The rate of work-related musculoskeletal disorders (WRMDs) among hospital workers is approximately twice as high as that in other service industries, making it a significant cause of absenteeism and reduced productivity. The study aimed to determine the severity and extent of WRMDs among physiotherapists in United Arab Emirates (UAE) last 2 years and to specify the specialty area, task, and the most common risk factors for these injuries. Also, to identify the different coping mechanisms the physiotherapist in UAE use to deal with WRMDs. The research was conducted as a descriptive cross-sectional design between March and June 2024. A self-reported questionnaire was distributed among 202 physiotherapists in the UAE who are members of the Emirates physiotherapy society via email. The questionnaire consisted of 17 questions that includes personal and occupational history. The statistically significant was set at a p-value less than 0.05 and 95% confidence interval. 69% of physiotherapists had a WRMDs in one or more area of the body most of the injuries have been occurred in the lower back (38.6%), followed by the neck and shoulders with an equal percentage (28.7%). The highest risk factors in causing the injury were performing repetitive tasks (28.2%) and maintaining a position for a prolonged period (26.2%). With regards to coping, 32% reported utilizing their professional expertise, 40% seek medical assistance to manage their injuries. Approximately 15% preferred to take rest and 13% to do exercise. Based on the findings of this study, physiotherapists in UAE have a high rate of WRMDs attributed to their profession. Survey respondents expressed the need for a change in work habits to reduce the risk of further injuries.

OBJECTIVE:To investigate the effect of early balance training combined with traditional Phase I cardiac rehabilitation (based on circulatory, respiratory and progressive aerobic exercises) compared to Phase I cardiac rehabilitation alone, on balance, functional capacity, quality of life, length of hospital stay and adverse events in patients post coronary artery bypass graft surgery. DESIGN:Randomized controlled trial. SETTING:Cardiothoracic surgery departments from the Cairo University Hospitals. PARTICIPANTS:Adults (≥55 years) undergoing coronary artery bypass graft were randomly allocated to either an early balance training plus Phase I cardiac rehabilitation group or a Phase I cardiac rehabilitation alone group. Both groups commenced within 48 hours postoperatively and performed 30 minutes of moderate-intensity Phase I cardiac rehabilitation, thrice daily for 7 days. The cardiac rehabilitation Balance group performed an additional 5 minutes of balance training each session. MAIN MEASURES:Balance (Berg Balance Scale), functional capacity (5-Repetition-Sit-to-Stand test), quality of life (Short Form-36 Health Survey Questionnaire), length of hospital stay (number of days hospitalized) and adverse events were evaluated. RESULTS:Sixty coronary artery bypass graft patients completed the study. When compared to cardiac rehabilitation Alone group, the cardiac rehabilitation balance group significantly improved balance (39.77 ± 4.73 vs 34.03 ± 4.94, respectively, P < .001) functional capacity (11.93 ± 1.70 vs 15.97 ± 2.01, respectively, P < .001), quality of life (71.87 ± 3.21 vs 66.17 ± 2.94, respectively, P < .001) and hospital length stay (11.47 ± 1.22 vs 14.93 ± 1.36, respectively, P < .01). Additionally, both groups showed significant improvements in balance, functional capacity and quality of life. No adverse events were registered in any of the groups. CONCLUSIONS:Phase I cardiac rehabilitation plus early balance training improves balance, functional capacity, quality of life, and decreases length of hospital stay beyond that of Phase I cardiac rehabilitation alone, without an increase in adverse events.Institutional Research Committee:No: P.T.REC/012/004372Registration:clinicaltrails.gov NCT06490458).

In the context of recommendation systems, addressing multi-behavioral user interactions has become vital for understanding the evolving user behavior. Recent models utilize techniques like graph neural networks and attention mechanisms for modeling diverse behaviors, but capturing sequential patterns in historical interactions remains challenging. To tackle this, we introduce Hierarchical Masked Attention for multi-behavior recommendation (HMAR). Specifically, our approach applies masked self-attention to items of the same behavior, followed by self-attention across all behaviors. Additionally, we propose historical behavior indicators to encode the historical frequency of each items behavior in the input sequence. Furthermore, the HMAR model operates in a multi-task setting, allowing it to learn item behaviors and their associated ranking scores concurrently. Extensive experimental results on four real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Our code and datasets are available here (https://github.com/Shereen-Elsayed/HMAR).

