Tandem mass spectrometry is an analytical technique widely used in proteomics for the high-throughput characterization of proteins in biological samples. Modern in-depth proteomic studies require the collection of even millions of mass spectra representing short protein fragments (peptides). In order to identify the peptides, the measured spectra are most often scored against a database of amino acid sequences of known proteins. Due to the volume of input data and the sizes of proteomic databases, this is a resource-intensive task, which requires an efficient and scalable computational strategy. Here, we present SparkMS, an algorithm for peptide and protein identification from mass spectrometry data explicitly designed to work in a distributed computational environment. To achieve the required performance and scalability, we use Apache Spark, a modern framework that is becoming increasingly popular not only in the field of “big data” analysis but also in bioinformatics. This paper describes the algorithm in detail and demonstrates its performance on a large proteomic dataset. Experimental results indicate that SparkMS scales with the number of worker nodes and the increasing complexity of the search task. Furthermore, it exhibits a protein identification efficiency comparable to X!Tandem, a widely-used proteomic search engine.

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Microscopic technology has recently flourished, allowing unparalleled viewing of microscopic elements invisible to the normal eye. Still, the existence of unavoidable constraints led on many occasions to have low contrast scanning electron microscopic (SEM) images. Thus, a noncomplex multiphase (NM) algorithm is proposed in this study to provide better contrast for various SEM images. The developed algorithm contains the following stages: first, the intensities of the degraded image are modified using a two-step regularization procedure. Next, a gamma-corrected cumulative distribution function of the logarithmic uniform distribution approach is applied for contrast enhancement. Finally, an automated histogram expansion technique is used to redistribute the pixels of the image properly. The NM algorithm is applied to natural-contrast distorted SEM images, as well as its results are compared with six algorithms with different processing notions. To assess the quality of images, three modern metrics are utilized, in that each metric measures the quality based on unique aspects. Extensive appraisals revealed the adequate processing abilities of the NM algorithm, as it can process many images suitably and its performances outperformed many available contrast enhancement algorithms in different aspects.

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This paper is devoted to the analysis of the stability and load-carrying capacity of thin-walled composite profiles in compression. The specimens reflect elements made of carbon fibre reinforced laminate (CFRP). Thin-walled columns with a square crosssection were made from 4 layers of composite in 3 different combinations of layer arrangements. Advanced numerical analyses have been carried out. In the first stage of the study, a buckling analysis of the structure was performed. In further numerical simulations, two advanced models were used simultaneously: the Progressive Failure Analysis (PFA) and the Cohesive Zone Model (CZM). The results showed significant differences between the critical load values for each layer configuration. The forms of buckling and the areas of damage initiation and evolution were also dependent on the applied layup.

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Plant diseases are a foremost risk to the safety of food. They have the potential to significantly reduce agricultural products quality and quantity. In agriculture sectors, it is the most prominent challenge to recognize plant diseases. In computer vision, the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) produces good results when solving image classification tasks. For plant disease diagnosis, many deep learning architectures have been applied. This paper introduces a transfer learning based model for detecting tomato leaf diseases. This study proposes a model of DenseNet201 as a transfer learning-based model and CNN classifier. A comparison study between four deep learning models (VGG16, Inception V3, ResNet152V2 and DenseNet201) done in order to determine the best accuracy in using transfer learning in plant disease detection. The used images dataset contains 22930 photos of tomato leaves in 10 different classes, 9 disorders and one healthy class. In our experimental, the results shows that the proposed model achieves the highest training accuracy of 99.84% and validation accuracy of 99.30%.

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This paper presents the results of a preliminary study on simplified diagnosis of osteoarthritis of the knee joint based on generated vibroacoustic processes. The analysis was based on acoustic signals recorded in a group of 50 people, half of whom were healthy, and the other half - people with previously confirmed degenerative changes. Selected discriminants of the signals were determined and statistical analysis was performed to allow selection of optimal discriminants used at a later stage as input to the classifier. The best results of classification using artificial neural networks (ANN) of RBF (Radial Basis Function) and MLP (Multilevel Perceptron) types are presented. For the problem involving the classification of cases into one of two groups HC (Healthy Control) and OA (Osteoarthritis) an accuracy of 0.9 was obtained, with a sensitivity of 0.885 and a specificity of 0.917. It is shown that vibroacoustic diagnostics has great potential in the non-invasive assessment of damage to joint structures of the knee.

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Increasing dependence on Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and especially on the Internet in Industrial Control Systems (ICS) has made these systems the primary target of cyber-attacks. As ICS are extensively used in Critical Infrastructures (CI), this makes CI more vulnerable to cyber-attacks and their protection becomes an important issue. On the other hand, cyberattacks can exploit not only software but also physics; that is, they can target the fundamental physical aspects of computation. The newly discovered RowHammer (RH) fault injection attack is a serious vulnerability targeting hardware on reliability and security of DRAM (Dynamic Random Access Memory). Studies on this vulnerability issue raise serious security concerns.  The purpose of this study was to overview the RH phenomenon in DRAMs and its possible security risks on ICSs and to discuss a few possible realistic RH attack scenarios for ICSs. The results of the study revealed that RH is a serious security threat to any computer-based system having DRAMs, and this also applies to ICS.

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In this work, we present a computer simulation model that generates the propagation of sound waves to solve a forward problem in ultrasound transmission tomography. The simulator can be used to create data sets used in the supervised learning process. A solution to the "free-space" boundary problem was proposed, and the memory consumption was significantly optimized from O(n2) to O(n). The given method of simulating wave scattering enables the control of the noise extinction time within the tomographic probe and the permeability of the sound wave. The presented version of the script simulates the classic variant of a circular probe with evenly distributed sensors around the circumference.

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