Systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) is an autoimmune disease with polymorphic expression. B cells have an essential contribution in immune system activation via the production of different cytokines and functioning as potent antigen-presenting cells. Therefore, a drug that particularly targets B cells may represent an ideal therapeutic approach for SLE. Rituximab (RTX), an anti-CD20 monoclonal antibody causing transient B-cell depletion, has been used to manage SLE. This study aims to assess Rituximab effects on lupus nephritis (LN) patients when added to conventional immunosuppressants. Twenty four patients, 15-32 years old, with class III/IV/V LN were involved in this study. All were on steroids before lupus nephritis occurrence. They were

Systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) is an autoimmune disease with polymorphic expression. B cells have an essential contribution in immune system activation via the production of different cytokines and functioning as potent antigen-presenting cells. Therefore, a drug that particularly targets B cells may represent an ideal therapeutic approach for SLE. Rituximab (RTX), an anti-CD20 monoclonal antibody causing transient B-cell depletion, has been used to manage SLE. This study aims to assess Rituximab effects on lupus nephritis (LN) patients when added to conventional immunosuppressants. Twenty four patients, 15-32 years old, with class III/IV/V LN were involved in this study. All were on steroids before lupus nephritis occurrence. They were

A study has been performed to compare the beddings in which ductile iron pipes are buried. In water transmission systems, bends are usually used in the pipes. According to the prescribed layout, at these bends, unbalanced thrust forces are generated that must be confronted to prevent the separation of the bend from the pipe. The bed condition is a critical and important factor in providing the opposite force to the thrust forces in the restraint joint system. Due to the interaction between the native soil and the bedding layers in which the pipe is buried and the different characteristics between them. Also, the interaction with the pipe material makes it difficult to calculate the real forces opposite to the thrust forces and the way they

Resistance spot welding (RSW) aluminum alloys has a major problem of inconsistent quality from weld to weld, because of the problems of the non-uniform oxide layer. The high resistivity of the oxide causes strong heat released which influence significantly on the electrode lifetime and the weld quality. Much effort has been devoted experimentally to the study of the sheet surface characteristics for as-received sheet and surface pretreatment sheet by pickling in NaOH and glassblasted with three thicknesses (0.6, 1.0, and 1.5 mm) of AA1050. Three different welding process parameters energy setup as a low, medium, and high were carried. Tensile-shear strength tests were performed to indicate the weld quality. Moreover, microhardness tests,

In some cases, researchers need to know the causal effect of the treatment in order to know the extent of the effect of the treatment on the sample in order to continue to give the treatment or stop the treatment because it is of no use. The local weighted least squares method was used to estimate the parameters of the fuzzy regression discontinuous model, and the local polynomial method was used to estimate the bandwidth. Data were generated with sample sizes (75,100,125,150 ) in repetition 1000. An experiment was conducted at the Innovation Institute for remedial lessons in 2021 for 72 students participating in the institute and data collection. Those who used the treatment had an increase in their score after

This paper presents a proposed method for (CBIR) from using Discrete Cosine Transform with Kekre Wavelet Transform (DCT/KWT), and Daubechies Wavelet Transform with Kekre Wavelet Transform (D4/KWT) to extract features for Distributed Database system where clients/server as a Star topology, client send the query image and server (which has the database) make all the work and then send the retrieval images to the client. A comparison between these two approaches: first DCT compare with DCT/KWT and second D4 compare with D4/KWT are made. The work experimented over the image database of 200 images of 4 categories and the performance of image retrieval with respect to two similarity measures namely Euclidian distance (ED) and sum of absolute diff

Water quality planning relies on Biochemical Oxygen Demand BOD. BOD testing takes five days. The Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) is increasingly used for water resource forecasting. This work designed a PSO technique for estimating everyday BOD at Al-Rustumiya wastewater treatment facility inlet. Al-Rustumiya wastewater treatment plant provided 702 plant-scale data sets during 2012-2022. The PSO model uses the daily data of the water quality parameters, including chemical oxygen demand (COD), chloride (Cl^-), suspended solid (SS), total dissolved solids (TDS), and pH, to determine how each variable affects the daily incoming BOD. PSO and multiple linear regression (MLR) findings are compared, and their perfor