Visual analysis of geospatial habitat suitability model based on inverse distance weighting with paired comparison analysis

Development of a new method framework to estimate the nonlinear and interaction relationship between environmental factors and soil heavy metals

The intricate and multifaceted nature of soil system profoundly influences the highly complex and often nonlinear changes that soil heavy metals (HM) undergo. Spatial heterogeneity, location and scale variability, and the interaction and superposition among environmental drivers challenged researchers to determine the sophisticated nature of soil HMs changes at the regional scale. This study aims to develop a new method framework and selects Ningbo as the case study to apportion the environmental factors responsible for soil HMs pollution that include Cd, Cr, Pb, Hg, As, Cu, Zn and Ni, focusing on nonlinearity and interaction. We harnessed the Random Forest model to apportion the environmental drivers of soil HM change. The directionality and shape of the nonlinear relationship between HMs and their individual contributors were derived by Partial Dependence Plots. The interactions of multiple drivers were quantitatively assessed by the Conditional Inference Tree. Our results demonstrated that soil HMs in the study area varied spatially. Soil HMs pollution was mitigated by natural factors and anthropogenic factors. The main influencing factors were pH, soil parent material type, enterprise activities, and agricultural application. The effects of some factors on soil HMs showed a monotonic linear trend, but some have apparent threshold effects. The direction of influence on soil HMs will shift when pH and phosphate fertilizer reach a specific value. The addition of enterprises in the area would rarely have an impact on the HMs pollution once it reached around 2 per km2 because of the industrial agglomeration. Soil HM concentrations were mainly from multi-pollutants and were governed by a combination of environmental factors. Our study provided managers and policymakers with site-specific and definite guidelines for preventing and controlling soil HM pollution.

A novel methodological framework for risk zonation and source-sink response concerning heavy-metal contamination in agroecosystems

The accurate identification of high-risk zones and risk source-sink responses for heavy-metal (HM) contamination of agroecosystems remains challenging due to involving multiple environmental media such as soils, dustfall, and crops and a wide range of evaluation criteria and constraints. This study established a novel evaluation model based on the integration of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) to assess agroecosystem risk in the Lihe River watershed, China. Bivariate local indicators of spatial association (LISA) were adopted to explore the spatial interaction of risk sources and sinks with outputs ranging from 0.0003 (no risk) to 0.83 (high risk). Areas with moderate, considerable, and high risk constituted 67.4 % of the total land area, and only 1.8 % of the area was classed as low risk. Central urban and eastern areas around Taihu Lake were risk accumulation regions that needed more remedial attention. Risk cluster zones in the central urban area involved significant source-sink response relationships with the spatial distribution of industries, whereas eastern zones were linked to vehicular traffic distribution, accounting for 27.5 % and 16.5 % of the total area, respectively. This study provides a new methodological framework for the assessment of environmental risk, risk zonation, and risk source-sink spatial interaction in agroecosystems.

An ML-Enabled Internet of Things Framework for Early Detection of Heart Disease

Healthcare occupies a central role in sustainable societies and has an undeniable impact on the well-being of individuals. However, over the years, various diseases have adversely affected the growth and sustainability of these societies. Among them, heart disease is escalating rapidly in both economically settled and undeveloped nations and leads to fatalities around the globe. To reduce the death ratio caused by this disease, there is a need for a framework to continuously monitor a patient's heart status, essentially doing early detection and prediction of heart disease. This paper proposes a scalable Machine Learning (ML) and Internet of Things-(IoT-) based three-layer architecture to store and process a large amount of clinical data continuously, which is needed for the early detection and monitoring of heart disease. Layer 1 of the proposed framework is used to collect data from IoT wearable/implanted smart sensor nodes, which includes various physiological measures that have significant impact on the deterioration of heart status. Layer 2 stores and processes the patient data on a local web server using various ML classification algorithms. Finally, Layer 3 is used to store the critical data of patients on the cloud. The doctor and other caregivers can access the patient health conditions via an android application, provide services to the patient, and inhibit him/her from further damage. Various performance evaluation measures such as accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, F1-measure, MCC-score, and ROC curve are used to check the efficiency of our proposed IoT-based heart disease prediction framework. It is anticipated that this system will assist the healthcare sector and the doctors in diagnosing heart patients in the initial phases.

