explain how to deal with borderline cases. We include many annotated examples to illustrate some specific cases of machine translation correction rules. Since there are equally-accurate alternative ways to edit the machine translation output, all being considered correct, some using fewer edits than others, we explained in the guidelines that the machine translated texts should be corrected with a minimum number of edits necessary to achieve an acceptable translation quality. However, correcting the accuracy errors and producing a semantically coherent text is more important than minimizing the number of edits and therefore, the annotators were asked to pay attention to the following three aspects: accuracy, fluency and style.
4. Annotation Pipeline
The annotation team consisted of a lead annotator and six annotators. The lead annotator is also the annotation workflow manager of this project. He frequently evaluate the quality of the annotation, monitor and report on the annotation progress. A clearly defined protocol is set, including a routine for the Post-editing annotation job assignment and the inter-annotator agreement evaluation. The lead annotators is also responsible of the corpus selection and normalization process beside the annotation of the gold standard to be used to compute the Inter-Annotator Agreement (IAA) portion of the corpus.
The annotation itself is done using an in house built web annotation framework built originally for the manual correction of errors in L1 and L2 texts (Obeid et al., 2013). This framework includes two major components: 1. The annotation management interface which is used to assist the lead annotator in the general work-flow process, it allows the user to upload, assign, monitor, evaluate and export annotation tasks. 2. The MT post-editing annotation interface is the actual annotation tool, which allows the annotators to do the manual correction of the MT Arabic output.
5. Evaluation
The low average WER of 4.92 obtained show a high agreement with the post-editing done in the first round between three annotators. The results obtained with the MT are comparable to those obtained with the L2 corpus, this can be explained by the difficult nature of both corpora and the multiple acceptable corrections for both.
6. Related Work
Large scale manually corrected MT corpora are not yet widely available due to the high cost related to building such resources. For the Arabic language, we cite the effort of Bouamor et al. (2014) who created a medium scale human judgment corpus of Arabic machine translation using the output of six MT systems and a total of 1892 sentences and 22k rankings. Our corpus is a part of the Qatar Arabic Language Bank (QALB) project, a large scale manually annotated annotation project (Zaghouani et al., 2014; Zaghouani et al., 2015). The project goal was to create an error corrected 2M-word corpus for online user comments on news websites, native speaker essays, non-native speaker essays and machine translation output.
7. Conclusion
We have presented in detail the methodology used to create a 100K word English to Arabic MT manually post-edited corpus, including the development of the guidelines as well as the annotation procedure and the quality control procedure using frequent inter-annotator measures. The created guidelines will be made publicly available and we look forward to distribute the post-edited corpus in a planned shared task on automatic error correction and getting feedback from the community on its usefulness as it was in the previous shared tasks we organized for the L1 and L2 corpus (Mohit et al., 2014; Rozovskaya et al., 2015).We believe that this corpus will be valuable to advance research efforts in the machine translation area since manually annotated data is often needed by the MT community. We believe that our methodology for guideline development and annotation consistency checking can be applied in other projects and other languages as well.
8. Acknowledgement
This project is supported by the National Priority Research Program (NPRP grant 4-1058-1-168) of the Qatar National Research Fund (a member of the Qatar Foundation). The statements made herein are solely the responsibility of the authors.
9. References
Obeid, O., Zaghouani, W., Mohit, B., Habash, N., Oflazer,K., and Tomeh, N. (2013). A Web-based Annotation Framework For Large-Scale Text Correction. In The Companion Volume of the Proceedings of IJCNLP 2013: System Demonstrations, Nagoya, Japan, October.
Mohit, B., Rozovskaya, A., Habash, N., Zaghouani, W., and Obeid, O. (2014). The first QALB shared task on automatic text correction for Arabic. ANLP 2014, page 39.
Rozovskaya Alla; Houda Bouamor; Nizar Habash; Wajdi Zaghouani; Ossama Obeid; Behrang Mohit. The Second QALB Shared Task on Automatic Text Correction for Arabic. In Proceedings of the ACL 2015 Workshop on Arabic Natural Language Processing (ANLP), Beijing, China, July 2015.
Zaghouani, W., Mohit, B., Habash, N., Obeid, O., Tomeh,N., Rozovskaya, A., Farra, N., Alkuhlani, S., and Oflazer, K. (2014). Large scale Arabic error annotation: Guidelines and framework. In International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2014).
Zaghouani, W., Habash, N., Bouamor, H., Rozovskaya, A., Mohit, B., Heider, A., and Oflazer, K. (2015). Correction annotation for non-native Arabic texts: Guidelines and corpus. Proceedings of The 9th Linguistic Annotation Workshop, pages 129-139.
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Crowd Inventing: An Innovation about Innovation
المؤلفون: Clinton FrancisThis paper presents the blueprint for the design of a practical system that would promote sharing of ideas among researchers, to allow them to identify optimal partners, to protect their intellectual capital, to ensure attribution of their ideas and to create equitable sharing in the ownership and revenue of any eventual commercializable invention. The title, Crowd Inventing, reflects the fact that the signaling among researchers in search of best partners – the “crowd” – is itself an inventive element in their larger enterprise. The combination of legal and technological components that the Crowd Inventing system offers allows it to reduce the transaction costs of this search. It is an invention about the inventive process that promises theoretical and practical advantages that will hopefully attract research sponsors or private enterprise to invest in promising projects and to thereby better promote and reward innovation. Qatar's rich research environment and entrepreneurial aspirations make it an ideal forum to implement the Crowd Inventing system as a platform that will allow it to capitalize on its investments through commercialization of products and processes. Crowd Inventing is designed to help researchers and innovators:
• Find valuable complementary ideas and research collaborators that are missing from their research team and that threaten to impair or, worse still, cripple their project. The drive to commercialization of research, as well as the basic goal of ensuring attribution of one's research, confronts huge challenges when all the inventive elements are not part of one large enterprise that has designed its own proprietary signaling and invention protection system. The open community of researchers who publish in conferences and journals confronts these challenges, with the result that researchers engage in greater secrecy that limits communication and impairs collaboration and, if they do publish, of losing all attribution and commercial value to the inventor who builds a successful product on their ideas.
