Background: Cystinosis is a rare autosomal recessive lysosomal storage disease with high morbidity and mortality. It is caused by mutations in the CTNS gene that encodes the cystine transporter, cystinosin, which leads to lysosomal cystine accumulation. It is the major cause of inherited Fanconi syndrome, and should be suspected in young children with failure to thrive and signs of renal proximal tubular damage. The diagnosis can be missed in infants, because not all signs of renal Fanconi syndrome are present during the first months of life. Elevated white blood cell cystine content is the cornerstone of the diagnosis. Since chitotriosidase (CHIT1 or chitinase-1) is mainly produced by activated macrophages both in normal and inflammatory conditions which suggest that cystinosis should be included within the differential diagnosis of disorders associated with increased plasma chitotriosidase activity. This study is aimed to estimate serum chitotriosidase level, as a screening marker and therapeutic monitor for cystinosis disease in Iraqi children with cystinosis.
Subjects and Methods: The present study is a case-control study that included samples of 30 children with nephropathic cystinosis, compared to 25 healthy control children from those attending at The Genetic Rare Diseases Center / AL-Emamain AL-Kadhimain Teaching Hospital, Baghdad-Iraq.
Results: Our results reported that cystinotic children had a marked elevation of serum chitotriosidase activity, compared to age-matched healthy children, besides a significant associated with leukocyte-cystine content for cystinotic patients.
CHT1 as a Novel Biomarker
Conclusion: Estimation of serum chitotriosidase activity might aid in monitoring the therapeutic benefits of cysteamine therapy, as well as the prognosis of the disease when WBC cystine assessment is not available.
Key Words: Cystinosis, Cysteamine, Chitotriosidase.
The clayey soils have the capability to swell and shrink with the variation in moisture content. Soil stabilization is a well-known technique, which is implemented to improve the geotechnical properties of soils. The massive quantities of waste materials are resulting from modern industry methods create disposal hazards in addition to environmental problems. The steel industry has a waste that can be used with low strength and weak engineering properties soils. This study is carried out to evaluate the effect of steel slag (SS) as a by-product of the geotechnical properties of clayey soil. A series of laboratory tests were conducted on natural and stabilized soils. SS was added by 0, 2.5, 5, 10, 15, and 20% to the soil.
... Show MoreAn intrusion detection system (IDS) is key to having a comprehensive cybersecurity solution against any attack, and artificial intelligence techniques have been combined with all the features of the IoT to improve security. In response to this, in this research, an IDS technique driven by a modified random forest algorithm has been formulated to improve the system for IoT. To this end, the target is made as one-hot encoding, bootstrapping with less redundancy, adding a hybrid features selection method into the random forest algorithm, and modifying the ranking stage in the random forest algorithm. Furthermore, three datasets have been used in this research, IoTID20, UNSW-NB15, and IoT-23. The results are compared with the three datasets men
... Show MoreSemantic segmentation is an exciting research topic in medical image analysis because it aims to detect objects in medical images. In recent years, approaches based on deep learning have shown a more reliable performance than traditional approaches in medical image segmentation. The U-Net network is one of the most successful end-to-end convolutional neural networks (CNNs) presented for medical image segmentation. This paper proposes a multiscale Residual Dilated convolution neural network (MSRD-UNet) based on U-Net. MSRD-UNet replaced the traditional convolution block with a novel deeper block that fuses multi-layer features using dilated and residual convolution. In addition, the squeeze and execution attention mechanism (SE) and the s
... Show MoreThe transmitting and receiving of data consume the most resources in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). The energy supplied by the battery is the most important resource impacting WSN's lifespan in the sensor node. Therefore, because sensor nodes run from their limited battery, energy-saving is necessary. Data aggregation can be defined as a procedure applied for the elimination of redundant transmissions, and it provides fused information to the base stations, which in turn improves the energy effectiveness and increases the lifespan of energy-constrained WSNs. In this paper, a Perceptually Important Points Based Data Aggregation (PIP-DA) method for Wireless Sensor Networks is suggested to reduce redundant data before sending them to the
... Show MoreRecently, the phenomenon of the spread of fake news or misinformation in most fields has taken on a wide resonance in societies. Combating this phenomenon and detecting misleading information manually is rather boring, takes a long time, and impractical. It is therefore necessary to rely on the fields of artificial intelligence to solve this problem. As such, this study aims to use deep learning techniques to detect Arabic fake news based on Arabic dataset called the AraNews dataset. This dataset contains news articles covering multiple fields such as politics, economy, culture, sports and others. A Hybrid Deep Neural Network has been proposed to improve accuracy. This network focuses on the properties of both the Text-Convolution Neural
... Show MoreLacing reinforcement plays a critical role in the design and performance of reinforced concrete (RC) slabs by distributing the applied loads more evenly across the slab, ensuring that no specific area of the slab is overloaded. In this study, nine slabs, divided into three groups according to the investigated parameters, were meticulously designed and evaluated to study the interplay between the lacing reinforcement and other key parameters. Each slab was crafted for simple support and was subjected to both static and repeated two-point load tests. The lacing reinforcement had an angle of 45° with various tension and lacing steel. The repeated-tested specimens with lacing reinforcement experienced smaller ductility than those of s
... Show MoreAbstract In this study, an investigation is conducted to realise the possibility of organic materials use in radio frequency (RF) electronics for RF-energy harvesting. Iraqi palm tree remnants mixed with nickel oxide nanoparticles hosted in polyethylene, INP substrates, is proposed for this study. Moreover, a metamaterial (MTM) antenna is printed on the created INP substrate of 0.8 mm thickness using silver nanoparticles conductive ink. The fabricated antenna performances are instigated numerically than validated experimentally in terms of S11 spectra and radiation patterns. It is found that the proposed antenna shows an ultra-wide band matching bandwidth to cover the frequencies from 2.4 to 10 GHz with bore-sight gain variation from 2.2 to
... Show MoreLacing reinforcement plays a critical role in the design and performance of reinforced concrete (RC) slabs by distributing the applied loads more evenly across the slab, ensuring that no specific area of the slab is overloaded. In this study, nine slabs, divided into three groups according to the investigated parameters, were meticulously designed and evaluated to study the interplay between the lacing reinforcement and other key parameters. Each slab was crafted for simple support and was subjected to both static and repeated two-point load tests. The lacing reinforcement had an angle of 45° with various tension and lacing steel. The repeated-tested specimens with lacing reinforcement experienced smaller ductility than those of s
... Show More