Assessment of morphological changes due to oxidative stress: leukodepleted packed red blood cells stored in SAGM

Background: In blood bank, the storage procedures of packed red blood cell (pRBC) require some conditions to ensure the maximum storage time for a safe blood supply. pRBC can be stored up to 42 days in 2-6⁰C, as long as more than 75% red blood cells survive in the first 24 hours post transfusion. However, pathological consequences can affect the stored blood, they are termed as storage lesions. Some reversible changes result from stored blood such as decreased ATP and 2, 3 BPG. Some other damages are irreversible and includes increased osmotic fragility, small echinocytic rigid red cells and microvesiculation. Methods: In this study, the effect of prolonged storage was assessed through investigating morphological alteration and evaluating oxidative stress.Samples from leukodepleted pRBC in SAGM stored at 4◦C for 42 days were withdrawn aseptically on day 0, day 14, day 28 and day 42. Morphological changes were observed using scanning electron microscopy and correlated with osmotic fragility and hematocrit. Oxidative injury was studied through assessing MDA level as a marker for lipid peroxidation. Results: Osmotic fragility test showed that extended storage time caused increase in the osmotic fragility. Day 42 displayed the highest osmotic fragility by the curve shifting to right. However, day 0 demonstrated the lowest osmotic fragility by the curve shifting to the left. The hematocrit increased by 6.6% from day 0 to day 42. The last 2 weeks of storage period revealed alteration in the morphology with the appearance of echinocytes and spherocytes. Small increase in MDA level was observed indicating that lipid peroxidation occurred. Conclusion: Storage lesions and morphological alterations appeared to affect RBCs during the storage period. These lesions are caused by oxidative injury, biochemical and metabolic changes that result in damaged RBCs membrane. Further studies should be performed to develop strategies that will aid in the improvement of stored RBC quality and efficiency. For example, the effect of ROS can be reduced by storing the blood bag in anaerobic condition. In addition, oxidative stress can be reduced by adding antioxidant in the blood bag.Qatar Universit

Multi-Stage Protection Using Pixel Selection Technique for Enhancing Steganography

Steganography and data security are extremely important for all organizations. This research introduces a novel stenographic method called multi-stage protection using the pixel selection technique (MPPST). MPPST is developed based on the features of the pixel and analysis technique to extract the pixel's characteristics and distribution of cover-image. A pixel selection technique is proposed for hiding secret messages using the feature selection method. The secret file is distributed and embedded randomly into the stego-image to make the process of the steganalysis complicated.  The attackers not only need to deter which pixel values have been selected to carry the secret file, they also must rearrange the correct sequence of pixels. MPPST generates a complex key that indicates where the encrypted elements of the binary sequence of a secret file are. The analysis stage undergoes four stages, which are the calculation of the peak signal-to-noise ratio, mean squared error, histogram analysis, and relative entropy. These four stages are used to demonstrate the characteristics of the cover image. To evaluate the proposed method, MPPST is compared to the standard technique of Least Significant Bit (LSB) and other algorithms from the literature. The experimental results show that MPPST outperforms other algorithms for all instances and achieves a significant security enhancement

Induction of Pathogenesis Related Proteins and Phenol in Chickpea Plants Treated with Bio-Agents in Response to Infection by Fusarium oxysporum f.sp. ciceri

Soil and seed treatments with bio-agents, bio root care (BRC), non pathogenic Fusarium oxysporum (NFo) and Rhizobium leguminisarum (R.l) indicated induced acquired resistance against Fusarium oxysporum f.sp. ciceri (Foc) in chickpea plants. This induced resistance was manifested by the accumulation of phenols and pathogenesis related protein in treated plants compared with control treatments (BRC, NFo and R.l and plants inoculated with the pathogen alone and untreated plants). Significantly (p=0.05), the highest rate of accumulation of phenols, 286.5µg gfw-1 and peroxidase activity, 68.3min-1 gfw-1 when soil was treated with NFo before inoculation with Foc compared with  other test treatments. Maximum accumulation of phenols, 228.0 µg gfw-1 was at day 5 after Foc inoculation, and maximum peroxidase activity 62.3 min-1 gfw-1 was at day 4 after Foc inoculation. The highest rate of phenylalanine ammonia lyase activity was scored when seeds were treated with BRC and NFo with no significant differences. PAL activity was 139.6 for BRC and 141.3 nM cinnamic acid min-1 gfw-1 for NFo and scored maximum activity of 99.7 nM cinnamic acid min-1 gfw-1 at day 5 after Foc inoculation. The highest rate of glucanase activity was 33.5 µM min-1 gfw-1 when seeds were treated with BRC compared with other test treatments and scored maximum activity of 29.0 and 29.5 µM min.-1 gfw-1 at day 4 and 5, respectively, after Foc inoculation

