Antimicrobial activity of crude henna extract against Gram-positive bacteria

Henna plant has been used in herbal medicine for ages, but the medical uses of this plant as antimicrobial agent had not been well discussed. In this study we aim to examine the effect of ethanolic extract of local Basra henna leaves on Gram-positive bacteria species. Also, to assess the antibacterial properties of henna crude extract in vitro and compare them with antibiotics. Lawsonia inermis (henna) leaves were extracted with ethanol via using the solvent extraction technique. The pathogens were isolated from wound samples obtained from hospitalized patients in two different hospitals in Duhok city. Culture of thirty isolates had been recognized by routine methods. Different concentrations of ethanol crude extract were acquired and bio-assayed in vitro to inhibit the growth of five human pathogenic Gram-positive bacteria. Agar well diffusion assay was used for achieving henna antibiotic activity. Moreover, antibiotics susceptibility test was done by the disk diffusion method using Muller-Hinton agar medium. The growth of all tested bacteria was suppressed to various degrees by increasing the concentration of the extract. The data has revealed that Staphylococcus aureus was more sensitive than other examined isolates, where the diameter zone of inhibition were ranging from 16-27, 14-25, and 8-18 mm for Staphylococcus epidermidis, Lactobacillus spp. and Streptococcus pneumoniae respectively. The antimicrobial activity of henna extract indicates that it is suitable for being used as significant certain medications. Consequently, henna is active to serve as an anti-bacterial agent against multi-drug resistant Gram-positive bacteria. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.456911

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

A Review on Finite Element Analysis Approaches in Durability Assessment of Automotive Components

This research describes the majority of interesting findings in the use of the Finite Element Analysis (FEA) based fatigue for automotive components in a form of review write-up. Thus, the theoretical background related to the fatigue life prediction using FEA is presented which is the main subject of this research. The challenge for FEA-based software developers is to deliver reliable fatigue-analysis tools because over designing components is no longer a viable option. Combination between a fatigue model based on the crack initiation, the crack growth and the crack closures are performed with consideration of cycle sequence effect together with finite element results, which lead to the prediction of fatigue life under spectrum or service loadings

Late seizures in cerebral venous thrombosis.

Objective To examine the incidence, characteristics, treatment, and predictors of late seizures (LS) after cerebral venous thrombosis (CVT), we described these features in a registry of 1,127 patients with CVT. Methods We included consecutive adult patients from an international consortium of 12 hospital-based CVT registries. We excluded patients with a history of epilepsy or with 7 days after diagnosis of CVT. We used multivariable Cox regression to identify predictors of LS. Results We included 1,127 patients with CVT. During a median follow-up of 2.0 years (interquartile range [IQR] 1.0-6.3), 123 patients (11%) experienced >= 1 LS (incidence rate for first LS 30 per 1,000 person-years, 95% confidence interval [CI] 25-35). Median time to first LS was 5 months (IQR 1-16 months). Baseline predictors of LS included status epilepticus in the acute phase (hazard ratio [HR] 7.0, 95% CI 3.9-12.6), decompressive hemicraniectomy (HR 4.2, 95% CI 2.4-7.3), acute seizure(s) without status epilepticus (HR 4.1, 95% CI 2.5-6.5), subdural hematoma (HR 2.3, 95% CI 1.1-4.9), and intracerebral hemorrhage (HR 1.9, 95% CI 1.1-3.1). Eighty-five patients (70% of patients with LS) experienced a recurrent seizure during follow-up, despite the fact that 94% received antiepileptic drug treatment after the first LS. Conclusion During a median follow-up of 2 years, approximate to 1 in 10 patients with CVT had LS. Patients with baseline intracranial bleeding, patients with acute symptomatic seizures, and those who underwent decompressive hemicraniectomy were at increased risk of developing LS. The high recurrence risk of LS justifies epilepsy diagnosis after a first LS