We present Federated Access ConTrol Support (FACTS) for flexible and energy efficient IoT edge deployments. FACTS is a hybrid approach to access control that couples capability support over MQTT with TLS based security to reduce the power consumption of IoT deployments. Capability systems are lightweight and enable fine-grained access control using cryptographically secure tokens. TLS provides number of security guarantees but is expensive in terms of both time and energy when employed by resource constrained devices at the edge. By combining the two, FACTS enables IoT deployment administrators to decide where and when to use encrypted communication for access control to achieve the best trade-off between data privacy, performance, and energy efficiency. We evaluate FACTS for different deployment scenarios and show that it improves both energy use and performance relative to existing approaches.

Telogen effluvium (TE) is a common cause of hair loss characterized by excessive resting hair shedding. Thyroid dysfunction is one of the possible causes of TE. On the other hand, the link between thyroid disorder and TE is still being debated. The aim of this retrospective is to investigate the link between thyroid dysfunction and TE. This retrospective study included 500 female patients with TE who had thyroid function testing between January 2012 and December 2022. Patients were eligible if they had a confirmed TE diagnosis and thyroid function tests within 3 months of being diagnosed with TE. The thyroid function of the participants was classified as euthyroid, hypothyroidism, or hyperthyroidism. The severity of hair loss was determined using the severity of alopecia tool (SALT) score. The study included 500 TE females, 248 of whom were euthyroid, 150 had hypothyroidism, and 102 had hyperthyroidism. The hypothyroid group had a significantly higher mean SALT score than the other 2 groups. Furthermore, patients in the hypothyroid group had a higher proportion of severe hair loss. The mean SALT score did not differ significantly between groups with normal thyroid function and those with hyperthyroidism. A common cause of TE is thyroid dysfunction, particularly hypothyroidism. Patients with hypothyroidism have more severe hair loss than those with normal thyroid function or hyperthyroidism. To effectively identify and manage such cases, thyroid function testing should be included in the diagnostic workup of patients with TE.

Background: Normal labor is stressful, and the intense pain and anxiety can have an adverse effect on the mother, the fetus, and the delivery procedure. This study aimed to determine how acupressure applied to multiple acupoints during normal labor affected labor pain and anxiety in primiparous women.Method: This study was a double-blinded randomized controlled trial that involved 43 primiparous women aging 20-30 years who were referred for normal labor. Subjects were randomly allocated to one of two groups: acupressure or control. Acupressure was administered to the Large Intestine 4 (LI4), Heart 7 (He-7), and Spleen 6 (SP6) acupoints in the acupressure group, whereas sham acupressure was administered to the control group. The study assessed the mothers' anxiety levels using the Spielberger Inventory questionnaire and measured their pain levels using the visual analog scale before and after the intervention. In addition, pulse rate and blood pressure were also measured.Result: In the acupressure group, both the anxiety score and pain level showed a substantial improvement (p < 0.001), but in the control group, only the anxiety score showed a significant improvement (p < 0.001). After the intervention, the difference in anxiety and pain scores between the two groups is statistically significant (p < 0.001). Furthermore, neither group's blood pressure nor pulse rate showed any significant changes (p < 0.05).Conclusion: According to the study's findings, acupressure targeting LI4, He-7, and SP6 acupoints was effective in relieving anxiety and pain during labor. Compared with the sham acupressure group, the acupressure group showed a greater decrease in both anxiety and pain levels. As such, acupressure may be recommended as an effective, affordable, and accessible technique for managing pain and anxiety during labor. This study has been registered in the database of clinical trials under the identifier Clinicaltrials.govNCT05411289.

