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.
The Hopfield network is one of the easiest types, and its architecture is such that each neuron in the network connects to the other, thus called a fully connected neural network. In addition, this type is considered auto-associative memory, because the network returns the pattern immediately upon recognition, this network has many limitations, including memory capacity, discrepancy, orthogonally between patterns, weight symmetry, and local minimum. This paper proposes a new strategy for designing Hopfield based on XOR operation; A new strategy is proposed to solve these limitations by suggesting a new algorithm in the Hopfield network design, this strategy will increase the performance of Hopfield by modifying the architecture of t
... Show Moren this study, data or X-ray images Fixable Image Transport System (FITS) of objects were analyzed, where energy was collected from the body by several sensors; each sensor receives energy within a specific range, and when energy was collected from all sensors, the image was formed carrying information about that body. The images can be transferred and stored easily. The images were analyzed using the DS9 program to obtain a spectrum for each object,an energy corresponding to the photons collected per second. This study analyzed images for two types of objects (globular and open clusters). The results showed that the five open star clusters contain roughly t
... Show MoreIn this paper we used frequentist and Bayesian approaches for the linear regression model to predict future observations for unemployment rates in Iraq. Parameters are estimated using the ordinary least squares method and for the Bayesian approach using the Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method. Calculations are done using the R program. The analysis showed that the linear regression model using the Bayesian approach is better and can be used as an alternative to the frequentist approach. Two criteria, the root mean square error (RMSE) and the median absolute deviation (MAD) were used to compare the performance of the estimates. The results obtained showed that the unemployment rates will continue to increase in the next two decade
... Show MoreWith the wide developments of computer applications and networks, the security of information has high attention in our common fields of life. The most important issues is how to control and prevent unauthorized access to secure information, therefore this paper presents a combination of two efficient encryption algorithms to satisfy the purpose of information security by adding a new level of encryption in Rijndael-AES algorithm. This paper presents a proposed Rijndael encryption and decryption process with NTRU algorithm, Rijndael algorithm is widely accepted due to its strong encryption, and complex processing as well as its resistance to brute force attack. The proposed modifications are implemented by encryption and decryption Rijndael
... Show MoreIn this paper, a robust invisible watermarking system for digital video encoded by MPEG-4 is presented. The proposed scheme provides watermark hidden by embedding a secret message (watermark) in the sprite area allocated in reference frame (I-frame). The proposed system consists of two main units: (i) Embedding unit and (ii) Extraction unit. In the embedding unit, the system allocates the sprite blocks using motion compensation information. The allocated sprite area in each I–frame is used as hosting area for embedding watermark data. In the extraction unit, the system extracts the watermark data in order to check authentication and ownership of the video. The watermark data embedding method is Blocks average modulation applied on RGB dom
... Show More<p class="0abstract">Image denoising is a technique for removing unwanted signals called the noise, which coupling with the original signal when transmitting them; to remove the noise from the original signal, many denoising methods are used. In this paper, the Multiwavelet Transform (MWT) is used to denoise the corrupted image by Choosing the HH coefficient for processing based on two different filters Tri-State Median filter and Switching Median filter. With each filter, various rules are used, such as Normal Shrink, Sure Shrink, Visu Shrink, and Bivariate Shrink. The proposed algorithm is applied Salt& pepper noise with different levels for grayscale test images. The quality of the denoised image is evaluated by usi
... Show MoreMost intrusion detection systems are signature based that work similar to anti-virus but they are unable to detect the zero-day attacks. The importance of the anomaly based IDS has raised because of its ability to deal with the unknown attacks. However smart attacks are appeared to compromise the detection ability of the anomaly based IDS. By considering these weak points the proposed
system is developed to overcome them. The proposed system is a development to the well-known payload anomaly detector (PAYL). By
combining two stages with the PAYL detector, it gives good detection ability and acceptable ratio of false positive. The proposed system improve the models recognition ability in the PAYL detector, for a filtered unencrypt