• Address the inability of intellectual property to protect against a downstream user's failure to attribute or share revenue. Intellectual property imposes little or no legal obligations on such users to attribute the source of the ideas they employ. It also focuses all reward on the last person to combine the inventive ideas into a final, commercializable product; there is no legal requirement of sharing revenues with contributors that fall outside its corporate or contractual network. Neither copyright nor trademark protect the functional ideas that a researcher discloses in his/her publications. These ideas are deemed to pass into the public domain to become free for competitors to use. Nor do they provide the researcher adequate protection against false attribution. As a result, a downstream user can pluck the idea from the public domain, use it without attributing its source, and even itself claim full attribution.
• Reach their patent goal. Patent law provides researchers with protection for their novel functional ideas, but its reduction-to-practice requirement means that the proprietary reward that it offers is very distant from many research projects. In many areas of innovation the authors lack the collaboration and capital to put together all of the pieces, with the result that the entity adding the last needed element can capture the full commercial benefit of the invention. In a world where ever-increasingly complex projects result in cost-prohibitive and prolonged research and the demanding search for collaborators to stay the course to eventual invention, the patent hurdle produces huge unintended consequences. Increased secrecy is one consequence and this has strong negative effects on publication and on the signaling required to find the missing elements for successful invention. Large enterprises whose rich financial and human capital is congregated in a single corporate silo often emerge as the winners in this environment – and when they do achieve a patent they have the financial resources to protect and defend their resulting property rights. However, academic or disbursed research communities do not typically have these resources or systems in place to compete. Even though their decentralized structure and flexibility mean they are increasingly the sites of path-breaking discovery, they are unable to successful achieve patenting and their ideas pass to others to commercialize them or to fade into obscurity. The proposed Crowd Inventing system crafts a legal and a technological solution that offers the following practical solutions to research and innovation problems:
• The signaling mechanism needed for successful collaboration; more effective sharing of ideas; full attribution to all contributors; equitable sharing in the rewards of patenting; and the enhanced ability to attract financial investment to projects. Researchers that subscribe to Crown Inventing would contractually enter the system through a master agreement that defines and protects member's attribution and revenue-sharing rights. Underlying this is a technological information-sharing platform whereby data is shared in standardized form and access is monitored and controlled using a system of digital management that would help secure and control information flows. The researcher submitting the information (the source) could track access to its information and ensure attribution, while the user could more easily verify the lineage of ideas and link it more closely to the reputation of its source. Thereby both sides could gain. The Crowd Inventing master agreement would also supply contractual templates to provide standardized resolution of the revenue sharing aspects of any resulting joint ventures and its trained intermediaries could facilitate agreements, either of which could be less expensive than employing the lawyers and the other professionals that typically exact heavy taxes on every venture or technology transfer transaction.
• The means to find out the conditions under which the research data was generated and to identify and approach the source through the clearing function of the information sharing system. Once the parties had identified themselves they could begin to work together to learn more about one another's work and address the terms of any relationship between them based on this information. The Crown Inventing System anticipates the contractual needs of their relationship facilitating an ensuing master agreement which avoids the potentially long delays of initial contracting. (If necessary the identity of the source could be held back until a formal approach is made by the interested party to the source).
• The apparatus to more successfully monitor and publish the reputations of the members of its user community. Crowd Inventing would facilitate a community where not only the reputation of products (academic or applied) could be charted by registering the number of transactions, but also the reputations of companies and academic labs as joint venture partners (their good faith and candor) could be logged thereby creating a system of accountability and verifiable reputation.
• The means to create a “market” based on failed experiments conducted by other researchers in related areas. While the Crown Inventing system is designed principally to promote maximum innovation and successful invention, it could also be adapted to create a “market” based on failed or stalled experiments conducted by other researchers in related areas. Currently there is a dearth of communication within the scientific community concerning unsuccessful experiments and failed hypotheses. Only successful experiments are published; scientists do not expose their failures perhaps out of fear that it will lower their prestige and because of a lack of an appropriate, widely-disseminated forum for this purpose. The Crowd Inventing system could be used to address sharing of information about failed or shelved experiments as readily as it could regarding successful experiments, and in the process it could create market value for such information.
• A useful complement to the internal governance structure of large corporations. While it is contemplated that the Crown Inventing system would be ideally suited to communities of scattered researchers or small independent companies, it could also be employed as a useful complement to the internal governance structure of large corporations. Such enterprises confront at the level of their inter-departmental relationships, problems of how to share information between departments, employee attribution, what budgets to set for each department, and the departments, compensations, which the Crown Inventing system could address. In summary, Crowd Inventing aspires to offer the research community a solution to the impediments to collaborative communication and the inequities of an intellectual property system that rewards the last contributor and that fails to protect attribution of prior inputs. In the process it promises to help researchers more easily find the collaborators and commercial funding and other resources they need to reach invention. It is itself an academic-conceived invention that with adequate community or commercial funding could become a reality that makes Qatar a leader in facilitating innovation. This proposal is led by Professor Clinton Francis, the Founding Dean of the Hamad bin Khalifa University, who is joined by HBKU Juris Doctorate students who will assist in conducting the research for, and design of, Crowd Inventing – an innovation about innovation.
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