Thyroid hormones play essential roles in spermatogenesis, but their effects on infertile males remain poorly understood. This study aimed to evaluate the impact of combining carbimazole (CBZ) with vitamin E (VE) on testicular injury induced by experimental hyperthyroidism in adult albino rats, focusing on oxidative, inflammatory, and apoptotic pathways. In this experimental study, 64 adult male albino Wistar rats were divided into eight groups: Group I (control-untreated), Group II (CBZ-control), Group III (VE-control), Group IV (CBZ + VE-control), Group V (levothyroxine-induced testicular injury), Group VI (levothyroxine + CBZ-treated), Group VII (levothyroxine + VE-treated), and Group VIII (levothyroxine + CBZ + VE-treated). The study was conducted in the Faculty of Medicine, Suez Canal University (Ismailia, Egypt). After cervical decapitation, both testes and epididymis were examined histopathologically and immunohistochemically. Significant differences were observed among groups concerning malondialdehyde (MDA), glutathione (GSH), superoxide dismutase (SOD), and catalase (CAT; all P < 0.001). Polymerase chain reaction analysis showed significant differences in tumor necrosis factor-α (TNF- α ), interleukin-10 (IL-10), Bcl-2-associated X protein (BAX), B-cell lymphoma 2 protein (Bcl2), p53, Caspase-3, Caspase-8, Caspase-9, and nuclear factor-kappa B (NF- κ B) mRNA levels (all P < 0.001). Hyperthyroid group treated with CBZ alone (Group VI) exhibited testicular side effects, affecting seminiferous tubules and spermatogenesis. However, the Group VIII showed improved spermatogenesis and a decrease in testicular side effects. The addition of VE to the treatment of hyperthyroid rats with CBZ reduced testicular side effects and seminiferous tubular affection when potentially improving spermatogenesis. Further research is needed to elucidate the underlying mechanisms fully.

BackgroundImprovement in rehabilitation outcomes for patients suffering from chronic stroke can be attained through systematic desensitization of their fear of falling, which in turn reduces the risk of falling.PurposeThis study aimed to examine the effect of adding systematic desensitization to a goal-directed paradigm on functional performance, balance, risk of falling, and fear of falling among chronic ischemic stroke patients.MethodologyTwo equally sized groups, each comprising 40 stroke patients of both sexes, were randomly divided. For 8 weeks, Group A received three sessions per week of combined treatment consisting of systematic desensitization and a goal-directed paradigm, while Group B received only the goal-directed paradigm. The Timed Up and Go (TUG) test and Dynamic Gait Index (DGI) were used to assess function performance; the Berg Balance Scale (BBS) and the Biodex Fall Risk Index (FRI) were used to evaluate balance; and the 16-item Fall Efficacy Scale-International (FES-I) was used to evaluate fear of falling. At baseline and after the treatment, all measurements were obtained.ResultsBoth groups (A and B) revealed a substantial increase in functional performance through a decrease in TUG scores and an increase in DGI. Additionally, there was a decrease in the risk of falling through an increase in the BBS scores and a decrease in the FRI. Furthermore, there was a decrease in the fear of falling, as measured using the FES-I, after treatment, with superior improvement in Group A with a p-value of <0.001.ConclusionSystematic desensitization combined with a goal-directed paradigm has a superior effect on improving functional performance and reducing the risk of falling and the fear of falling in patients with stroke compared to a goal-directed paradigm alone.

