Cement dust is created as a by-product during the production of cement, and in its composition it contains high concentrations of calcium oxide (CaO), potassium oxide (K2O) and other important micro and macro elements. Due to its composition, it is suitable for correcting the pH of the soil, as well as for the uptake of essential elements by plants. The ability to accumulate essential and non-essential heavy metals also depends on the cultivated plant species, and vegetables show the greatest affinity for these elements. The application of cement dust as a soil additive used to improve the physico-chemical soil properties is examined in the paper. After the addition, the soil was mechanically cultivated and planting of the vegetable crop tomato was carried out. The content of essential elements and heavy metals was determined in the soil, cement dust, and tomato fruits grown on soil with and without the addition of cement dust. Due to the high pH value, high conductivity as well as the high content of CaO, it is very important to examine in real conditions how the addition of cement dust to the soil affects the formation of micro and macro elements as well as the content of heavy metals when growing tomatoes. The results showed that the cement kiln dust is an effective addition to the soil because it is a source of calcium, potassium and other essential elements without affecting the loss of quality or contamination with heavy metals during production.

Background: The VEPs provide an objective measure of brain function, analyzing integrity of visual processing. With patients affected with schizophrenia, the changes with the implementation of VEP are evident, such as symmetrical deceleration of the impulse (reduction of the amplitude) and the continuance of latency, which points to a degenerative illness, suggesting the presence of optical neuritis or hemianopsia conjoined with mentioned intracranial illness. Objective: The aim of the study was to determine the correlation of l P100 latency and P100 amplitude (µV) between patients with schizophrenia and patients with migraine headache. Visual evoked potentials (VEPs) were applied. Methods: The sample included 80 subjects: a) S group- 40 patients with schizophrenia (21 males; 19 females), b) H group-40 healthy subjects with migraine headache (10 males; 30 females). The study was conducted at the Department of Psychiatry, Neurology and Radiology, University Clinical Center Sarajevo. Results: Our research revealed positive correlations were registered in P100 latency in left view field of both eyes and in P100 amplitude in the region of right eye (p=0.01) in comparison with left eye region (p=0.05) in patients with schizophrenia. Conclusion: Results imply that the cognitive impairment seen in schizophrenia is not just due to deficits in higher order aspects of cognition but also encompasses significant deficits in early sensory processing. Our study is useful to initiate new questions and recommendations for further studies, specifically on changes in the occipital lobe in the schizophrenic patient’s brain. Changes in the volume in the occipital lobe are quite evident and further studies are required to better understand how the progressive brain changes affect the structural, functional, and metabolic activities of the occipital lobe in schizophrenia.

Background: The pandemic of the new corona virus has taken its toll on the mental health of entire humankind with special impact on vulnerable groups, such as drug users in substitution treatment. Objective: The aim of the study was to determine the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on mental health in the population of opiate addicts who are on substitution therapy. Methods: The research was conducted in the Institute of Addiction Diseases of the ZE-DO canton on the population of patients addicted to opiates who are included in the substitution therapy program. The sample of 80 patients was randomly selected with respect to the inclusion criteria. An 8-parameter questionnaire with symptoms of anxiety and depressive disorder, ranked by intensity on the Likert scale from 0 to 4, was used as a measuring instrument. The change in these symptoms in the one-year period before the pandemic to the one-year period of the pandemic are compared. The results are analyzed in descriptive statistics using the SPSS program. The statistical significance was monitored by the χ2 test. Results: The results of this research show an apperent statistically significant increase in the symptoms of anxiety and depressive disorder, as well as an increase in drug abuse during the pandemic period compared to the period before it. Conclusion: Results imply the existence of a significant adverse effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on the mental health of treated opiate addicts. This research impose the need to affirm the prevention of further abuse of illegal substances, as well as the introduction of new customized programs through various psychosocial interventions and therapies carried out by psychiatrists and psychologists. Telemedicine presents itself as useful way of intervention and treatment.

Data acquisition in process industries usually takes place at each sampling. The disadvantage is that a considerable amount of data without new information about the state of the process is continuously transmitted and processed. This negatively affects the communication system and computational power, which is more critical nowadays given the number of variables measured, even in seconds. One solution concerns the event-driven paradigm, in which only relevant data according to a pre-defined criterion is forwarded for further processing. This work investigated the event-based threshold and delta methods in the context of fault detection. The data transmission rate was also analyzed. The well-know Tennessee Eastman problem (TEP) was used as a case study. The fault detection system was based on PCA (principal component analysis), which is widely used for this purpose in this benchmark. The results were compared with the commonly used time-based approach, for a fixed false alarm rate. The threshold rule provided similar results, but with much less data. For the delta rule, significant MDR (missed detection rate) gains of up to 74% were obtained for five of the six hard-to-detect faults, and of up to 69%, for two of the three very hard-to-detect faults. MDR values very close to zero were reached for two of the three intermediate detection faults and two of the hard-to-detect faults. The detection time was also evaluated. In this regard, considerably lower values were obtained for all intermediate detection faults, three of the hard-to-detect faults and all very hard-to-detect faults. In short, the delta method was able to improve fault detection performance, especially for hard-to-detect faults, with a considerably lower data transmission rate, around 20% on average. Event-driven data acquisition can be very attractive for process industries.

