A Game-Theoretic Approach to Safe Crowd Evacuation in Emergencies

Obstacle removal in crowd evacuation is critical to safety and the evacuation system efficiency. Recently, manyresearchers proposed game theoreticmodels to avoid and remove obstacles for crowd evacuation. Game theoreticalmodels aim to study and analyze the strategic behaviors of individuals within a crowd and their interactionsduring the evacuation. Game theoretical models have some limitations in the context of crowd evacuation. Thesemodels consider a group of individuals as homogeneous objects with the same goals, involve complex mathematicalformulation, and cannot model real-world scenarios such as panic, environmental information, crowds that movedynamically, etc. The proposed work presents a game theoretic model integrating an agent-based model to removethe obstacles from exits. The proposed model considered the parameters named: (1) obstacle size, length, andwidth, (2) removal time, (3) evacuation time, (4) crowd density, (5) obstacle identification, and (6) route selection.The proposed work conducts various experiments considering different conditions, such as obstacle types, obstacleremoval, and several obstacles. Evaluation results show the proposed model’s effectiveness compared with existingliterature in reducing the overall evacuation time, cell selection, and obstacle removal. The study is potentially usefulfor public safety situations such as emergency evacuations during disasters and calamities.

IGF2 ApaI A/G Polymorphism Evaluated in ESRD Individuals as a Biomarker to Identify Patients with New Onset Diabetes Mellitus after Renal Transplant in Asian Indians

Insulin like growth factors2 (IGF2) regulates pancreatic β-cell renewal and apoptosis, which in turn plays a role in altering insulin activity and glucose homeostasis. Polymorphisms in IGF2 gene have been associated with altered levels of IGF2. Hence, ApaI polymorphism in exon 9 of IGF2 (rs#680) gene was assessed in patients with end stage renal disease (ESRD) to identify individuals at risk of developing new onset diabetes mellitus (NODM) in Asian Indians. Isolated DNA was used for PCR&RFLP based genotyping of IGF2 ApaI polymorphism which was carried out in 364 individuals these included 140 patients who had undergone renal transplant, 42 of which developed new onset diabetes mellitus after renal transplant and 224 healthy control volunteers. In the present study NODM or post transplant diabetes mellitus (PTDM) showed a significant association with G allele and AG genotype when compared with the Non-NODM ESRD patients after transplant (OR 2.081, 95% CI = 1.191 - 3.634, p = 0.01 and OR 3.188, 95% CI = 1.498 - 6.785, p = 0.002) ESRD patients with healthy controls also showed an association with G allele and AG genotype (OR 1.512, 95% CI = 1.060 - 2.155, p = 0.02 and OR 2.235, 95% CI = 1.453 - 3.438, p = 0.0002). IGF2 could be used as a biomarker to identify individuals at high risk of developing NODM, it would be a valuable asset in selecting appropriate immunosuppressive regimens for individuals undergoing transplant. Present study shows the importance of IGF2 ApaI polymorphism in assessing the risk of NODM in ESRD individuals in Asian Indians with ESRD.

Adaptive Multi-Cost Routing Protocol to Enhance Lifetime for Wireless Body Area Network

Wireless Body Area Network(WBAN)technologies are emerging with extensive applications in several domains.Health is a fascinating domain of WBAN for smart monitoring of a patient’s condition.An important factor to consider in WBAN is a node’s lifetime.Improving the lifetime of nodes is critical to address many issues,such as utility and reliability.Existing routing protocols have addressed the energy conservation problem but considered only a few parameters,thus affecting their performance.Moreover,most of the existing schemes did not consider traffic prioritization which is critical in WBANs.In this paper,an adaptive multi-cost routing protocol is proposed with a multi-objective cost function considering minimum distance from sink,temperature of sensor nodes,priority of sensed data,and maximum residual energy on sensor nodes.The performance of the proposed protocol is compared with the existing schemes for the parameters:network lifetime,stability period,throughput,energy consumption,and path loss.It is evident from the obtained results that the proposed protocol improves network lifetime and stability period by 30%and 15%,respectively,as well as outperforms the existing protocols in terms of throughput,energy consumption,and path loss.

Effect of kappa distribution on the damping rate of the obliquely propagating magnetosonic mode

Data from spacecrafts suggest that space plasma has an abundance of suprathermal particles which are controlled by the spectral index κ when modeled on kappa particle velocity distribution. In this paper, considering homogeneous plasma, the effect of integer values of κ on the damping rate of an obliquely propagating magnetosonic（MS） wave is studied. The frequency of the MS wave is assumed to be less than ion cyclotron frequency, i.e.,iw（28）w. Under this assumption, the dispersion relation is investigated both numerically and analytically, and it is found that the real frequency of the wave is not a sensitive function of κ, but the imaginary part of the frequency is. It is also shown that for those values of κ where a large number of resonant particles participate in wave–particle interaction, the wave is heavily damped, as expected. The possible application of the results to the solar wind is discussed.

Correlation between KCNQ1 and KCNJ11 gene polymorphisms and type 2 and posttransplant diabetes mellitus in the Asian Indian population

Type 2 diabetes mellitus(T2DM)and post-transplant diabetes mellitus(PTDM)share a common pathophysiology.However,diabetes mellitus is a complex disease,and T2DM and PTDM have different etiologies.T2DM is a metabolic disorder,characterized by persistent hyperglycemia,whereas PTDM is a condition of abnormal glucose tolerance,with variable onset after organ transplant.The KCNQ1 and KCNJ11 gene encode potassium channels,which mediate insulin secretion from pancreatic b-cells,and KCN gene mutations are correlated with the development of diabetes.However,no studies have been carried out to establish an association between KCNQ1 and KCNJ11 gene polymorphisms and T2DM and PTDM.Therefore,our study was aimed at the identification of the role of KCNQ1 and KCNJ11 gene polymorphisms associated with T2DM and the risk of developing PTDM in the Asian Indian population.We have carried out a caseecontrol study including 250 patients with T2DM,250 control subjects,42 patients with PTDM and 98 subjects with non-PTDM.PCR-RFLP analysis was carried out following the isolation of genomic DNA from EDTA-blood samples.The results of the present study reveal that two single nucleotide polymorphisms(rs2283228 and rs5210,of the KCNQ1 and KCNJ11 genes,respectively)are associated with both T2DM and PTDM.The results of our study suggest a role of KCNQ1 and KCNJ11 gene variants in the increased risk of T2DM and PTDM in the Asian Indian population.