Implantable drug delivery systems, such as drug pumps and polymeric drug depots, have emerged as means of providing predetermined drug release profiles at the desired site of action. While initial implants aimed at providing an enduring drug supply, developments in polymer chemistry and pharmaceutical technology and the growing need for refined drug delivery patterns have prompted the design of sophisticated drug delivery implants such as on-demand drug-eluting implants and personalized 3D printed implants. The types of cargo loaded into these implants range from small drug molecules to hormones and even therapeutic cells. This review will shed light upon recent advances in materials and composites used for polymeric implant fabrication, highlight select approaches employed in polymeric implant fabrication, feature medical applications where polymeric implants have a significant impact, and report recent advances made in these areas.
Drug-induced acute kidney injury is a serious disorder. Oxidative stress has a key role in its initiation and progression. In this study, the possible ameliorative effect of fimasartan against methotrexate-induced nephrotoxicity was investigated in comparison with α-tocopherol in rats. Wistar rats were allocated into six groups and treated as follows: group Ӏ received water on a daily basis for 8 successive days; group ӀӀ received methotrexate (20 mg/kg) on day 1, followed by water for 7 successive days; group ӀӀӀ received fimasartan (3 mg/kg/day) for 7 successive days; group IV received α-tocopherol (1 g/kg/day) for 7 successive days; group V re
... Show MoreIn this paper, we propose an approach to estimate the induced potential, which is generated by swift heavy ions traversing a ZnO thin film, via an energy loss function (ELF). This induced potential is related to the projectile charge density, ρq(k) and is described by the extended Drude dielectric function. At zero momentum transfer, the resulting ELF exhibits good agreement with the previously reported results. The ELF, obtained by the extended Drude model, displays a realistic behavior over the Bethe ridge. It is observed that the induced potential relies on the heavy ion velocity and charge state q. Further, the numerical results show that the induced potential for neutral H, as projectile, dominates when the heavy ion velocity is less
... Show MoreThe article includes the concept of aesthetics through what has been dealt with in the literature by philosophers and researchers who have addressed this concept in an attempt to derive indicators of aesthetics. The article adopted a descriptive and analytical methodology by reviewing recent literature on the concept of aesthetics and its relation to urban planning and design issues. Many subjective and objective aesthetics indicators have been identified, some of which are classified under real aesthetics, and some under fake aesthetics. The indicators were applied to the Kufa Mosque complex and Sahla Mosque complex as a comparative case study. It was found that the indicators of real aesthetics have a higher weight in determining
... Show MoreIn the case where a shallow foundation does not satisfy with design requirements alone, the addition of a pile may be suitable to improve the performance of the foundation design. The lack of in-situ data and the complexity of the issues caused by lagging in the research area of pile foundations are notable. In this study, different types of piles were used under the same geometric conditions to determine the load-settlement relationships with various sandy soil relative densities. The ultimate pile capacity for each selected pile is obtained from a modified California Bearing Ratio (CBR) machine to be suitable for axial pile loading. Based on the results, the values of Qu for close-ended square pile were increased by 15
... Show Moremodel is derived, and the methodology is given in detail. The model is constructed depending on some measurement criteria, Akaike and Bayesian information criterion. For the new time series model, a new algorithm has been generated. The forecasting process, one and two steps ahead, is discussed in detail. Some exploratory data analysis is given in the beginning. The best model is selected based on some criteria; it is compared with some naïve models. The modified model is applied to a monthly chemical sales dataset (January 1992 to Dec 2019), where the dataset in this work has been downloaded from the United States of America census (www.census.gov). Ultimately, the forecasted sales
Recent reports of new pollution issues brought on by the presence of medications in the aquatic environment have sparked a great deal of interest in studies aiming at analyzing and mitigating the associated environmental risks, as well as the extent of this contamination. The main sources of pharmaceutical contaminants in natural lakes and rivers include clinic sewage, pharmaceutical production wastewater, and sewage from residences that have been contaminated by drug users' excretions. In evaluating the health of rivers, pharmaceutical pollutants have been identified as one of the emerging pollutants. The previous studies showed that the contaminants in pharmaceuticals that are widely used are non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, ant
... Show MoreSoftware-defined networking (SDN) presents novel security and privacy risks, including distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. In response to these threats, machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) have emerged as effective approaches for quickly identifying and mitigating anomalies. To this end, this research employs various classification methods, including support vector machines (SVMs), K-nearest neighbors (KNNs), decision trees (DTs), multiple layer perceptron (MLP), and convolutional neural networks (CNNs), and compares their performance. CNN exhibits the highest train accuracy at 97.808%, yet the lowest prediction accuracy at 90.08%. In contrast, SVM demonstrates the highest prediction accuracy of 95.5%. As such, an
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