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.
<p>Combating the COVID-19 epidemic has emerged as one of the most promising healthcare the world's challenges have ever seen. COVID-19 cases must be accurately and quickly diagnosed to receive proper medical treatment and limit the pandemic. Imaging approaches for chest radiography have been proven in order to be more successful in detecting coronavirus than the (RT-PCR) approach. Transfer knowledge is more suited to categorize patterns in medical pictures since the number of available medical images is limited. This paper illustrates a convolutional neural network (CNN) and recurrent neural network (RNN) hybrid architecture for the diagnosis of COVID-19 from chest X-rays. The deep transfer methods used were VGG19, DenseNet121
... Show MoreSustainability including renewable energy and green power, is one of the important feature in recent years due to environmental constraints and the emission of CO2 from fossil fuel. Pressure retarded osmosis (PRO) process is considered one of the effective technology for power generation. This study assessed the application of pressure retarded osmosis to produce power from Tigris River water in Baghdad City, Iraq. Spiral wound TFC membrane was tested in the PRO process with different variables. The effect of different types of draw solutions (MgCl2, NaCl, Sodium Formate, KCl, Sodium Acetate), applied pressure (0 – 7 bar), and draw solution concentration (0.08 and 0.4 M) were tested in this work. The flux, recovery, and power density for
... Show MoreOptimizing system performance in dynamic and heterogeneous environments and the efficient management of computational tasks are crucial. This paper therefore looks at task scheduling and resource allocation algorithms in some depth. The work evaluates five algorithms: Genetic Algorithms (GA), Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), Ant Colony Optimization (ACO), Firefly Algorithm (FA) and Simulated Annealing (SA) across various workloads achieved by varying the task-to-node ratio. The paper identifies Finish Time and Deadline as two key performance metrics for gauging the efficacy of an algorithm, and a comprehensive investigation of the behaviors of these algorithms across different workloads was carried out. Results from the experiment
... 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 MoreIn this work, using GPS which has best accuracy that can be established set of GCPs, also two satellite images can be used, first with high resolution QuickBird, and second has low resolution Landsat image and topographic maps with 1:100,000 and 1:250,000 scales. The implementing of these factors (GPS, two satellite images, different scales for topographic maps, and set of GCPs) can be applying. In this study, must be divided this work into two parts geometric accuracy and informative accuracy investigation. The first part is showing geometric correction for two satellite images and maps.
The second part of the results is to demonstrate the features (how the features appearance) of topographic map or pictorial map (image map), Where i
Although the number of stomach tumor patients reduced obviously during last decades in western countries, but this illness is still one of the main causes of death in developing countries. The aim of this research is to detect the area of a tumor in a stomach images based on fuzzy clustering. The proposed methodology consists of three stages. The stomach images are divided into four quarters and then features elicited from each quarter in the first stage by utilizing seven moments invariant. Fuzzy C-Mean clustering (FCM) was employed in the second stage for each quarter to collect the features of each quarter into clusters. Manhattan distance was calculated in the third stage among all clusters' centers in all quarters to disclosure of t
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