It was aimed to understand the interleukin-4 (IL-4) role in etio-pathogenesis of rheumatoid arthritis (RA). Two approaches were adopted. In the first one, a quantitative expression of IL4 gene was assessed by reverse transcription-quantitative polymerase chain reaction (RT-qPCR), and such findings were correlated with some demographic, clinical and laboratory parameters, which included gender, duration of disease, disease activity score (DAS-28), rheumatoid factors (RFs), C-reactive protein (CRP) and anti-cyclic citrullinated peptide (ACCP) antibodies. In the second approach, a single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) of IL4 gene (rs2243250) was inspected by DNA sequencing using specific primers. Fifty-one Iraqi RA patients (22 males and 29 females) were enrolled in the study. They were under therapy, which was a single weekly subcutaneous dose of 25 mg of etanercept (Enbrel) for a period of 3-5 years. The results of gene expression (2-??Ct) revealed an increased expression of IL4 mRNA (Mean ± SEM: 8.247 ± 2.442), especially female patients compared to male patients (11.545 ± 3.928 vs. 3.537 ± 1.530; p = 0.03). The expression was also subjected to variations that were related to clinical and laboratory findings. With respect to IL4 gene SNP, allele and genotype frequencies showed no significant differences between RA patients and controls. In addition, the SNP genotypes had no effect on IL4 gene expression. In conclusion, an up-regulation of IL4 gene expression was observed in RA patients, and it was more pronounced in female than male patients by approximately four folds, while no association between the IL4 SNP alleles or genotypes and RA was observed.
Photonic crystal fiber interferometers are widely used for sensing applications. In this work, solid core-Photonic crystal fiber based on Mach-Zehnder modal interferometer for sensing refractive index was presented. The general structure of sensor applied by splicing short lengths of PCF in both sides with conventional single mode fiber (SMF-28). To apply modal interferometer theory; collapsing technique based on fusion splicing used to excite higher order modes (LP01 and LP11). Laser diode (1550 nm) has been used as a pump light source. Where a high sensitive optical spectrum analyzer (OSA) was used to monitor and record the transmitted. The experimental work shows that the interference spectrum of Photonic crystal fiber interferometer
... Show MoreFor many years, the construction industry damages have been overlooked such as unreasonable consumption of resources in addition to producing a lot of construction waste but with global awareness growth towards the sustainable development issues, the sustainable construction practices have been adopted, taking into account the environment and human safety. The research aims to propose a management system for construction practices which could be adopted during constructing different types of sustainable buildings besides formulating flowcharts which clarify the required whole phases of sustainable buildings life cycle. The research includes two parts: theoretical part which generally ,handles the sustainability concepts at construction i
... Show MoreHuman interaction technology based on motion capture (MoCap) systems is a vital tool for human kinematics analysis, with applications in clinical settings, animations, and video games. We introduce a new method for analyzing and estimating dorsal spine movement using a MoCap system. The captured data by the MoCap system are processed and analyzed to estimate the motion kinematics of three primary regions; the shoulders, spine, and hips. This work contributes a non-invasive and anatomically guided framework that enables region-specific analysis of spinal motion which could be used as a clinical alternative to invasive measurement techniques. The hierarchy of our model consists of five main levels; motion capture system settings, marker data
... Show MoreA Strength Pareto Evolutionary Algorithm 2 (SPEA 2) approach for solving the multi-objective Environmental / Economic Power Dispatch (EEPD) problem is presented in this paper. In the past fuel cost consumption minimization was the aim (a single objective function) of economic power dispatch problem. Since the clean air act amendments have been applied to reduce SO2 and NOX emissions from power plants, the utilities change their strategies in order to reduce pollution and atmospheric emission as well, adding emission minimization as other objective function made economic power dispatch (EPD) a multi-objective problem having conflicting objectives. SPEA2 is the improved version of SPEA with better fitness assignment, density estimation, an
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XML is being incorporated into the foundation of E-business data applications. This paper addresses the problem of the freeform information that stored in any organization and how XML with using this new approach will make the operation of the search very efficient and time consuming. This paper introduces new solution and methodology that has been developed to capture and manage such unstructured freeform information (multi information) depending on the use of XML schema technologies, neural network idea and object oriented relational database, in order to provide a practical solution for efficiently management multi freeform information system.
Today in the digital realm, where images constitute the massive resource of the social media base but unfortunately suffer from two issues of size and transmission, compression is the ideal solution. Pixel base techniques are one of the modern spatially optimized modeling techniques of deterministic and probabilistic bases that imply mean, index, and residual. This paper introduces adaptive pixel-based coding techniques for the probabilistic part of a lossy scheme by incorporating the MMSA of the C321 base along with the utilization of the deterministic part losslessly. The tested results achieved higher size reduction performance compared to the traditional pixel-based techniques and the standard JPEG by about 40% and 50%,
... Show MoreThis study deals with knowing the public relations activities of the Integrity Commission for the year 2007, knowing the contents of these activities, knowing the contents of the advertisements that it published, whether the contents of the advertisements were convincing, and whether press photographs were used in these advertisements, as well as whether symbols and slogans were used. What language and words were used to address the recipient? 1- What feelings do the contents of advertisements arouse? 2- Research objectives: This research aims to answer the following questions: What are the public relations activities carried out by the Integrity Commission? B: Are the contents of the advertisements published by the Authority convincing to
... Show More<p><span>This research deals with the feasibility of a mobile robot to navigate and discover its location at unknown environments, and then constructing maps of these navigated environments for future usage. In this work, we proposed a modified Extended Kalman Filter- Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (EKF-SLAM) technique which was implemented for different unknown environments containing a different number of landmarks. Then, the detectable landmarks will play an important role in controlling the overall navigation process and EKF-SLAM technique’s performance. MATLAB simulation results of the EKF-SLAM technique come with better performance as compared with an odometry approach performance in terms of measuring the
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