Modeling Analysis and Simulation of Wheel Suspension System's Response for Quarter Car Model by Using 20-sim Software for Honda Civic Lx 2019 Sedan

This paper exhibits a study of car passive and active- suspension system to improving drive exhilarate to passengers while also enhancing vehicle stability by decreasing the effect of oscillation on the suspension. Modeling and simulation by using the bond diagram. They much concede a prime arrangement of the machine to the exterior surrounding: street quality, atmospherically circumstances, while guarantying driver as well as passengers, major safeness and more potentially exhilarate. Automotive aid it course manners. The result cleared this action plan at different set during the vehicle mean, but particularly in evolution level. It is also clear the proportion of suspension system's mass to the vehicle's mass. Also graphical representation of suspension system' parameters like vertical passenger displacement, potential energy of mass of suspension system and acceleration. To foretell the comportment of a car, it is necessary to make design, modeling, and simulation. Honda Civic Lx 2019 sedan car has used for modeling, and simulation

Frequency of Clinically Important RH and Kell Blood Group Antigens Among Blood Donors in Qatar

Background Very limited information is available about the prevalence of blood groups among Qatari population and residents. The information about frequencies of different blood group antigens is important to manage, patients who has tendency to develop alloantibodies such as thalassemics. Thalassemia is most common genetically inherited blood disorder due to a quantitative defect in hemoglobin formation, results ineffective erythropoiesis, leads to severe anemia requires regular blood transfusions. To maintain a safe blood supply for alloimmunized patients are difficult, without the knowledge of donor pool's antigen frequency evidence. We have determined the frequencies of the Rh, and Kell, clinically significant antigens among blood donors in Qatar. Method As per approved IRB and consent waiver signed, blood samples were collected from voluntary blood donors at Hammad Medical Cooperation (HMC), Blood Centre in EDTA vacutainer tubes. The samples were, then processed on day of collection to remove plasma and the packed RBC (pRBC) was 3 times washed with saline. After washing the pRBC were used to make 5% cell suspension with saline. Blood samples were collected from regular healthy 512 donors. Blood group antigens were analyzed by tube and Gel card method as manufacturer's instruction. The Rh antigens including, D, C, E, c, e and Kell (K) were typed and incidence frequencies were expressed as percentage. Anti-sera used in tube testing were bought from Lorne Laboratories, United Kingdom (UK) and the Gel cards from Grifols® The results were analyzed by using statistical software SPSS. The data were analyzed using descriptive exploratory features to see various blood group antigens we have studied and characterized Results We analyzed blood group antigens; with age range from 19–65 years, mean donors age 38.4 ± 8 years. Nationalities among donors varied considerably, the highest frequency donations were Qataris 89 (17.4%), Syrians 89 (17.4%) and Egyptians 77 (15%). When compared among Arabs 365 (72.1%) and non-Arabs 132 (25.8%), majority of blood donors are from Arab countries. Rh antigens frequency shown from our analysis is, D 88.08%, C 70.11%, E 33.59%, c 75.39%, e88.47% and K 10.4%. The Rh antigens among Qataris were D 92.13% E 39.32%, e 88.76%, C 65.16%, c 86.5%, K 13.8%. Conclusions Our data shows the blood donors in state of Qatar are multinational and demonstrates variations in frequency of Rh and Kell RBC antigens. These variations may be a challenge to find antigen negative blood, needs for multiple transfused alloimmunized patients such as thalassemics and sickle cell patients. It is important to establish the incidences of various RBC antigens amid blood donors, when dealing with patients who have developed multiple antibodies. The current clinical practice in blood banks is randomly cross match the available blood units in the stock. This study will help to provide data regarding the frequency of Rh and Kell blood group clinically significant antigens. As we have mentioned very limited information are available, about blood group prevalence among Qatari population accept some data about the association of blood groups among diabetes mellitus patients in Qatar. Our study shows though there is large number of expatriates in Qatar, among them Arabs are the highest frequent blood donors including Qataris. While Indians resident community is the largest, among expatriates here in state of Qatar number of blood donation is less compare to other residents. Our data shows Qataris and Syrians 17.4% are the most regular blood donors in Qatar. The age groups highest frequent blood donors were 25–34 years in Qatar, but according to WHO facts blood donation, among high income countries most regular blood donation is in the age group 45–64 years, while low and middle income countries the age group donates most regularly are 18–25 years.Qatar Universit

Hemoglobin Oxidation in Stored Blood Accelerates Hemolysis and Oxidative Injury to Red Blood Cells.