Background: Infertility is a complex issue affecting 15% of couples of reproductive age, with men accounting for 40%-50% of infertility cases. Semen analysis comprises various descriptive measures of sperm and seminal fluid to determine semen quality. Transforming qualitative descriptions of sperm deformities and shape changes into quantitative terms can aid in identifying sub-visual abnormalities. This study aimed to evaluate sperm morphometry parameters in both infertile and fertile men. Methods and Results: The study enrolled a total of 101 participants, divided into three groups: Group A included 38 subfertile patients with varicocele, Group B included 33 patients with idiopathic infertility (23 with asthenozoospermia and 10 with oligozoospermia), and Group C (the control group) included 30 healthy fertile men. The mean age of patients was 31.6±5.81, 31.3±6.0, and 29.47±4.27 years in Groups A, B, and C, respectively. Scrotal duplex examinations were performed to identify the presence of varicocele. Semen samples were collected following WHO Manual (2010). Semen dynamic and morphological analyses were conducted using CASA (Computer-Assisted Semen Analysis, MIRALAB, ISO9001, ISO13485). We found that sperm concentration, total sperm count, sperm progressive motility, and sperm progressive+non-progressive motility were significantly lower in Group A and Group B than in Group C (P=0.000 in all cases); however, there were no differences between Group A and Group B regarding these parameters (Table 5). The sperm morphology index was significantly lower in Group A than in Group C (P=0.0024); no differences were found between Group B and Group C and Group B and Group A. The mean value of the sperm deformity index was significantly lower in Group A than in Group C P=0.004). Conclusion: Our study highlights the significant association between sperm morphology and male infertility in varicocele and idiopathic subfertile males.

Sequential recommendation models are crucial for next-item prediction tasks in various online platforms, yet many focus on a single behavior, neglecting valuable implicit interactions. While multi-behavioral models address this using graph-based approaches, they often fail to capture sequential patterns simultaneously. Our proposed Multi-Behavioral Sequential Recommendation framework (MBSRec) captures the multi-behavior dependencies between the heterogeneous historical interactions via multi-head self-attention. Furthermore, we utilize a weighted binary cross-entropy loss for precise behavior control. Experimental results on four datasets demonstrate MBSRec's significant outperformance of state-of-the-art approaches. The implementation code is available here (1).

OBJECTIVE Bee venom (BV) phonophoresis has been recommended as a non-invasive treatment for a variety of inflammatory conditions and for reducing post-operative pain. This study aimed at evaluating the impact of bee venom phonophoresis around incisions and on selected acupuncture points for the treatment of pain, inflammation, and mobility of the hip following inguinal hernioplasty. PATIENTS AND METHODS Sixty-six male patients who had acute pain and decreased mobility of the hip after having an indirect unilateral inguinal hernioplasty with a mesh participated in this study. Patients were randomly assigned into two equal groups of 33. The bee venom phonophoresis group (Group A) received low-intensity pulsed ultrasound using BV gel, and the control group (Group B) received low-intensity pulsed ultrasound using only plain gel without BV gel. Both groups received the same regular medical care and 5 minutes of therapy each, three times a week, for three weeks postoperative. The visual analogue scale (VAS), serum C-reactive protein (CRP), and hip ROM measurements were used to assess the acute pain, inflammation, and ROM pre-application (pre-treatment) and post-3 weeks of treatment (post-treatment) for both groups. RESULTS The findings have exhibited an extremely significant difference in VAS, CRP, and hip ROM measurements in the BV phonophoresis group compared to that of the control group (p < 0.05). CONCLUSIONS BV delivered by phonophoresis around incisions and on selected acupuncture points has a beneficial effect in the treatment of pain, inflammation, and mobility of the hip following inguinal hernioplasty with mesh.

Sequential recommendation models are crucial for next-item recommendations in online platforms, capturing complex patterns in user interactions. However, many focus on a single behavior, overlooking valuable implicit interactions like clicks and favorites. Existing multi-behavioral models often fail to simultaneously capture sequential patterns. We propose CASM, a Context-Aware Sequential Model, leveraging sequential models to seamlessly handle multiple behaviors. CASM employs context-aware multi-head self-attention for heterogeneous historical interactions and a weighted binary cross-entropy loss for precise control over behavior contributions. Experimental results on four datasets demonstrate CASM's superiority over state-of-the-art approaches.

