Introduction: Biocides are commonly used for disinfection in a variety of contexts. They are generally used to avoid infection by controlling biofilm on medical equipment. However, the literature lacks information on the effect of biocide on efflux pump gene expression. Objective: To determine the influence of biocide on biofilm development and efflux pump acrA and ramA gene expression. Methodology: The microtiter plate method was used to identify biofilm development in 80 isolates of K. pneumoniae. The minimal inhibitory concentrations (MIC) of three biocides (quaternary ammonium compound (QAC), chlorohexidine digluconate, and chloroxylenol) were estimated. The effect of QAC on the intensity and viability of biofilms was investigated as well. Its influence on biofilm was evaluated using scanning electron microscopy. For each isolate, gene expression of the acrA and ramA was evaluated before and after treatment with the biocide (at ½MIC). Results: The study revealed that 60% of isolates formed moderate biofilms. Biofilms of all isolates were inhibited by QAC at high concentrations. Moreover, QAC at ½MIC downregulated the gene expression of the efflux pump gene (acrA) and its regulator (ramA). Conclusion: Biofilms of all isolates were prevented by QAC at high doses. Furthermore, QAC at ½MIC decreased the expression of the efflux pump gene (acrA) and its regulator (ramA).
In the present work, pattern recognition is carried out by the contrast and relative variance of clouds. The K-mean clustering process is then applied to classify the cloud type; also, texture analysis being adopted to extract the textural features and using them in cloud classification process. The test image used in the classification process is the Meteosat-7 image for the D3 region.The K-mean method is adopted as an unsupervised classification. This method depends on the initial chosen seeds of cluster. Since, the initial seeds are chosen randomly, the user supply a set of means, or cluster centers in the n-dimensional space.The K-mean cluster has been applied on two bands (IR2 band) and (water vapour band).The textural analysis is used
... Show MoreBackground: Treatment of invasive prolactinoma, which has several characteristics including invasive growth into cavernous sinuses and formation of giant adenomas compressing adjacent neural structures, resulting in neurological dysfunction, has been very challenging. There are relatively few reports available describing long-term treatment outcome.
Aims of the study: In this study we evaluate the results of cabergoline administration as initial treatment during 4 years follow up period.
Methods: We prospectively categorized 36 patients into four groups according to the results of 3 months of cabergoline treatment: group 1, tumor volume reduction (TVR) ˃25% with normaliz
... Show MoreDue to wind wave actions, ships impacts, high-speed vehicles and others resources of loading, structures such as high buildings rise bridge and electric transmission towers undergo significant coupled moment loads. In this study, the effect of increasing the value of coupled moment and increasing the rigidity of raft footing on the horizontal deflection by using 3-D finite element using ABAQUS program. The results showed that the increasing the coupled moment value leads to an increase in lateral deflection and increase in the rotational angle (α◦). The rotational angle increases from (0.014, 0.15 to 0.19) at coupled moment (120 kN.m), (0.29, 0.31 and 0.49) at coupled moment (240 kN.m) and (0.57, 0.63 and 1.03) at cou
... Show MoreFeatures is the description of the image contents which could be corner, blob or edge. Corners are one of the most important feature to describe image, therefore there are many algorithms to detect corners such as Harris, FAST, SUSAN, etc. Harris is a method for corner detection and it is an efficient and accurate feature detection method. Harris corner detection is rotation invariant but it isn’t scale invariant. This paper presents an efficient harris corner detector invariant to scale, this improvement done by using gaussian function with different scales. The experimental results illustrate that it is very useful to use Gaussian linear equation to deal with harris weakness.
The thermal performance of three solar collectors with 3, 6 mm and without perforation absorber plate was assessed experimentally. The experimental tests were implemented in Baghdad during the January and February 2017. Five values of airflow rates range between 0.01 – 0.1 m3/s were used through the test with a constant airflow rate during the test day. The variation of the following parameters air temperature difference, useful energy, absorber plate temperature, and collector efficiency was recorded every 15 minutes. The experimental data reports that the increases the number of absorber plate perforations with a small diameter is more efficient rather than increasing the hole diameter of the absorber plate with decr
... Show MoreArtificial Neural Networks (ANN) is one of the important statistical methods that are widely used in a range of applications in various fields, which simulates the work of the human brain in terms of receiving a signal, processing data in a human cell and sending to the next cell. It is a system consisting of a number of modules (layers) linked together (input, hidden, output). A comparison was made between three types of neural networks (Feed Forward Neural Network (FFNN), Back propagation network (BPL), Recurrent Neural Network (RNN). he study found that the lowest false prediction rate was for the recurrentt network architecture and using the Data on graduate students at the College of Administration and Economics, Univer
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