Cairo University

About: Cairo University is a education organization based out in Giza, Egypt. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Medicine. The organization has 33532 authors who have published 55581 publications receiving 792654 citations. The organization is also known as: Fuad I University & King Fuad I University.

Novel mutation strategy for enhancing SHADE and LSHADE algorithms for global numerical optimization

Abstract: Proposing new mutation strategies to improve the optimization performance of differential evolution (DE) is an important research study. Therefore, the main contribution of this paper goes in three directions: The first direction is introducing a less greedy mutation strategy with enhanced exploration capability, named DE/current-to-ord_best/1 (ord stands for ordered) or ord_best for short. In the second direction, we introduce a more greedy mutation strategy with enhanced exploitation capability, named DE/current-to-ord_pbest/1 (ord_pbest for short). Both of the proposed mutation strategies are based on ordering three selected vectors from the current generation to perturb the target vector, where the directed differences are used to mimic the gradient decent behavior to direct the search toward better solutions. In ord_best, the three vectors are selected randomly to enhance the exploration capability of the algorithm. On the other hand, ord_pbest is designed to enhance the exploitation capability where two vectors are selected randomly and the third is selected from the global p best vectors. Based on the proposed mutation strategies, ord_best and ord_pbest, two DE variants are introduced as EDE and EBDE, respectively. The third direction of our work is a hybridization framework. The proposed mutations can be combined with DE family algorithms to enhance their search capabilities on difficult and complicated optimization problems. Thus, the proposed mutations are incorporated into SHADE and LSHADE to enhance their performance. Finally, in order to verify and analyze the performance of the proposed mutation strategies, numerical experiments were conducted using CEC2013 and CEC2017 benchmarks. The performance was also evaluated using CEC2010 designed for Large-Scale Global Optimization. Experimental results indicate that in terms of robustness, stability, and quality of the solution obtained, both mutation strategies are highly competitive, especially as the dimension increases.

The effect of linolenic acid on bovine oocyte maturation and development.

Abstract: Dietary polyunsaturated fatty acids can influence reproductive performance. In dairy cattle, some high-fat diets resulted in higher blastocyst rates and improved embryo quality. These effects may partly be mediated by a direct action of fatty acids on oocyte development. The present study investigated the effect of linolenic acid (ALA; 18:3 n-3) supplementation on bovine oocyte maturation and early embryo development in vitro. Treatment of cumulus-oocyte complexes (COCs) with 50 μM ALA significantly increased the percentage of oocytes at the metaphase II (MII) stage compared with untreated controls (95% ± 2% vs. 84% ± 2%, respectively). Higher doses of ALA were detrimental. Treatment of COCs with 50 μM ALA compared with controls also resulted in a significantly higher percentage of cleaved embryos (77% ± 9% vs. 69% ± 9%, respectively) and blastocyst rate (36% ± 4% vs. 23% ± 5%, respectively) and better-quality embryos. Furthermore, COCs treated with ALA had significant increases compared with controls in:...