OBJECTIVE: The quantitative measurement of handgrip strength is important in assessing and charting the progress of patients with neuromuscular diseases. The aim of this research was to determine the intra-rater and inter-rater reliability and the validity of the Squegg digital dynamometer. SUBJECTS AND METHODS: Twenty-one females and nine male participants with an age range between 18 and 40 years volunteered for the study. Three testers each took three measurements with a Squegg device and a Jamar dynamometer using standardized measurement techniques. Intra- and inter-tester reliability were calculated using the intra-class correlation coefficient (ICC). To investigate the relationship between hand measures and isometric handgrip strength, the Pearson correlation coefficient test was used. To determine the agreement between the two devices, a Bland Altman plot was constructed, and the concurrent validity of Squegg was calculated. RESULTS: The intra-rater reliability coefficients for both Jamar and Squegg were greater than 0.99 for all three testers, indicating excellent intra-rater reliability. The inter-rater reliability of Jamar (ICC=0.93) and Squegg (ICC=0.87) was excellent. With an ICC of 0.844 and an r-value of 0.720, Squegg with Jamar demonstrates good validity and statistical significance (p=0.001). CONCLUSIONS: The isometric handgrip strength and hand measures showed a moderate correlation in the study population. The Squegg isometric handgrip dynamometer has good concurrent validity and great intra- and inter-rater reliability in healthy individuals. The validity of Squegg in patients with neuromuscular diseases that affect hand function has to be investigated further.

Click-Through Rate prediction (CTR) is a crucial task for online advertising and recommender systems. Therefore, it has gained considerable attention in the past few years as it highly affects the revenue of several commercial platforms and online systems. The primary purpose of recent research emphasizes obtaining meaningful and powerful representations through mining low and high-feature interactions using various components such as Deep Neural Networks (DNN), CrossNets, or transformer blocks. However, models utilizing one representation for the input fields in each instance restrict the model's predictive power. Other models tend to be overly complicated to reach high input data expressiveness and predictive power. In this work, we propose a simple yet effective Deep Multi-Representation model (DeepMR) that is capable of learning informative representations by jointly training a mixture of two powerful feature representation learning components, namely DNNs and multi-head self-attentions. Furthermore, DeepMR integrates the novel residual with zero initialization (ReZero) connections to the DNN and the multi-head self-attention components for learning superior input representations. Experiments on three real-world datasets show that the proposed model significantly outperforms all state-of-the-art models with a relative improvement of up to 16.6% in the task of click-through rate prediction. Our implementation code and datasets are available here https://github.com/Shereen-Elsayed/DeepMR.

This paper presents a new model for a data management system specifically designed to enable community-curated data repositories and collaboration. Depot (a Dependence-Eager Platform of Transformations) is based on a data-lake approach that eases the technological burdens associated with data contribution while providing an interactive programming environment for developing transformations that result in structured tables supporting SQL database operations. Crucially, Depot implements lazy evaluation of these transformations so that only the structured data that is demanded by a data consumer is generated. Until the structured data is "materialized," Depot tracks and maintains the dependencies that are required to perform the eventual materialization. This lazy approach to creating structured data allows Depot to maintain a smaller resource footprint compared to a typical data warehouse approach while maintaining the flexibility of the data lake model. Furthermore, Depot is designed as a community-sustainable platform. The initial prototype is implemented for cloud deployment and it distributes the storage and ETL workload cost among the data consumers. Performance results of the early prototype are encouraging, making Depot a new infrastructure for creating data lakes that foster contributed-consumer collaboration.

In fashion-based recommendation settings, incorporating the item image features is considered a crucial factor, and it has shown significant improvements to many traditional models, including but not limited to matrix factorization, auto-encoders, and nearest neighbor models. While there are numerous image-based recommender approaches that utilize dedicated deep neural networks, comparisons to attribute-aware models are often disregarded despite their ability to be easily extended to leverage items' image features. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective attribute-aware model that incorporates image features for better item representation learning in item recommendation tasks. The proposed model utilizes items' image features extracted by a calibrated ResNet50 component. We present an ablation study to compare incorporating the image features using three different techniques into the recommender system component that can seamlessly leverage any available items' attributes. Experiments on two image-based real-world recommender systems datasets show that the proposed model significantly outperforms all state-of-the-art image-based models.

