Cutaneous leishmaniasis is a disease caused by Leishmania tropica parasite. Current treatments for this parasite are undesirable because of their toxicity, resistance, and high cost. Macrophages are key players against pathogens. Nitric oxide (NO), a molecule produce by immune cells, controls intracellular killing of pathogens during infection. Silver nanoparticles (Ag NPs) demonstrated broad-spectrum activity against various types of infectious diseases. It has the ability to stimulate oxygen species production. This study aims to analyze the macrophages activation through NO production and estimate the cytotoxicity based on the lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) release upon exposure to L. tropica and Ag NPs. Serially concentrations of Ag NPs were used under two conditions during and following macrophages exposure to L. tropica. MTT assay was used to determine the cytotoxicity of Ag NPs on L. tropica amastigotes during infection of macrophages in vitro. The results showed that by increasing the Ag NPs concentrations, the viability percentage of L. tropica amastigotes decreased and reached to 21.7 ± 0.64 % during infection compared with the control. The 50% inhibitory concentration of Ag NPs on amastigotes was 2.048µg/ml during infection. Moreover, post-phagocytosis study involved the assessment of NO and LDH release by macrophages upon exposure to L. tropica. It have shown that untreated macrophages released low levels of NO while in the presence of Ag NPs, macrophages were activated to produce higher levels of NO under all experimental conditions. On the other hand, macrophages were capable of controlling cytotoxicity and decreasing LDH levels during phagocytosis of L. tropica amastiogotes. Taking together, these findings suggest that Ag NPs can enhance macrophages NO production which provides a method for the identification of Ag NPs ligands with microbicidal and anti-cytotoxic properties against L. tropica pathogens.
The complexity of multimedia contents is significantly increasing in the current world. This leads to an exigent demand for developing highly effective systems to satisfy human needs. Until today, handwritten signature considered an important means that is used in banks and businesses to evidence identity, so there are many works tried to develop a method for recognition purpose. This paper introduced an efficient technique for offline signature recognition depending on extracting the local feature by utilizing the haar wavelet subbands and energy. Three different sets of features are utilized by partitioning the signature image into non overlapping blocks where different block sizes are used. CEDAR signature database is used as a dataset f
... Show MoreImage Fusion Using A Convolutional Neural Network
Smart water flooding (low salinity water flooding) was mainly invested in a sandstone reservoir. The main reasons for using low salinity water flooding are; to improve oil recovery and to give a support for the reservoir pressure.
In this study, two core plugs of sandstone were used with different permeability from south of Iraq to explain the effect of water injection with different ions concentration on the oil recovery. Water types that have been used are formation water, seawater, modified low salinity water, and deionized water.
The effects of water salinity, the flow rate of water injected, and the permeability of core plugs have been studied in order to summarize the best conditions of low salinity
... Show MoreUsed automobile oils were subjected to filtration to remove solid material and dehydration to remove water, gasoline and light components by using vacuum distillation under moderate pressure, and then the dehydrated waste oil is subjected to extraction by using liquid solvents. Two solvents, namely n-butanol and n-hexane were used to extract base oil from automobile used oil, so that the expensive base oil can be reused again.
The recovered base oil by using n-butanol solvent gives (88.67%) reduction in carbon residue, (75.93%) reduction in ash content, (93.73%) oil recovery, (95%) solvent recovery and (100.62) viscosity index, at (5:1) solvent to used oil ratio and (40 oC) extraction temperature, while using n-hexane solvent gives (6
Electrospinning is a novel technique that can be used to produce highly porous fibers with highly tunable properties. In this research, this technique is adopted to prepare the electrospun nanofiber membrane for membrane distillation application. A custom-built electrospinning setup was made to prepare the nanofibers membrane. Polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) polymer was used in the electrospinning process due to its high hydrophobicity. Electrospun (PVDF) nanofibers were tested in direct contact membrane distillation (DCMD) process using 0.6 M sodium chloride as a feed solution. The resulting nanofiber membrane exhibited high performance in DCMD (i.e. relatively high water flux and high salt rejection). It has been found
... Show MoreFace Identification is an important research topic in the field of computer vision and pattern recognition and has become a very active research area in recent decades. Recently multiwavelet-based neural networks (multiwavenets) have been used for function approximation and recognition, but to our best knowledge it has not been used for face Identification. This paper presents a novel approach for the Identification of human faces using Back-Propagation Adaptive Multiwavenet. The proposed multiwavenet has a structure similar to a multilayer perceptron (MLP) neural network with three layers, but the activation function of hidden layer is replaced with multiscaling functions. In experiments performed on the ORL face database it achieved a
... Show MoreRecognizing speech emotions is an important subject in pattern recognition. This work is about studying the effect of extracting the minimum possible number of features on the speech emotion recognition (SER) system. In this paper, three experiments performed to reach the best way that gives good accuracy. The first one extracting only three features: zero crossing rate (ZCR), mean, and standard deviation (SD) from emotional speech samples, the second one extracting only the first 12 Mel frequency cepstral coefficient (MFCC) features, and the last experiment applying feature fusion between the mentioned features. In all experiments, the features are classified using five types of classification techniques, which are the Random Forest (RF),
... Show Moreteen sites Baghdad are made. The sites are divided into two groups, one in Karkh and the other in Rusafa. Assessing the underground conditions can be occurred by drilling vertical holes called exploratory boring into the ground, obtaining soil (disturbed and undisturbed) samples, and testing these samples in a laboratory (civil engineering laboratory /University of Baghdad). From disturbed, the tests involved the grain size analysis and then classified the soil, Atterberg limit, chemical test (organic content, sulphate content, gypsum content and chloride content). From undisturbed samples, the test involved the consolidation test (from this test, the following parameters can be obtained: initial void ratio eo, compression index cc, swel
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