Fu Jen Catholic University

About: Fu Jen Catholic University is a education organization based out in Taipei, Taiwan. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Medicine. The organization has 6842 authors who have published 9512 publications receiving 171005 citations. The organization is also known as: FJU & Fu Jen.

Epidemiological study of health hazards among workers handling engineered nanomaterials

Abstract: The aim of this study was to establish and identify the health effect markers of workers with potential exposure to nanoparticles (20–100 nm) during manufacturing and/or application of nanomaterials. For this cross-sectional study, we recruited 227 workers who handled nanomaterials and 137 workers for comparison who did not from 14 plants in Taiwan. A questionnaire was used to collect data on exposure status, demographics, and potential confounders. The health effect markers were measured in the medical laboratory. Control banding from the Nanotool Risk Level Matrix was used to categorize the exposure risk levels of the workers. The results showed that the antioxidant enzyme, superoxide dismutase (SOD) in risk level 1 (RL1) and risk level 2 (RL2) workers was significantly (p RL1 > RL2). Another antioxidant, glutathione peroxidase (GPX), was significantly lower only in RL1 workers than in the control workers. The cardiovascular markers, fibrinogen and ICAM (intercellular adhesion molecule), were significantly higher in RL2 workers than in controls and a significant dose–response with an increasing trend was found for these two cardiovascular markers. Another cardiovascular marker, interleukin-6, was significantly increased among RL1 workers, but not among RL2 workers. The accuracy rate for remembering 7-digits and reciting them backwards was significantly lower in RL2 workers (OR = 0.48) than in controls and a significantly reversed gradient was also found for the correct rate of backward memory (OR = 0.90 for RL1, OR = 0.48 for RL2, p < 0.05 in test for trend). Depression of antioxidant enzymes and increased expression of cardiovascular markers were found among workers handling nanomaterials. Antioxidant enzymes, such as SOD and GPX, and cardiovascular markers, such as fibrinogen, ICAM, and interluekin-6, are possible biomarkers for medical surveillance of workers handling engineered nanomaterials.

Efficacy of Maxillomandibular Advancement Examined with Drug-Induced Sleep Endoscopy and Computational Fluid Dynamics Airflow Modeling

Abstract: ObjectivesTo use drug-induced sedation endoscopy (DISE) and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modeling to study dynamic airway and airflow changes after maxillomandibular advancement (MMA), and ho...

A New Hybrid Case-Based Architecture for Medical Diagnosis.

Abstract: This paper proposes a new hybrid case-based architecture, which supports multiple-disease diagnosis and the learning of new adaptation knowledge. The architecture combines case-based reasoning (CBR), neural networks, fuzzy theory, induction, utility theory, and knowledge-based planning technology together to facilitate medical diagnosis. The basic mechanism is that of CBR. A distributed fuzzy neural network is employed to perform approximate matching and thus to tolerate potential noise in case retrieval. The induction technology along with utility theory is used to select valuable features of the target case and prune unnecessary search space. Knowledge-based planning is a general-purpose mechanism for case adaptation. It creates a case adaptation plan from an adaptation tree, which contains all relevant problem features, satisfies all relevant constraints, and contains all cases whose expected utilities are greater than a threshold. Execution of the case adaptation plan leads to the diagnosis of multiple diseases. The adaptation tree facilitates the reuse of cases and the learning of various types of knowledge-including relationships between disease types and features, case-specific verification knowledge, and differential diagnosis rules. Integrating these techniques in the CBR paradigm can effectively produce a high-quality diagnosis for a given medical consultation.

Towards secure and efficient user authentication scheme using smart card for multi-server environments

Abstract: Two user authentication schemes for multi-server environments have been proposed by Tsai and Wang et al., respectively. However, there are some flaws existing in both schemes. Therefore, a new scheme for improving these drawbacks is proposed in this paper. The proposed scheme has the following benefits: (1) it complies with all the requirements for multi-server environments; (2) it can withstand all the well-known attacks at the present time; (3) it is equipped with a more secure key agreement procedure; and (4) it is quite efficient in terms of the cost of computation and transmission. In addition, the analysis and comparisons show that the proposed scheme outperforms the other related schemes in various aspects.