Objectives: Dickkopf-1 (DKK-1) is WNT/b-catenin pathway antagonist which plays a detrimental role in the development of diabetic retinopathy (DR). This research aimed to assess serum DKK-1 levels in diabetic patients who have and have not developed DR and, compare them with the control subjects finding out whether we can use it as an indicator for DR early diagnosis and to find out which one of the widely used two groups of antidiabetic treatments had the greater effect on this biomarker and hence on the progression of DR. Methods: The study participants were divided into two subgroups: First, 70 patients (36 male, 34 female) with type 2 diabetes mellitus, among them 35 patients diagnosed with DR and 35 with no evidence of DR, and s

This paper describes the problem of online autonomous mobile robot path planning, which is consisted of finding optimal paths or trajectories for an autonomous mobile robot from a starting point to a destination across a flat map of a terrain, represented by a 2-D workspace. An enhanced algorithm for solving the problem of path planning using Bacterial Foraging Optimization algorithm is presented. This nature-inspired metaheuristic algorithm, which imitates the foraging behavior of E-coli bacteria, was used to find the optimal path from a starting point to a target point. The proposed algorithm was demonstrated by simulations in both static and dynamic different environments. A comparative study was evaluated between the developed algori

Quadrotors are coming up as an attractive platform for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) research, due to the simplicity of their structure and maintenance, their ability to hover, and their vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) capability. With the vast advancements in small-size sensors, actuators, and processors, researchers are now focusing on developing mini UAV’s to be used in both research and commercial applications. This work presents a detailed mathematical nonlinear dynamic model of the quadrotor which is formulated using the Newton-Euler method. Although the quadrotor is a 6 DOF under-actuated system, the derived rotational subsystem is fully actuated, while the translational subsystem is under-actuated. The der

Flow-injection (FI) spectrophotometric method has been developed for the analysis of thymol in pharmaceutical preparations. The method is based on organic coupling reaction between thymol and 4-amino antipyrine in the presence of alkaline medium to form an intense stable red color complex with copper nitrate that has a maximum absorption at 490 nm. Optimum conditions for determination of the drug was investigated .The calibration graph was linear over the range of 5-500 µg.ml-1 of thymol . The limit of detection (LOD) and limit of quantification (LOQ) were 1.81 ?g mL-1 and 3.60 ?g mL-1 respectively .The proposed method was applied satisfactorily to the determination of thymol in mouth wash preparations. The procedure is characterized by

Background: MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) is a global health problem. Many people are looking for new ways to combat MRSA, for example by using bacteriophages (phages). It has been extremely challenging to isolate a sufficient quantity of lytic anti-MRSA phages. Therefore, new techniques for separating, refining, and reworking anti-MRSA phages were sought in this study.

Methods: Of 437 S. aureus isolates, nine clinical MRSA isolates were obtained from three hospitals in Baghdad, Iraq and two ATCC MRSA strains were used to separate wild anti-MRS

Kinematics is the mechanics branch which dealswith the movement of the bodies without taking the force into account. In robots, the forward kinematics and inverse kinematics are important in determining the position and orientation of the end-effector to perform multi-tasks. This paper presented the inverse kinematics analysis for a 5 DOF robotic arm using the robotics toolbox of MATLAB and the Denavit-Hartenberg (D-H) parameters were used to represent the links and joints of the robotic arm. A geometric approach was used in the inverse kinematics solution to determine the joints angles of the robotic arm and the path of the robotic arm was divided into successive lines to accomplish the required tasks of the robotic arm.Therefore, this

    In this paper, the ability of using corn leaves as low-cost natural biowaste adsorbent material for the removal of Indigo Carmen (IC) dye was studied. Batch mode system was used to study several parameters such as, contact time (4 days), concentration of dye (10-50) ppm, adsorbent dosage (0.05-0.25) gram, pH (2-12) and temperature (30-60) oC. The corn leaf was characterized by Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy device before and after the adsorption process of the IC dye and scanning electron microscope device was used to find the morphology of the adsorbent material. The experimental data was imputing with several isotherms where it fits with Freundlich (R2 = 0.9937) and followed pseudo second order kinetic. The hi

A hand gesture recognition system provides a robust and innovative solution to nonverbal communication through human–computer interaction. Deep learning models have excellent potential for usage in recognition applications. To overcome related issues, most previous studies have proposed new model architectures or have fine-tuned pre-trained models. Furthermore, these studies relied on one standard dataset for both training and testing. Thus, the accuracy of these studies is reasonable. Unlike these works, the current study investigates two deep learning models with intermediate layers to recognize static hand gesture images. Both models were tested on different datasets, adjusted to suit the dataset, and then trained under different m

The research aims to determine the mix of production optimization in the case of several conflicting objectives to be achieved at the same time, therefore, discussions dealt with the concept of programming goals and entrances to be resolved and dealt with the general formula for the programming model the goals and finally determine the mix of production optimization using a programming model targets to the default case.