Maintaining blood supply is a challenge in blood banks. Red blood cells (RBCs) stored at 4°C experience issues of biochemical changes due to metabolism of cells, leading to changes collectively referred to as "storage lesions." Oxidation of the red cell membrane, leading to lysis, contributes to these storage lesions.  Blood bags with CPD-SAGM stored at 4°C for 28 days were withdrawn aseptically on days 1, 14, and 28. Hematology analyzer was used to investigate RBC indices. Hemoglobin oxidation was studied through spectrophotometric scan of spectral change. RBC lysis was studied with the help of Drabkin's assay, and morphological changes were observed by light and scan electron microscopy.  RBCs show progressive changes in morphology echinocytes and spherocytes on day 28. There was 0.85% RBC lysis, an approximately 20% decrease in percentage oxyhemoglobin, and a 14% increase in methemoglobin formation, which shows hemoglobin oxidation on day 28.  Oxidative damage to RBC, with an increase in storage time was observed in the present study. The observed morphological changes to RBC during the course of increased time shows that there is progressive damage to RBC membrane and a decrease in hemoglobin concentration; percentage RBC lysis is probably due to free hemoglobin and iron.The research is supported by Qatar University student grants

Arabic Sentiment Analysis of Users’ Opinions of Governmental Mobile Applications

Different types of pandemics that have appeared from time to time have changed many aspects of daily life. Some governments encourage their citizens to use certain applications to help control the spread of disease and to deliver other services during lockdown. The Saudi government has launched several mobile apps to control the pandemic and have made these apps available through Google Play and the app store. A huge number of reviews are written daily by users to express their opinions, which include significant information to improve these applications. The manual processing and extracting of information from users’ reviews is an extremely difficult and time-consuming task. Therefore, the use of intelligent methods is necessary to analyse users’ reviews and extract issues that can help in improving these apps. This research aims to support the efforts made by the Saudi government for its citizens and residents by analysing the opinions of people in Saudi Arabia that can be found as reviews onGoogle Play and the app store using sentiment analysis and machine learning methods. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to explore users’ opinions about governmental apps in Saudi Arabia. The findings of this analysis will help government officers make the right decisions to improve the quality of the provided services and help application developers improve these applications by fixing potential issues that cannot be identified during application testing phases. A new dataset used for this research includes 8000 user reviews gathered from social media, Google Play and the app store. Different methods are applied to the dataset, and the results show that the k nearest neighbourhood (KNN) method generates the highest accuracy compared to other implemented methods

An Improved Sentiment Classification Approach for Measuring User Satisfaction toward Governmental Services’ Mobile Apps Using Machine Learning Methods with Feature Engineering and SMOTE Technique

Analyzing the sentiment of Arabic texts is still a big research challenge due to the special characteristics and complexity of the Arabic language. Few studies have been conducted on Arabic sentiment analysis (ASA) compared to English or other Latin languages. In addition, most of the existing studies on ASA analyzed datasets collected from Twitter. However, little attention was given to the huge amounts of reviews for governmental or commercial mobile applications on Google Play or the App Store. For instance, the government of Saudi Arabia developed several mobile applications in healthcare, education, and other sectors as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic. To address this gap, this paper aims to analyze the users’ opinions of six applications in the healthcare sector. An improved sentiment classification approach was proposed for measuring user satisfaction toward governmental services’ mobile apps using machine learning models with different preprocessing methods. The Arb-AppsReview dataset was collected from the reviews of these six mobile applications available on Google Play and the App Store, which includes 51k reviews. Then, several feature engineering approaches were applied, which include Bing Liu lexicon, AFINN, and MPQA Subjectivity Lexicon, bag of words (BoW), term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF), and the Google pre-trained Word2Vec. Additionally, the SMOTE technique was applied as a balancing technique on this dataset. Then, five ML models were applied to classify the sentiment opinions. The experimental results showed that the highest accuracy score (94.38%) was obtained by applying a support vector machine (SVM) using the SMOTE technique with all concatenated features

Seronegative Bilateral Symmetrical Inflammatory Polyarthritis: Think Twice Before Starting Immunosuppression

The most common cause of bilateral symmetrical polyarthritis in the small joints is rheumatoid arthritis. However, if seronegative arthritis is involved, it could be the case that other underlying causes need to be diagnosed. This is particularly important for those coming from or living in developing countries where infectious causes should always be considered. The case of a young Nepali woman is presented in this article. She was referred as a case of seronegative rheumatoid arthritis for DMARDs therapy but this was not the case due to her origin from Nepal and seronegativity for RF, Anti-ccp, and ANA as well as faint macular skin lesions over her face and upper extremities, which the patients are not aware of. Consequently, skin biopsy was carried out which subsequently confirmed that the infectious cause of her polyarthritis was leprosy