Cutaneous leishmaniasis is a disease caused by Leishmania tropica parasite. Current treatments for this parasite are undesirable because of their toxicity, resistance, and high cost. Macrophages are key players against pathogens. Nitric oxide (NO), a molecule produce by immune cells, controls intracellular killing of pathogens during infection. Silver nanoparticles (Ag NPs) demonstrated broad-spectrum activity against various types of infectious diseases. It has the ability to stimulate oxygen species production. This study aims to analyze the macrophages activation through NO production and estimate the cytotoxicity based on the lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) release upon exposure to L. tropica and Ag NPs. Serially concentrations of Ag NPs were used under two conditions during and following macrophages exposure to L. tropica. MTT assay was used to determine the cytotoxicity of Ag NPs on L. tropica amastigotes during infection of macrophages in vitro. The results showed that by increasing the Ag NPs concentrations, the viability percentage of L. tropica amastigotes decreased and reached to 21.7 ± 0.64 % during infection compared with the control. The 50% inhibitory concentration of Ag NPs on amastigotes was 2.048µg/ml during infection. Moreover, post-phagocytosis study involved the assessment of NO and LDH release by macrophages upon exposure to L. tropica. It have shown that untreated macrophages released low levels of NO while in the presence of Ag NPs, macrophages were activated to produce higher levels of NO under all experimental conditions. On the other hand, macrophages were capable of controlling cytotoxicity and decreasing LDH levels during phagocytosis of L. tropica amastiogotes. Taking together, these findings suggest that Ag NPs can enhance macrophages NO production which provides a method for the identification of Ag NPs ligands with microbicidal and anti-cytotoxic properties against L. tropica pathogens.
Many tools and techniques have been recently adopted to develop construction materials that are less harmful and friendlier to the environment. New products can be achieved through the recycling of waste material. Thus, this study aims to use recycled glass bottles as sustainable materials.
Our challenge is to use nano glass powder by the addition or replacement of the weight of the cement for producing concrete with enhanced strength.
A nano recycled glass p
Electrospinning is a novel technique that can be used to produce highly porous fibers with highly tunable properties. In this research, this technique is adopted to prepare the electrospun nanofiber membrane for membrane distillation application. A custom-built electrospinning setup was made to prepare the nanofibers membrane. Polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) polymer was used in the electrospinning process due to its high hydrophobicity. Electrospun (PVDF) nanofibers were tested in direct contact membrane distillation (DCMD) process using 0.6 M sodium chloride as a feed solution. The resulting nanofiber membrane exhibited high performance in DCMD (i.e. relatively high water flux and high salt rejection). It has been found
... Show MoreFace Identification is an important research topic in the field of computer vision and pattern recognition and has become a very active research area in recent decades. Recently multiwavelet-based neural networks (multiwavenets) have been used for function approximation and recognition, but to our best knowledge it has not been used for face Identification. This paper presents a novel approach for the Identification of human faces using Back-Propagation Adaptive Multiwavenet. The proposed multiwavenet has a structure similar to a multilayer perceptron (MLP) neural network with three layers, but the activation function of hidden layer is replaced with multiscaling functions. In experiments performed on the ORL face database it achieved a
... Show MoreImage Fusion Using A Convolutional Neural Network
In this paper we find the exact solution of Burger's equation after reducing it to Bernoulli equation. We compare this solution with that given by Kaya where he used Adomian decomposition method, the solution given by chakrone where he used the Variation iteration method (VIM)and the solution given by Eq(5)in the paper of M. Javidi. We notice that our solution is better than their solutions.
In this paper, visible image watermarking algorithm based on biorthogonal wavelet
transform is proposed. The watermark (logo) of type binary image can be embedded in the
host gray image by using coefficients bands of the transformed host image by biorthogonal
transform domain. The logo image can be embedded in the top-left corner or spread over the
whole host image. A scaling value (α) in the frequency domain is introduced to control the
perception of the watermarked image. Experimental results show that this watermark
algorithm gives visible logo with and no losses in the recovery process of the original image,
the calculated PSNR values support that. Good robustness against attempt to remove the
watermark was s
Preserving and saving energy have never been more important, thus the requirement for more effective and efficient heat exchangers has never been more important. However, in order to pave the way for the proposal of a truly efficient technique, there is a need to understand the shortcomings and strengths of various aspects of heat transfer techniques. This review aims to systematically identify these characteristics two of the most popular passive heat transfer techniques: nanofluids and helically coiled tubes. The review indicated that nanoparticles improve thermal conductivity of base fluid and that the nanoparticle size, as well as the concentrations of the nanoparticles plays a major role in the effectiveness of the nanofluids.
... Show MoreDocument analysis of images snapped by camera is a growing challenge. These photos are often poor-quality compound images, composed of various objects and text; this makes automatic analysis complicated. OCR is one of the image processing techniques which is used to perform automatic identification of texts. Existing image processing techniques need to manage many parameters in order to clearly recognize the text in such pictures. Segmentation is regarded one of these essential parameters. This paper discusses the accuracy of segmentation process and its effect over the recognition process. According to the proposed method, the images were firstly filtered using the wiener filter then the active contour algorithm could b
... Show MoreIn this paper, the developed sprite allocation method is designed to be coherent with the introduced block-matching method in order to minimize the allocation process time for digital video. The accomplished allocation process of sprite region consists of three main steps. The first step is the detection of sprite area; where the sequence of frames belong to Group of Video sequence are analysed to detect the sprite regions which survive for long time, and to determine the sprite type (i.e., whether it is static or dynamic). Then as a second step, the flagged survived areas are passed through the gaps/islands removal stage to enhance the detected sprite areas using post-processing operations. The third step is partitioning the sprite area in
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