The clinical spectrum of cutaneous leishmaniasis (CL), an intracellular parasitic pathogen, ranges from a single sore healing to chronic crusty lesions with a manifestation of treatment resistance. The complicated interaction between Leishmania bodies and the early immune response, including innate and adaptive mechanisms, determines the evolution of nodules. This study examined the levels of the chemoattractant interleukin 8 (IL-8), pro-inflammatory nitric oxide (NO), and immunoregulatory macrophage inhibitory factor (MIF) in the serum of subjects recently diagnosed with cutaneous leishmaniasis, in parallel with patients being monitored during consecutive sodium stibogluconate (Pentostam) treatment. A total of 161 serum samples of newly di

Abstract 

This paper presents an intelligent model reference adaptive control (MRAC) utilizing a self-recurrent wavelet neural network (SRWNN) to control nonlinear systems. The proposed SRWNN is an improved version of a previously reported wavelet neural network (WNN). In particular, this improvement was achieved by adopting two modifications to the original WNN structure. These modifications include, firstly, the utilization of a specific initialization phase to improve the convergence to the optimal weight values, and secondly, the inclusion of self-feedback weights to the wavelons of the wavelet layer. Furthermore, an on-line training procedure was proposed to enhance the control per

This paper describes a new proposed structure of the Proportional Integral Derivative (PID) controller based on modified Elman neural network for the DC-DC buck converter system which is used in battery operation of the portable devices. The Dolphin Echolocation Optimization (DEO) algorithm is considered as a perfect on-line tuning technique therefore, it was used for tuning and obtaining the parameters of the modified Elman neural-PID controller to avoid the local minimum problem during learning the proposed controller. Simulation results show that the best weight parameters of the proposed controller, which are taken from the DEO, lead to find the best action and unsaturated state that will stabilize the Buck converter system performan

In this work, the performance of the receiver in a quantum cryptography system based on BB84 protocol is scaled by calculating the Quantum Bit Error Rate (QBER) of the receiver. To apply this performance test, an optical setup was arranged and a circuit was designed and implemented to calculate the QBER. This electronic circuit is used to calculate the number of counts per second generated by the avalanche photodiodes set in the receiver. The calculated counts per second are used to calculate the QBER for the receiver that gives an indication for the performance of the receiver. Minimum QBER, 6%, was obtained with avalanche photodiode excess voltage equals to 2V and laser diode power of 3.16 nW at avalanche photodiode temperature of -10

This project sought to fabricate a flexible gas sensor based on a short functionalized multi-walled carbon nanotubes (f-MWCNTs) network for nitrogen dioxide gas detection. The network was prepared by filtration from the suspension (FFS) method and modified by coating with a layer of polypyrrole conductive polymer (PPy) prepared by the oxidative chemical polymerization to improve the properties of the network. The structural, optical, and morphological properties of the f-MWCNTs and f-MWCNTs/PPy network were studied using X-ray diffraction (XRD), Fourie-transform infrared (FTIR), with an AFM (atomic force microscopy). XRD proved that the structure of f-MWCNTs is unaffected by the synthesis procedure. The FTIR spectra verified the existence o

Photonic crystal fiber interferometers (PCFIs) are widely used for sensing applications. This work presented solid core-PCFs based on Mach-Zehnder modal interferometer for sensing refractive index. The general structure of sensor was applied by splicing short lengths of PCF in both sides with conventional single mode fiber (SMF-28).To apply modal interferometer theory collapsing technique based on fusion splicing used to excite higher order modes (LP01 and LP11). A high sensitive optical spectrum analyzer (OSA) was used to monitor and record the transmitted wavelength. This work studied a Mach-Zahnder interferometer refractive index sensor based on splicing point tapered SMF-PCF-SMF. Relation between refractive index sensitivity and tape

There has been a growing interest in the use of chaotic techniques for enabling secure communication in recent years. This need has been motivated by the emergence of a number of wireless services which require the channel to provide very low bit error rates (BER) along with information security. As more and more information is transacted over wireless media, there has been increasing criminal activity directed against such systems. This paper investigates the feasibility of using chaotic communications over Multiple-Input-Multiple-Output (MIMO) channels. We have studied the performance of differential chaos shift keying (DCSK) with 2×2 Alamouti scheme and 2×1 Alamouti scheme for different chaotic maps over additive white Gaussian noise (

In this work, N-hydroxy phthalimide derivatives (NHPID) were synthesized from the nucleuphilic substitution reactions of (NHPI) with different halides (alkyl halides, sulfonyl halides, benzoyl halides and benzyl halides). The products were distinguished using FTIR spectrum and Nuclear magnetic resonsnce (1H-NMR and 13CNMR), in addition to other characteristic methods such as sodium fution for sulfur determination. followed by measuring antibacterial (with different types of gram positive/gram negative bacteria) and antifungal activities of these compounds.