Toxoplasma gondii is a unique intracellular parasite, which infect a large proportion of the world population, but uncommonly causes clinically significant disease. The present study was performed to estimate the prevalence of toxoplasmosis in 400 apparently healthy blood donor males, their ages were between 18 and 57 years using enzyme linked immunosorbent assay, and to examine the effects of infection on total testosterone, free testosterone and follicle stimulating hormone (FSH) levels in their sera. Seroprevalence showed 10 (2.5 %) and 121 (30 %) of them had IgM and IgG antibodies respectively. Both acute and chronic toxoplasmosis in males recorded higher significant (P < 0.05) mean concentration for total and free testosterone hormone,

Objectives: Dickkopf-1 (DKK-1) is WNT/b-catenin pathway antagonist which plays a detrimental role in the development of diabetic retinopathy (DR). This research aimed to assess serum DKK-1 levels in diabetic patients who have and have not developed DR and, compare them with the control subjects finding out whether we can use it as an indicator for DR early diagnosis and to find out which one of the widely used two groups of antidiabetic treatments had the greater effect on this biomarker and hence on the progression of DR. Methods: The study participants were divided into two subgroups: First, 70 patients (36 male, 34 female) with type 2 diabetes mellitus, among them 35 patients diagnosed with DR and 35 with no evidence of DR, and s

This paper analyses the relationship between selected macroeconomic variables and gross domestic product (GDP) in Saudi Arabia for the period 1993-2019. Specifically, it measures the effects of interest rate, oil price, inflation rate, budget deficit and money supply on the GDP of Saudi Arabia. The method employs in this paper is based on a descriptive analysis approach and ARDL model through the Bounds testing approach to cointegration. The results of the research reveal that the budget deficit, oil price and money supply have positive significant effects on GDP, while other variables have no effects on GDP and turned out to be insignificant. The findings suggest that both fiscal and monetary policies should be fo

SKF Sami I. Jafar, Mohammad J. Kadhim, Engineering and Technology Journal, 2018 - Cited by 4

A theoretical study has been proposed to investigate the effects of different laser radiations (Nd - glass, DF and C02) as a heating source on different glass samples (Optical glass, Bk - 7 and Soda - lime glass) and different waves lengths (10.6, 3.8, 1.6) ???. The heat changes as which are resulted due irradiation with laser sources have been determined by using the one dimension mathematical relation as a function of time (t) and depth (z). The results of the study show ed that the irradiation with C02 laser had a greater effect than DF laser, while the effects of Nd - glass laser were minimal with a power density of (1.8*10?? w/m2) within atime(l^sec).(Forboth Kinds) The change in the temperatures were not exceeded than (70"K) in all sa

؛ ١٨his study male and female albino mice werdministr^d doses of alkaloid and phenolic extracts of Allium cepa at doses of( 25 ,50,100, 200) mg / kg of( body weight). males and females were divided into four groups and each croup comprised mice were injected intra^ritonially daily for one week and orally ٢٠٢ one month . After which animals were killed and the serum was separated for biochemical analysis (total blood suger, total protein , otal cholesterol). Results showed significant decrease ( p< 0,05) in the total blood suger and total cholesterol on the serum of both males and females and significant increase( p< 0,05) in the total serum protein of both males and females of the two types of injection and oral administr

Human identification is crucial in forensics for the investigation of large-scale disasters such as fires, epidemics, earthquakes, and tsunamis. Even though biometric identification using panoramic dental radiography (PDR) has been the subject of several studies in the literature, further study remains a necessary and challenging issue. In this research, a human identification system was developed based on a convolutional neural network (CNN) and contour transform (CT). The proposed system was implemented on a total of 1540 PDR from 302 individuals. The preprocessing applied to PDRs for enhancing and taking the Region of Interest (ROI). The features were extracted using CT transform. These features were fused with features extracted

Segmentation of urban features is considered a major research challenge in the fields of photogrammetry and remote sensing. However, the dense datasets now readily available through airborne laser scanning (ALS) offer increased potential for 3D object segmentation. Such potential is further augmented by the availability of full-waveform (FWF) ALS data. FWF ALS has demonstrated enhanced performance in segmentation and classification through the additional physical observables which can be provided alongside standard geometric information. However, use of FWF information is not recommended without prior radiometric calibration, taking into account all parameters affecting the backscatter energy. This paper reports the implementation o

In this work, results from an optical technique (laser speckle technique) for measuring surface roughness was done by using statistical properties of speckle pattern from the point of view of computer image texture analysis. Four calibration relationships were used to cover wide range of measurement with the same laser speckle technique. The first one is based on intensity contrast of the speckle, the second is based on analysis of speckle binary image,  the third is on size of speckle pattern spot, and the latest one is based on characterization of the energy feature of the gray level co-occurrence matrices for the speckle pattern. By these calibration relationships surface roughness of an object surface can be evaluated within the