Cutaneous leishmaniasis (CL) is an endemic parasitic disease found in many provinces of Iraq. The immune system plays a crucial role in the development or healing of lesions through chemotactic cytokine activity. This study was aimed to detect the levels of two chemokine ligands (CCL2 and CCL5) in Iraqi patients suffering from dermal ulcers, caused by cutaneous leishmaniasis. It was measured in pre and post-treatment state of Pentostam (Pentavalent Antimony 100 mg). Blood serum concentrations of CCL2, CCL5 were measured by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay among newly infected patients, two-trial treatment patients and three-trial treatment patients, in comparison with the control group. The result indicated a significant difference in CCL5 level for the three groups of CL patients. Whereas the control (p˂0.5), CCL2 level counterparts showed a significant difference only in newly infected and the thee-trial treatment groups. Moreover, there was a significant difference between all CCL5 patient groups, while no observed difference was detected within patient groups of CCL2.Thus altering the chemokine levels before and after treatment gives insights for parasite role in chemokine expression which may help in new therapeutic approaches for dry or wet CL.
Pavement crack and pothole identification are important tasks in transportation maintenance and road safety. This study offers a novel technique for automatic asphalt pavement crack and pothole detection which is based on image processing. Different types of cracks (transverse, longitudinal, alligator-type, and potholes) can be identified with such techniques. The goal of this research is to evaluate road surface damage by extracting cracks and potholes, categorizing them from images and videos, and comparing the manual and the automated methods. The proposed method was tested on 50 images. The results obtained from image processing showed that the proposed method can detect cracks and potholes and identify their severity levels wit
... Show MoreVehicle detection (VD) plays a very essential role in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) that have been intensively studied within the past years. The need for intelligent facilities expanded because the total number of vehicles is increasing rapidly in urban zones. Trafï¬c monitoring is an important element in the intelligent transportation system, which involves the detection, classification, tracking, and counting of vehicles. One of the key advantages of traffic video detection is that it provides traffic supervisors with the means to decrease congestion and improve highway planning. Vehicle detection in videos combines image processing in real-time with computerized pattern recognition in flexible stages. The real-time pro
... Show MoreA new approach presented in this study to determine the optimal edge detection threshold value. This approach is base on extracting small homogenous blocks from unequal mean targets. Then, from these blocks we generate small image with known edges (edges represent the lines between the contacted blocks). So, these simulated edges can be assumed as true edges .The true simulated edges, compared with the detected edges in the small generated image is done by using different thresholding values. The comparison based on computing mean square errors between the simulated edge image and the produced edge image from edge detector methods. The mean square error computed for the total edge image (Er), for edge regio
... Show MoreVoice Activity Detection (VAD) is considered as an important pre-processing step in speech processing systems such as speech enhancement, speech recognition, gender and age identification. VAD helps in reducing the time required to process speech data and to improve final system accuracy by focusing the work on the voiced part of the speech. An automatic technique for VAD using Fuzzy-Neuro technique (FN-AVAD) is presented in this paper. The aim of this work is to alleviate the problem of choosing the best threshold value in traditional VAD methods and achieves automaticity by combining fuzzy clustering and machine learning techniques. Four features are extracted from each speech segment, which are short term energy, zero-crossing rate, auto
... Show MoreHM Al-Dabbas, RA Azeez, AE Ali, Iraqi Journal of Science, 2023
The Normalization Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), for many years, was widely used in remote sensing for the detection of vegetation land cover. This index uses red channel radiances (i.e., 0.66 μm reflectance) and near-IR channel (i.e., 0.86 μm reflectance). In the heavy chlorophyll absorption area, the red channel is located, while in the high reflectance plateau of vegetation canopies, the Near-IR channel is situated. Senses of channels (Red & Near- IR) read variance depths over vegetation canopies. In the present study, a further index for vegetation identification is proposed. The normalized difference vegetation shortwave index (NDVSI) is defined as the difference between the cubic bands of Near- IR and Shortwave infrared
... Show MoreThe seizure epilepsy is risky because it happens randomly and leads to death in some cases. The standard epileptic seizures monitoring system involves video/EEG (electro-encephalography), which bothers the patient, as EEG electrodes are attached to the patient’s head.
Seriously, helping or alerting the patient before the seizure is one of the issue that attracts the researchers and designers attention. So that there are spectrums of portable seizure detection systems available in markets which are based on non-EEG signal.
The aim of this article is to provide a literature survey for the latest articles that cover many issues in the field of designing portable real-time seizure detection that includes the use of multiple
... Show MoreFor several applications, it is very important to have an edge detection technique matching human visual contour perception and less sensitive to noise. The edge detection algorithm describes in this paper based on the results obtained by Maximum a posteriori (MAP) and Maximum Entropy (ME) deblurring algorithms. The technique makes a trade-off between sharpening and smoothing the noisy image. One of the advantages of the described algorithm is less sensitive to noise than that given by Marr and Geuen techniques that considered to be the best edge detection algorithms in terms of matching human visual contour perception.
Background: Coronavirus, which causes respiratory illness, has been a public health issue in recent decades. Because the clinical symptoms of infection are not always specific, it is difficult to expose all suspects to qualitative testing in order to confirm or rule out infection as a test. Methods: According to the scientific studies and investigations, seventy-three results of scientific articles and research were obtained using PubMed, Medline, Research gate and Google Scholar. The research keywords used were COVID-19, coronavirus, blood parameters, and saliva. Results: This review provides a report on the changes in the blood and saliva tests of those who are infected with the COVID-19.COVID-19 is a systemic infection that has
... Show MorePregnancy-induced hypertension (PIH) is a major pregnancy complication that causes pregnant women mortality. Here, we had scrutinized the correlation between serum levels of -hCG and biochemical parameters in PIH. Serum samples were collected from eighty Iraqi women (forty women with pregnancy-induced hypertension as patients group, twenty normotensive pregnant women as a positive control, and twenty normotensive non-pregnant women as a negative control) all groups were diagnosed clinically. All -hCG hormone level was measured for all studied groups, also serum uric acid, albumin, and total protein levels were measured as biochemical parameters. Data analysis showed that serum level of -hCG hormone was significant increase (p≤
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