The aim: to evaluate combined microscopy techniques for determining the morphological and optical properties of methadone hydrochloride (MDN) crystals. Materials and methods: MDN crystal formation was optimized using a closed container method and crystals were characterized using polarized light microscope (PLM), scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and confocal microscopy (CM). SEM and CM were used to determine MDN crystal thickness and study its relationship with crystal retardation colours using the Michel-Levy Birefringence approach. Results: Dimensions (mean±SD) of diamond shaped MDN crystals were confirmed using SEM and CM. Crystals were 46.4±15.2 Vs 32.0±8.3 µm long, 28.03±8.2 Vs 20.85±5.5 µm wide, and 6.62±

BACKGROUND: Hepatocyte growth factor (HGF) is a proangiogenic factor that exerts different effects over stem cell survival growth, apoptosis, and adhesion. Its impact on leukemogenesis has been established by many studies. AIM: This study aimed to determine the effect of plasma HGF activity on acute myeloid leukemia (AML) patients at presentation and after remission. PATIENTS AND METHODS: This was a cross-sectional prospective study of 30 newly-diagnosed, adult, and AML patients. All patients received the 7+3 treatment protocol. Patients’ clinical data were taken at presentation, and patients were followed up for 6 months to evaluate the clinical status. Plasma HGF levels were estimated by ELISA based methods in the pa

Juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA) represents a group of multifactorial autoinflammatory arthritis diseases. A dysregulated production of pro-inflammatory cytokines is proposed to have a role in the pathogenesis of the disease. Interleukin-18 (IL-18) is one of these pro-inflammatory cytokines. Therefore, this study aimed to define the role of IL-18 in the pathogenesis of JIA. Accordingly, the serum level of IL-18 was determined in 59 Iraqi JIA patients and 58 matched controls. The results revealed a significantly increased median of IL-18 in the patients as compared to the control. A similar increased level was observed in subgroups of patients characterized according to gender, seropositivity for C-reactive protein and rheumatoid facto

A method has been demonstrated to synthesise effective zeolite membranes from existing crystals without a hydrothermal synthesis step.

An automatic text summarization system mimics how humans summarize by picking the most ‎significant sentences in a source text. However, the complexities of the Arabic language have become ‎challenging to obtain information quickly and effectively. The main disadvantage of the ‎traditional approaches is that they are strictly constrained (especially for the Arabic language) by the ‎accuracy of sentence feature ‎functions, weighting schemes, ‎and similarity calculations. On the other hand, the meta-heuristic search approaches have a feature tha

Recent years have seen an explosion in graph data from a variety of scientific, social and technological fields. From these fields, emotion recognition is an interesting research area because it finds many applications in real life such as in effective social robotics to increase the interactivity of the robot with human, driver safety during driving, pain monitoring during surgery etc. A novel facial emotion recognition based on graph mining has been proposed in this paper to make a paradigm shift in the way of representing the face region, where the face region is represented as a graph of nodes and edges and the gSpan frequent sub-graphs mining algorithm is used to find the frequent sub-structures in the graph database of each emotion. T

 N-Pyridin-2-ylmethyl-benzene-1,2-diamine (L) was prepared from the reaction of ortho amino phenyl thiol with 2 – amino methyl pyridine in mole ratio (1:1) . It was characterized by elemental analysis (C.H.N) , FT-IR , Uv – Vis , 1H , 13C-N.M.R . The complexes of the bivalent ions (Co , Ni , Cu ,Pd , Cd , Hg and Pb) and the trivalent (Cr) have been prepared and characterized too . The structural was established by elemental analysis (C.H.N) , FT-IR , Uv – Vis spectra , conductivity measurements , atomic absorption and magnetic susceptibility . The complexes showed characteristic behavior of octahedral geometry around the metal ions and the (N,N,N) ligand coordinated in tridentat mode except with Pd complexes sho

The prostaglandins inside inflamed tissues are produced by cyclooxygenase-2 (COX-2), making it an important target for improving anti-inflammatory medications over a long period. Adverse effects have been related to the traditional usage of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) for the treatment of inflammation, mainly centered around gastrointestinal (GI) complications. The current research involves the creation of a virtual library of innovative molecules showing similar drug properties via a structure-based drug design. A library that includes five novel derivatives of Diclofenac was designed. Subsequently, molecular docking through the Glide module and determining the binding free energy implementing the P

The present study aimed to demonstrate the extent to which the activity of a number of enzymes and genetic variation of β-globin genes were affected in the blood of 65 children with β - thalassemia major of both sexes. The patients, with an age range of 2 – 15 years, were registered in the Thalassemia Center at Ibn Al-Atheer Teaching Hospital for Children in the city of Mosul / Iraq. They were under continuous treatment after being diagnosed by specialist doctors. The study also involved 30 healthy children of both sexes with the same age range who were considered as a control group.

       The results showed significant increases (p≤0.05) in the activities of alanine transaminase (ALT), aspart