Healthcare professionals' perception and practice of complementary and alternative medicine in Qassim region, Saudi Arabia.

INTRODUCTION: Over the last few decades, use of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) has grown in popularity, changing health professionals' knowledge and attitude toward CAM, and the treatment recommended by them. The aim of the study was to evaluate the perception and practice of CAM among healthcare professionals. METHODOLOGY: A cross-sectional study was conducted among healthcare providers selected by multistage random sampling technique in two governmental hospitals and ten primary healthcare centers in two governorates in the Qassim region, Saudi Arabia. A web-based, self-administered questionnaire was distributed via social media platforms. RESULTS: A total of 350 physicians responded to the survey. Good basic knowledge about CAM was reported by 48.6% of the respondents; a positive attitude was adopted by 53%; and CAM was actively practiced by 9.7%. Being a physician > 40 years and consultant affiliation were significantly associated with higher knowledge level about CAM (p = 0.006 and 0.03, respectively), as well as having a proactive practice (p = 0.007 and 0.04, respectively). Practicing CAM was prevalent among non-Saudi and married physicians (p = 0.02 for both). Knowledge about CAM and its practice were strongly correlated (p = 0.007). The most frequent constraints facing CAM practice were lack of knowledge and training on CAM (81.4%) and lack of studies supporting CAM (74.3%). CONCLUSIONS: The practices of health professionals in Qassim region need to be improved despite their expertise and favourable perception of CAM. Educational interventions could play greater roles in providing evidence-based CAM knowledge and enhancing training for physicians.

Comparative analysis of magnetic induction based communication techniques for wireless underground sensor networks.

A large range of applications have been identified based upon the communication of underground sensors deeply buried in the soil. The classical electromagnetic wave (EM) approach, which works well for terrestrial communication in air medium, when applied for this underground communication, suffers from significant challenges attributing to signal absorption by rocks, soil, or water contents, highly varying channel condition caused by soil characteristics, and requirement of big antennas. As a strong alternative of EM, various magnetic induction (MI) techniques have been introduced. These techniques basically depend upon the magnetic induction between two coupled coils associated with transceiver sensor nodes. This paper elaborates on three basic MI communication mechanisms i.e. direct MI transmission, MI waveguide transmission, and 3D coil MI communication with detailed discussion of their working mechanism, advantages and limitations. The comparative analysis of these MI techniques with each other as well as with EM wave method will facilitate the users in choosing the best method to offer enhanced transmission range (upto 250 m), reduced path loss (<100 dB), channel reliability, working bandwidth (1-2 kHz), & omni-directional coverage to realize the promising MI-based wireless underground sensor network (WUSN) applications.

Nurses' Knowledge and Practices Regarding the Prevention of Deep Vein Thrombosis in Saudi Arabia: Descriptive Cross-Sectional Study.

Background: Deep venous thrombosis (DVT) is a prevalent fatal problem and a major cause of avoidable death among morbid hospitalized patients. It is estimated that up to 900,000 people in the United States are affected each year. Additionally, around 60,000 to 100,000 Americans die annually of DVT. Objective: To assess studied nurses' knowledge and practice regarding Deep venous thrombosis prevention. Methods: A descriptive cross-sectional research design was used in this study at King Fahad Hospital of the University in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, using a self-administered questionnaire. A total of 67 nurses from medical and surgical units were included in the study. Data were coded and analyzed using SPSS 23.0 version. Results: According to the results, the knowledge and practice of nurses were found to be high. Total knowledge score regarding prevention of deep venous thrombosis (72.8±9.6), regarding studied nurses, score for each subcategory: general knowledge category (70.6±15.5), deep venous thrombosis risk factors category (66.5±13.1), and deep venous thrombosis prevention category (90.1±10.5). in addition, a statically significance association between nurses' years of experience (p=0.026), previous Deep venous thrombosis education (p=0.012), and total knowledge score regarding the prevention of deep venous thrombosis. Concerning the self-reported practice, the majority of the studied nurses have shown a very high practice score. Yet, there was no statically significant association between the sociodemographic characteristic and practice. Furthermore, a positive association between total knowledge and reported practice score but statically insignificant (p=0.075). Conclusion: Based on the result of the study, most of the studied nurses' level of knowledge and practice concerning the prevention of deep vein thrombosis ranged between high and very high.

Secure biometric authentication with de-duplication on distributed cloud storage.

Cloud computing is one of the evolving fields of technology, which allows storage, access of data, programs, and their execution over the internet with offering a variety of information related services. With cloud information services, it is essential for information to be saved securely and to be distributed safely across numerous users. Cloud information storage has suffered from issues related to information integrity, data security, and information access by unauthenticated users. The distribution and storage of data among several users are highly scalable and cost-efficient but results in data redundancy and security issues. In this article, a biometric authentication scheme is proposed for the requested users to give access permission in a cloud-distributed environment and, at the same time, alleviate data redundancy. To achieve this, a cryptographic technique is used by service providers to generate the bio-key for authentication, which will be accessible only to authenticated users. A Gabor filter with distributed security and encryption using XOR operations is used to generate the proposed bio-key (biometric generated key) and avoid data deduplication in the cloud, ensuring avoidance of data redundancy and security. The proposed method is compared with existing algorithms, such as convergent encryption (CE), leakage resilient (LR), randomized convergent encryption (RCE), secure de-duplication scheme (SDS), to evaluate the de-duplication performance. Our comparative analysis shows that our proposed scheme results in smaller computation and communication costs than existing schemes.