Diabetic retinopathy is an eye disease in diabetic patients due to damage to the small blood vessels in the retina due to high and low blood sugar levels. Accurate detection and classification of Diabetic Retinopathy is an important task in computer-aided diagnosis, especially when planning for diabetic retinopathy surgery. Therefore, this study aims to design an automated model based on deep learning, which helps ophthalmologists detect and classify diabetic retinopathy severity through fundus images. In this work, a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) with transfer learning and fine tunes has been proposed by using pre-trained networks known as Residual Network-50 (ResNet-50). The overall framework of the proposed

            Toxoplasma gondii is an opportunistic parasite in immune-compromised persons. The prevalence of toxoplasmosis in psoriasis patients is investigated. In addition, the treatment effect on psoriasis patients infected with toxoplasmosis through evaluating Tumor Necrosis Factor-α (TNF-α) cytokine levels is studied. Blood samples were collected from 130 individuals who involved 60 control samples and 70 samples with psoriasis. They attended Medical City Hospital in Baghdad province from October 2017 - February 2018. Then, the anti- T. gondii antibodies (IgM and IgG) and TNF- α in the sera were determined via the enzyme linked immune-sorbent assay. The highe

Objective: To evaluate the functional outcomes after extended curettage and reconstruction using a combination of bone graft and bone cement (sandwich). Methodology: In this prospective case series 16 skeletally mature patients with primary giant cell tumor around the knee were included. Patients with previous surgically treated, malignant transformation, degenerative knee changes and those presenting with pathological fracture were excluded. The tumor was excised with bone graft filling space beneath the articular cartilage and a block of gel foam was placed over the cortical surface of picked bone graft. Remaining cavity was filled with polymethylmethacrylate cement (sandwich) with or without internal fixation. The func tional evaluation

One of the recent significant but challenging research studies in computational biology and bioinformatics is to unveil protein complexes from protein-protein interaction networks (PPINs). However, the development of a reliable algorithm to detect more complexes with high quality is still ongoing in many studies. The main contribution of this paper is to improve the effectiveness of the well-known modularity density ( ) model when used as a single objective optimization function in the framework of the canonical evolutionary algorithm (EA). To this end, the design of the EA is modified with a gene ontology-based mutation operator, where the aim is to make a positive collaboration between the modularity density model and the proposed

Automatic Programming Assessment (APA) has been gaining lots of attention among researchers mainly to support automated grading and marking of students’ programming assignments or exercises systematically. APA is commonly identified as a method that can enhance accuracy, efficiency and consistency as well as providing instant feedback on students’ programming solutions. In achieving APA, test data generation process is very important so as to perform a dynamic testing on students’ assignment. In software testing field, many researches that focus on test data generation have demonstrated the successful of adoption of Meta-Heuristic Search Techniques (MHST) so as to enhance the procedure of deriving adequate test data for efficient t

Plumbago (Plumbaginaceae) is a genus of 10-20 species of flowering plants used in traditional Indian medicine, native to warm temperature to tropical regions of the world. The roots of Plumbago europaea, the Iraqi species of Plumbago, have been used for the treatment of cancer, rheumatoid arthritis, and dysmenorrhea. The main active constituents from dried powdered leaves and roots of Plumbago europaea were extracted by Soxhlet apparatus using ethyl acetate, the main active constituent was characterized by spectroscopic analysis (IR, ¹H NMR, and ¹³C NMR)   as plumbagin. Quantitative and qualitative study of plumbagin in the roots and leaves extracts was carried out by HP

The objective of this research was to estimate the dose distribution delivered by radioactive gold nanoparticles (198 AuNPs or 199 AuNPs) to the tumor inside the human prostate as well as to normal tissues surrounding the tumor using the Monte-Carlo N-Particle code (MCNP-6.1. 1 code). Background Radioactive gold nanoparticles are emerging as promising agents for cancer therapy and are being investigated to treat prostate cancer in animals. In order to use them as a new therapeutic modality to treat human prostate cancer, accurate radiation dosimetry simulations are required to estimate the energy deposition in the tumor and surrounding tissue and to establish the course of therapy for the patient. Materials and methods A simple geometrical

      A model using the artificial neural networks and genetic algorithm technique is developed for obtaining optimum dimensions of the foundation length and protections of small hydraulic structures. The procedure involves optimizing an objective function comprising a weighted summation of the state variables. The decision variables considered in the optimization are the upstream and downstream cutoffs lengths and their angles of inclination, the foundation length, and the length of the downstream soil protection. These were obtained for a given maximum difference in head, depth of impervious layer and degree of anisotropy. The optimization carried out is subjected to constraints that ensure a safe structure aga

The proposed work is an attempt to investigate the stability of the nonlinear system by using a whale optimization algorithm as of one of the meta-heuristic optimization methods, and this investigation was conducted on a single inverted pendulum as a study model. The evaluation measures which were used in this article values of gain and sliding surface of the conventional sliding mode controller to illustrate the extent of the system`s stability. Furthermore, control action, the relationship between error and its derivative, desired, and actual position in addition to sliding response graphically showed the feasibility of the proposed solution. The attained results illustrated considerable improvement in the settling time and minimizing the

The gas-lift method is crucial for maintaining oil production, particularly from an established field when the natural energy of the reservoirs is depleted. To maximize oil production, a major field's gas injection rate must be distributed as efficiently as possible across its gas-lift network system. Common gas-lift optimization techniques may lose their effectiveness and become unable to replicate the gas-lift optimum in a large network system due to problems with multi-objective, multi-constrained & restricted gas injection rate distribution. The main objective of the research is to determine the possibility of using the genetic algorithm (GA) technique to achieve the optimum distribution for the continuous gas-lift injectio