Characterization of ambient carbon monoxide and PM 2.5 effects on fetus development, liver enzymes and TSH in Isfahan City, central Iran

Ambient carbon monoxide (CO) and particulate matters (PMs) are two important air pollutants in urban areas with known impacts on fetuses. Hence, this study measured some biochemistry factors of 200 neonates with birth dates from January 19 to October 12, 2020, including the birth weight and height and the serum levels of ALT, AST, ALP, GGT, and TSH. The Support Vector Machine-fitted land-use regression approach was used to predict the spatio-temporal variability of intra-urban PM 2.5 and CO concentrations by month during the pregnancy period of the cases employing 5 variables of Digital Elevation Model (DEM), slope, and distance from Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) stations, Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) stations, and mines and industries. Spearman correlation analysis (p < 0.05) was performed between the neonate indices and mean monthly PM 2.5 and CO concentrations at the exact residential address of maternal cases and their nearby areas in 250, 500, 1000, 1500, and 2000 m-radius buffer rings. All modeling efforts succeeded in predicting CO and PM 2.5 levels with acceptable adjusted r² values. Northern Isfahan had relatively higher CO and PM 2.5 concentrations due to its adjacency to low-vegetated open lands and its high traffic load as compared to southern areas. The correlation results between the neonate biochemistry indices and mean PM 2.5 and CO concentrations were mostly positive in most buffer rings, especially in the >500 m-radius buffer rings for PM 2.5 and in the 2000 m-radius rings for CO. Although the correlation results of PM 2.5 followed a detectable trend in the buffer rings, the associations between CO and the neonate biochemistry indices differed significantly between the buffer rings. Results showed that increasing mean monthly concentration of CO and PM 2.5 may stimulate further production of liver enzymes while decreasing the birth weight and height.

An Adaptive Inverse-Distance Weighting Interpolation Method Considering Spatial Differentiation in 3D Geological Modeling

The inverse-distance weighting interpolation is widely used in 3D geological modeling and directly affects the accuracy of models. With the development of “smart” or “intelligent” geology, classical inverse-distance weighting interpolation cannot meet the accuracy, reliability, and efficiency requirements of large-scale 3D geological models in these fields. Although the improved inverse-distance weighting interpolation can basically meet the requirements of accuracy and reliability, it cannot meet the requirements of efficiency at the same time. In response to these limitations, the adaptive inverse-distance weighting interpolation method based on geological attribute spatial differentiation and geological attribute feature adaptation was proposed. This method takes into account the spatial differentiation of geological attributes to improve the accuracy and considers the first-order neighborhood selection strategy to adaptively improve efficiency to meet above requirements of large-scale geological modeling. The proposed method was applied to an area in eastern China, and the results of the proposed method, compared to the results of classical inverse-distance weighting interpolation and improved inverse-distance weighting interpolation, suggest that the problems encountered above in large-scale geological modeling can be solved with the proposed method. The method can provide effective support for large-scale 3D geological modeling in smart geology.

An Effective Detection Mechanism for Localizing Macular Region and Grading Maculopathy

The eye disease is prominent in many nations including India and is said to affect up to 80% patients having diabetes. Diabetic Retinopathy is the medical term for denoting the damages to retina caused due to diabetes mellitus. Implying K means Clustering algorithm for coarse segmentation, hard distils are identified with better accuracy than the classical approaches. The variance based methods for segmenting hard distils are reviewed in the surveys and had to be improved. To remove the background features from the picture and conserve computational costs, a mathematical morphological method is used to reconstruct the image features for better segmentation. The results obtained for 96.4% sensitivity and 97.2% specificity. Along with this advantage, a graphical user interface is developed which will simplify the usage of this system. This model will divide the fragments into regions of interests having lesions and normal regions carrying normal features. After this segmentation, ophthalmologists will utilize the results to grade diabetic retinopathy and devise a treatment plan.