Figure 1. Our method obtains a high-quality 3D reconstruction from an RGB-D input sequence by training a multi-layer perceptron. In comparison to state-of-the-art methods like BundleFusion [3] or the theoretical NeRF [9] with additional depth constraints, our approach results in cleaner and more complete reconstructions. As can be seen, the pose optimization of our approach is key to resolving misalignment artifacts.

This paper presents new records and noteworthy data on the following taxa in SE Europe and adjacent regions: red algae Lemanea rigida and Paralemanea torulosa, mycorrhizal fungi Amanita simulans and Terfezia pseudoleptoderma, parasitic fungus Microbotryum vinosum, saprotrophic fungus Sarcoscypha jurana, stonewort Chara tenuispina, mosses Brachytheciastrum collinum and Meesia longiseta, monocots Dactylorhiza romana and Neotinea maculata and dicots Adenophora liliifolia, Ambrosia artemisiifolia and Tanacetum corymbosum subsp. cinereum are given within SE Europe and adjacent regions.

This paper presents new records and noteworthy data on the following taxa in SE Europe and adjacent regions: red algae Lemanea fucina and Paralemanea annulata, parasitic fungus Anthracoidea pratensis, saprotrophic fungi Cyathus olla, Massaria campestris, and Xylaria sicula, stonewort Chara canescens, liverworts Gymnomitrion commutatum and Porella baueri, moss Acaulon triquetrum, monocots Anacamptis laxiflora, Cephalanthera damasonium, and Himantoglossum robertianum and dicot Jacobaea othonnae are given within SE Europe and adjacent regions.

Dysphagia, commonly referred to as abnormal swallowing, affects millions of people annually. If not diagnosed expeditiously, dysphagia can lead to more severe complications, such as pneumonia, nutritional deficiency, and dehydration. Bedside screening is the first step of dysphagia characterization and is usually based on pass/fail tests in which a nurse observes the patient performing water swallows to look for dysphagia overt signs such as coughing. Though quick and convenient, bedside screening only provides low-level judgment of impairment, lacks standardization, and suffers from subjectivity. Recently, high resolution cervical auscultation (HRCA) has been investigated as a less expensive and non-invasive method to diagnose dysphagia. It has shown strong preliminary evidence of its effectiveness in penetration-aspiration detection as well as multiple swallow kinematics. HRCA signals have traditionally been collected and investigated in conjunction with videofluoroscopy exams which are performed using barium boluses including thin liquid. An HRCA-based bedside screening is highly desirable to expedite the initial dysphagia diagnosis and overcome all the drawbacks of the current pass/fail screening tests. However, all research conducted for using HRCA in dysphagia is based on thin liquid barium boluses and thus not guaranteed to provide valid results for water boluses used in bedside screening. If HRCA signals show no significant differences between water and thin liquid barium boluses, then the same algorithms developed on thin liquid barium boluses used in diagnostic imaging studies, it can be then directly used with water boluses. This study investigates the similarities and differences between HRCA signals from thin liquid barium swallows compared to those signals from water swallows. Multiple features from the time, frequency, time-frequency, and information-theoretic domain were extracted from each type of swallow and a group of linear mixed models was tested to determine the significance of differences. Machine learning classifiers were fit to the data as well to determine if the swallowed material (thin liquid barium or water) can be correctly predicted from an unlabeled set of HRCA signals. The results demonstrated that there is no systematic difference between the HRCA signals of thin liquid barium swallows and water swallows. While no systematic difference was discovered, the evidence of complete conformity between HRCA signals of both materials was inconclusive. These results must be validated further to confirm conformity between the HRCA signals of thin liquid barium swallows and water swallows.

Fiber optics has revolutionized telecommunication with its superior bandwidth and distance it can span. For its use in IoT networks, some of the limiting factors are the high cost of new installations and the need to power the end device by electrical current. The installations are a part of long-term investments, and one can expect this to be an ever-smaller issue as more fibers are installed. Typically, the newly installed cables contain single-mode fibers. There are a lot of reports on transport of power over fiber, however, majority recommend using multi-mode fibers with a large core or double-clad fibers. In our approach, instead of increasing the core of the fiber, we focus on the possibility of shortening the working time of IoT devices, using the existing single-mode fiber for powering. Also, instead of an expensive PV (photo voltaic) cell with small dimensions and a high efficiency, we propose using the commercially available larger PV cells with an air gap between the end of the fiber and the cells. In accordance with our approach, we successfully conducted an experiment.