A novel planar type antenna printed on a high permittivity Rogers’ substrate is proposed for early stage microwave breast cancer detection. The design is based on a p-shaped wide-slot structure with microstrip feeding circuit to eliminate losses of transmission. The design parameters are optimized resulting in a good reflection coefficient at −10 dB from 4.5 to 10.9 GHz. Imaging result using inhomogeneous breast phantom indicates that the proposed antenna is capable of detecting a 5 mm size cancerous tumor embedded inside the fibroglandular region with dielectric contrast between the target and the surrounding materials ranging from 1.7 : 1 to 3.6 : 1.

A series of 4-(methylsulfonyl)aniline derivatives were synthesized in order to obtain new compounds as a potential anti-inflammatory agents with expected selectivity against COX-2 enzyme. In vivo acute anti-inflammatory activity of the final compounds 11–14 was evaluated in rat using an egg-white induced edema model of inflammation in a dose equivalent to 3 mg/Kg of diclofenac sodium. All tested compounds produced significant reduction of paw edema with respect to the effect of propylene glycol 50% v/v (control group). Moreover, the activity of compounds 11 and 14 was significantly higher than that of diclofenac sodium (at 3 mg/Kg) in the 120–300 minute time interval, while compound 12 expressed a comparable effect to that of di

A simple, fast, selective of a new flow injection analysis method coupled with potentiometric detection was used to determine vitamin B1 in pharmaceutical formulations via the prepared new selective membranes. Two electrodes were constructed for the determination of vitamin B1 based on the ion-pair vitamin B1-phosphotungestic acid (B1-PTA) in a poly (vinyl chloride) supported with a plasticized di-butyl phthalate (DBPH) and di-butyl phosphate (DBP). Applications of these ion selective electrodes for the determination of vitamin B1 in the pharmaceutical preparations for batch and flow injection systems were described. The ion selective membrane exhibited a near-Nernstian slope values 56.88 and 58.53 mV / decade, with the linear dy

Many oil and gas processes, including oil recovery, oil transportation, and petroleum processing, are negatively impacted by the precipitation and deposition of asphaltene. Screening methods for determining the stability of asphaltenes in crude oil have been developed due to the high cost of remediating asphaltene deposition in crude oil production and processing. The colloidal instability index, the Asphaltene-resin ratio, the De Boer plot, and the modified colloidal instability index were used to predict the stability of asphaltene in crude oil in this study. The screening approaches were investigated in detail, as done for the experimental results obtained from them. The factors regulating the asphaltene precipitation are different fr

The azo ligand obtained from the diazotization reaction of 2-aminobenzothiazole and 4- nitroaniline yielded a novel series of complexes with Co(II), Ni(II), Cu(II), and Zn(II) ions. The complexes were investigated using spectral techniques such as UV-Vis, FT-IR, 1H and 13C NMR spectroscopic analyses, LC-MS and atomic absorption spectrometry, electrical conductivity, and magnetic susceptibility. The molar ratio of the synthesized compounds was determined using the ligand exchange ratio, which revealed the metal-ligand ratios in the isolated complexes were 1:2. The synthesized complexes were tested for antimicrobial activity against S. aureus, E. coli, C. albicans, and C. tropicalis bacterial species. Additionally, their binding affinities we

BP algorithm is the most widely used supervised training algorithms for multi-layered feedforward neural net works. However, BP takes long time to converge and quite sensitive to the initial weights of a network. In this paper, a modified cuckoo search algorithm is used to get the optimal set of initial weights that will be used by BP algorithm. And changing the value of BP learning rate to improve the error convergence. The performance of the proposed hybrid algorithm is compared with the stan dard BP using simple data sets. The simulation result show that the proposed algorithm has improved the BP training in terms of quick convergence of the solution depending on the slope of the error graph.