Asthma is a chronic inflammatory disorder of the airways in which many cells and cellular elements play a role. The treatment guidelines recommend theuse of a second controller drug in addition to medium doses of inhaled corticosteroids (ICSs) rather than the use of high doses ICS alone in the treatment of moderate-severe persistent asthma. This study was conducted to compare the clinical efficacy and safety of three treatment regimens in Iraqi patients with moderate-severe persistent asthma.The study included three groups; each group included 15 patients. Patients were administered beclomethasone inhaler alone 1500-2000 μg/day, beclomethasone inhaler 750-1000 μg/day plus oral controlled release aminophylline tablets 450 mg/day or beclomethasone inhaler 750-1000 μg/dayplus oral montelukast tablets 10 mg/day for 4-5 weeks. Patients were followed 2 weeks and 4-5 weeks after the baseline visit. In all of the three groups,significant improvements were noticed in pulmonary function test parameters (FEV1, FVC, FEF50%) and the asthma symptom records (day-time symptoms,night-time symptoms, number of salbutamol puffs per 24 hours), while there were no significant differences among the groups. Regarding side effects, onlythe group of inhaled steroid plus aminophylline tablets showed discontinuation of drug therapy in some patients which could be attributed to the development of serious side effects.It was concluded that the administration of a second controller agent was important to use lower doses of inhaled beclomethasone. It was concluded alsothat montelukast was associated with a lower incidence of serious side effects than aminophylline which could make aminophylline an alternative to montelukast as combination therapy with medium doses ICS in the treatment of moderate-severe persistent asthma
Gas hydrate formation is considered one of the major problems facing the oil and gas industry as it poses a significant threat to the production, transportation and processing of natural gas. These solid structures can nucleate and agglomerate gradually so that a large cluster of hydrate is formed, which can clog flow lines, chokes, valves, and other production facilities. Thus, an accurate predictive model is necessary for designing natural gas production systems at safe operating conditions and mitigating the issues induced by the formation of hydrates. In this context, a thermodynamic model for gas hydrate equilibrium conditions and cage occupancies of N2 + CH4 and N2 + CO4 gas mix
The aim of this study is to shed light on the importance of biofuels as an alternative to conventional energy, in addition to the importance of preserving agricultural crops, which are the main source of this fuel, to maintain food security, especially in developing countries. The increase in global oil prices, in addition to the fear of global warming, are among the main factors that draw the world’s attention to searching for alternative sources of traditional energy, which are sustainable on the one hand, and on the other hand reduce carbon emissions. Therefore, the volume of global investment in renewable energy in general, and in liquid biofuels and biomass in particular, has increased. Global fears emerged that the excessive
... Show MoreThere is various human biometrics used nowadays, one of the most important of these biometrics is the face. Many techniques have been suggested for face recognition, but they still face a variety of challenges for recognizing faces in images captured in the uncontrolled environment, and for real-life applications. Some of these challenges are pose variation, occlusion, facial expression, illumination, bad lighting, and image quality. New techniques are updating continuously. In this paper, the singular value decomposition is used to extract the features matrix for face recognition and classification. The input color image is converted into a grayscale image and then transformed into a local ternary pattern before splitting the image into
... Show MoreAdverse drug reactions (ADR) are important information for verifying the view of the patient on a particular drug. Regular user comments and reviews have been considered during the data collection process to extract ADR mentions, when the user reported a side effect after taking a specific medication. In the literature, most researchers focused on machine learning techniques to detect ADR. These methods train the classification model using annotated medical review data. Yet, there are still many challenging issues that face ADR extraction, especially the accuracy of detection. The main aim of this study is to propose LSA with ANN classifiers for ADR detection. The findings show the effectiveness of utilizing LSA with ANN in extracting AD
... Show MoreIn this paper, a design of the broadband thin metamaterial absorber (MMA) is presented. Compared with the previously reported metamaterial absorbers, the proposed structure provides a wide bandwidth with a compatible overall size. The designed absorber consists of a combination of octagon disk and split octagon resonator to provide a wide bandwidth over the Ku and K bands' frequency range. Cheap FR-4 material is chosen to be a substate of the proposed absorber with 1.6 thicknesses and 6.5×6.5 overall unit cell size. CST Studio Suite was used for the simulation of the proposed absorber. The proposed absorber provides a wide absorption bandwidth of 14.4 GHz over a frequency range of 12.8-27.5 GHz with more than %90 absorp
... Show MoreLuminescent sensor membranes and sensor microplates are presented for continuous or high-throughput wide-range measurement of pH based on a europium probe.
This work implements an Electroencephalogram (EEG) signal classifier. The implemented method uses Orthogonal Polynomials (OP) to convert the EEG signal samples to moments. A Sparse Filter (SF) reduces the number of converted moments to increase the classification accuracy. A Support Vector Machine (SVM) is used to classify the reduced moments between two classes. The proposed method’s performance is tested and compared with two methods by using two datasets. The datasets are divided into 80% for training and 20% for testing, with 5 -fold used for cross-validation. The results show that this method overcomes the accuracy of other methods. The proposed method’s best accuracy is 95.6% and 99.5%, respectively. Finally, from the results, it
... Show MoreThe design, synthesis, and characterization of a star shaped 2,4,6-tris-(4`-carboxyphenoxy)-1,3,5-triazine liquid crystalline with columnar discotic mesophase properties establish H-bond interactions with 3,5-dialkoxypyidine were reported. The structures of the synthesized compounds were actually determined by elementary analysis, and FT-IR, ¹HNMR, ¹³CNMR, and mass spectroscopy. The mesomorphic properties of these mesogens were examined using differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) and optical polarizing microscopy (OPM). The synthesized molecules exhibited enantiotropic hexagonal columnar liquid crystal, which depends for the H- bond complex in a 1:3 ratio.
Cyber-attacks keep growing. Because of that, we need stronger ways to protect pictures. This paper talks about DGEN, a Dynamic Generative Encryption Network. It mixes Generative Adversarial Networks with a key system that can change with context. The method may potentially mean it can adjust itself when new threats appear, instead of a fixed lock like AES. It tries to block brute‑force, statistical tricks, or quantum attacks. The design adds randomness, uses learning, and makes keys that depend on each image. That should give very good security, some flexibility, and keep compute cost low. Tests still ran on several public image sets. Results show DGEN beats AES, chaos tricks, and other GAN ideas. Entropy reached 7.99 bits per pix
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