National University of Malaysia

About: National University of Malaysia is a education organization based out in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Heat transfer. The organization has 26593 authors who have published 41270 publications receiving 552683 citations. The organization is also known as: NUM & Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia.

Current Progress in Tendon and Ligament Tissue Engineering.

Abstract: Tendon and ligament injuries accounted for 30% of all musculoskeletal consultations with 4 million new incidences worldwide each year and thus imposed a significant burden to the society and the economy. Damaged tendon and ligament can severely affect the normal body movement and might lead to many complications if not treated promptly and adequately. Current conventional treatment through surgical repair and tissue graft are ineffective with a high rate of recurrence. In this review, we first discussed the anatomy, physiology and pathophysiology of tendon and ligament injuries and its current treatment. Secondly, we explored the current role of tendon and ligament tissue engineering, describing its recent advances. After that, we also described stem cell and cell secreted product approaches in tendon and ligament injuries. Lastly, we examined the role of the bioreactor and mechanical loading in in vitro maturation of engineered tendon and ligament. Tissue engineering offers various alternative ways of treatment from biological tissue constructs to stem cell therapy and cell secreted products. Bioreactor with mechanical stimulation is instrumental in preparing mature engineered tendon and ligament substitutes in vitro. Tissue engineering showed great promise in replacing the damaged tendon and ligament. However, more study is needed to develop ideal engineered tendon and ligament.

A graph coloring constructive hyper-heuristic for examination timetabling problems

Abstract: In this work we investigate a new graph coloring constructive hyper-heuristic for solving examination timetabling problems. We utilize the hierarchical hybridizations of four low level graph coloring heuristics, these being largest degree, saturation degree, largest colored degree and largest enrollment. These are hybridized to produce four ordered lists. For each list, the difficulty index of scheduling the first exam is calculated by considering its order in all lists to obtain a combined evaluation of its difficulty. The most difficult exam to be scheduled is scheduled first (i.e. the one with the minimum difficulty index). To improve the effectiveness of timeslot selection, a roulette wheel selection mechanism is included in the algorithm to probabilistically select an appropriate timeslot for the chosen exam. We test our proposed approach on the most widely used un-capacitated Carter benchmarks and also on the recently introduced examination timetable dataset from the 2007 International Timetabling Competition. Compared against other methodologies, our results demonstrate that the graph coloring constructive hyper-heuristic produces good results and outperforms other approaches on some of the benchmark instances.