Background: Elderly populations are expanding in both wealthy and developing countries. The aged people have a particular skin disease spectrum that varies geographically. With aging, the skin system experiences structural and functional changes. Geriatric dermatoses provide a tough condition for clinicians in terms of diagnosis, treatment, and follow-up. There is little data on skin illness in Saudi Arabia's elderly community. This research aimed to investigate the prevalence and distribution of cutaneous illnesses in patients in Saudi Arabia's middle region. Methods: The retrospective study included patients who attended the dermatology outpatient clinic of Prince Sattam Bin Abdulaziz University Hospital between January 1, 2020, and December 31, 2022. Their genders, ages, and cutaneous diagnoses were collected, and the descriptive analysis was performed using SPSS version 22. Results: 1152 patients were present, with a male predominance of 63.45%. The most prevalent diagnosis was skin eczema or dermatitis (39.91%), followed by infections (20.31%), papulosquamous illness (13.37%), and benign neoplasms (12.85%). There were no cancerous tumors. Conclusions: Eczema/dermatitis and infections are major health issues for older persons in this region. Most illnesses are preventable; to lessen the prevalence of certain skin disorders, it is crucial to increase public awareness of risk factors and conduct additional research in related fields.

Background:Physiotherapy protocols based on high-intensity interval training (HIIT) or eccentric hamstring exercises like Nordic Curl (NC) have been scarcely studied in futsal players. The objective of this study was to compare the effectiveness of a HIIT combined with an NC exercise program versus a HIIT-only program in futsal players. Methods:Twenty-one futsal players were divided into (1) HIIT + NC group (n = 11, mean age = 21.55 [4.25]); and (2) HIIT group (n = 10, mean age = 20.90 [1.29]). The HIIT + NC group performed a HIIT circuit combined with 3 sets of 10 NC repetitions for 4 weeks, while the HIIT group performed the same protocol without NC exercise. Body mass index, intermittent work performance, vertical jump performance without and with arms, isometric strength of quadriceps and hamstrings, and the isometric hamstrings/quadriceps (H/Q) ratio, were assessed before and after the interventions. Results:The HIIT + NC group and the HIIT group showed a significant improvement in intermittent work performance after the intervention (P = .04 and P = .01, respectively). Also, both groups showed a trend of increasing quadriceps and hamstring isometric strength, although no significant changes were found (P > .05). In addition, neither the HIIT + NC protocol nor the HIIT protocol was sufficient to yield changes in body mass index nor to improve the vertical jump performance (P > .05). Conclusion:Both an isolated HIIT protocol and HIIT in combination with NC exercise improved intermittent work performance in futsal players. The present study's findings may guide futsal players' physical preparation and injury prevention programs.

In sparse recommender settings, users' context and item attributes play a crucial role in deciding which items to recommend next. Despite that, recent works in sequential and time-aware recommendations usually either ignore both aspects or only consider one of them, limiting their predictive performance. In this paper, we address these limitations by proposing a context and attribute-aware recommender model (CARCA) that can capture the dynamic nature of the user profiles in terms of contextual features and item attributes via dedicated multi-head self-attention blocks that extract profile-level features and predicting item scores. Also, unlike many of the current state-of-the-art sequential item recommendation approaches that use a simple dot-product between the most recent item's latent features and the target items embeddings for scoring, CARCA uses cross-attention between all profile items and the target items to predict their final scores. This cross-attention allows CARCA to harness the correlation between old and recent items in the user profile and their influence on deciding which item to recommend next. Experiments on four real-world recommender system datasets show that the proposed model significantly outperforms all state-of-the-art models in the task of item recommendation and achieving improvements of up to 53 Cumulative Gain (NDCG) and Hit-Ratio. Results also show that CARCA outperformed several state-of-the-art dedicated image-based recommender systems by merely utilizing image attributes extracted from a pre-trained ResNet50 in a black-box fashion.