Sharif Digital Repository

Mechanical ventilation (MV) can result in long-term brain impairments that are resistant to treatment. The mechanisms underlying MV-induced brain function impairment remain unclear. Since nasal airflow modulates brain activity, here we evaluated whether reinstating airflow during MV could influence the memory performance of rats after recovery. Rats were allocated into two study groups: one group received rhythmic air-puff into the nasal cavity during MV and a control group that underwent ventilation without air-puff. During MV, air-puffs induced time-locked event potentials in OB, mPFC and vHPC and significantly increased the oscillatory activity at the air-puff frequency. Furthermore, in... 

Over the past few decades, gold nanomaterials have shown great promise in the field of nanotechnology, especially in medical and biological applications. They have become the most used nanomaterials in those fields due to their several advantageous. However, rod-shaped gold nanoparticles, or gold nanorods (GNRs), have some more unique physical, optical, and chemical properties, making them proper candidates for biomedical applications including drug/gene delivery, photothermal/photodynamic therapy, and theranostics. Most of their therapeutic applications are based on their ability for tunable heat generation upon exposure to near-infrared (NIR) radiation, which is helpful in both... 

The ability to speak lucidly plays a key role in social relations. Consequently, the role of the larynx is quite important, and timely diagnosis of laryngeal diseases has proved to be crucial. In this study, a simple computational model for inverse of speech production model is employed to extract the glottal waveform using speech signal. This waveform has useful information about vocal folds performance in terms of providing evidence for distinguishing pathological disorders. Furthermore, obtaining the significance of classification results is important, because it leads to reliable inferences. This study utilizes the sustained vowel sound /a/ and a well-referenced database, namely MEEI. In... 

Meshless methods are a relatively new type of numerical methods that have attracted the attention of many researchers over the past years. So far, a number of meshless methods have been developed and applied to solve problems in various fields of engineering, including solid mechanics and geotechnical problems. The Element-Free Galerkin (EFG) method is adopted in this study for solving the governing partial differential equations of equilibrium and continuity of pore fluid flow for numerical simulation of coupled hydro-mechanical problems. For this purpose, the weak form of the governing equations is derived by applying the weighted residual method and Galerkin technique. The penalty method...