r. azimi

Thymus lancifolius Celak. is one of the exclusive species of thyme genus in Iran, possessing high economic and medicinal value due to its high phenolic compounds. Considering the indiscriminate harvesting from thyme habitats, low production and non-standard quantity and quality of bioactive ingredients due to the high genetic diversity of thyme, the domestication of T. lancifolius Celak. species and its standardization is one of the goals of this study. In this regard, the quantity and quality of this species' essential oil (EO) were investigated and compared in habitat and field conditions. In order to investigate the effects of environmental factors on the quantitative and qualitative production of T. lancifolius Celak. in the field and habitat conditions (five habitats of Rezen, Asadabad, Hamedan, Malayer, and Toyserkan), this species was planted in the Ekbatan station through seed propagation, in the form of a complete randomized block design with three replications. The EO of plants at the full flowering stage were extracted using the hydrodistillation method, and the chemical compounds of EO were measured and identified by GC and GC/MS devices. The comparison of the EO percentage of T. lancifolius populations shows that there is a significant difference in the habitat, so the Asadabad habitat had the highest EO percentage (3.85%), and the Malayer habitat had the lowest EO (1.94%). The amount of EO of the populations in the field also has a significant difference, so the highest percentage of EO (4.18%) is related to the Asadabad population and the lowest is related to Malayer (1.78%). In the populations of Asadabad and Toyserkan, the percentage of EO from the field was more than that of the habitat, but in the populations of Razan, Hamedan, and Malayer, the higher EO belongs to the habitat. Compounds in all populations are almost similar in habitat and field conditions but differ in the type of dominant compounds and their amount. The result of the cluster analysis of the important bioactive constituents of the EO in the five studied populations indicates the existence of two types of chemical types (chemotypes), including thymol (chemotype 1) and geraniol/geranyl acetate (chemotype 2) in both field and habitat conditions. In the EO of four populations of T. lancifolius related to chemotype 1, the main compounds include thymol (habitat: 52.2-71.4%, field: 49.4-68.1%), carvacrol (habitat: 4.5-23.5%, field: 3.9-25.5%), p-cemen (habitat: 4.3-6.1%, field: 4.6-6.6%), and γ-terpinene (habitat: 3.9-9.3%, field: 5.7-8.9%). In this chemotype, the highest amount of thymol (71.4%) was observed in the Hamedan habitat, and the highest amount of phenolic compounds (80%) was found in the Malayer habitat. In the Razan population related to chemotype 2, bioactive constituents including geraniol (habitat: 52.1%, field35.8%), geranyl acetate (habitat: 22%, field: 16%), linalool (habitat: 6.3%, field: 14.7%), and thymol (habitat: 7%, farm: 12%) formed the main compounds of the EO. According to the results of examining the quantity and quality of EO of different populations of T. lancifolius Celak., two main chemotypes, including the thymol chemotype and the geraniol/geranyl acetate chemotype, can be introduced for the domestication and cultivation of this species in Hamadan province to prevent the destruction of thyme plants while using them in the pharmaceutical industry.

In this study, to investigate the effects of gamma ray to dry plant materials, conditions, and storage duration of the plants on the percentage and essential oil composition and some physiological traits of Satureja spicigera (C. Koch) Boiss., plant top shoots were collected at the flowering stage. Gamma ray irradiation was performed in the Atomic Energy Organization at five levels of 0, 2.5, 5, 7.5, and 10 kGy (kilo gray). Storage was carried out under two refrigerator (4°C) and room air temperature conditions at three storage duration levels of 0, 120, and 240 hours. The experiment was conducted as a factorial in a completely randomized design with three replications. Essential oil of flowering shoots was extracted by water distillation method and analyzed by GC and GC/MS quantitatively and qualitatively. According to the obtained results, gamma radiation affected the essential oil percentage and amount of p-cymene, thymol, carvacrol, phenols, flavonoids, and antioxidant activity significantly at the level of 1%. Storage duration had a significant effect on the essential oil percentage and amount of p-cymene, thymol, and carvacrol. Storage conditions showed a significant effect on the total phenols and flavonoids content and antioxidant activity of ethanol extract of S. spicigera. Means comparison of gamma radiation effects showed that the highest percentage of essential oil with 1.12% and 1.03% was obtained in the control and 5 kGy treatments, respectively. The highest amount of thymol (13.57%) and carvacrol (34.73%) was observed in the 10 kGy and control treatments, respectively. With 2.5 kGy gamma irradiation, the amount of phenolic compounds and antioxidant activity respectively increased by 1.4 and 1.76 times compared to the control. Of course, by keeping the plant in the refrigerator, the amount of thymol was reduced. The highest percentage of essential oil was related to the storage for 120 hours. The use of high intensity gamma radiation is suitable to achieve high thymol essential oil. The use of low radiation can also be useful for drying S. spicigera to obtain extracts containing more phenolic compounds. However, gamma radiation is not appropriate for plant materials drying to obtain essential oils of this species.

In this work, the convection-diffusion integro-differential equation with a weakly singular kernel is discussed. The  Legendre spectral tau method is introduced for finding the unknown function. The proposed method is based on expanding the approximate solution as the elements of a shifted Legendre polynomials. We reduce the problem to a set of algebraic equations by using operational matrices. Also the convergence analysis for  shifted Legendre polynomials and error estimation for tau method have been discussed and approved with the exact solution. Finally, several numerical examples are given to demonstrate the high accuracy of the method.

Abstract: Detection of small moving targets is of utmost importance in defense systems. For this purpose, using Infrared (IR) images is preferred to visible images for the reason that in circumstances such as marine navigation in fog and dust conditions, visible images are coming with false alarms that render the detection of small target difficult. So far different methods presented for IR small targets detection and false alarm reduction. In this study, first of all the image was enhanced with a morphological operation called Top-Hat. Then, the IR small target detection problem was considered as a tow-class pattern recognition problem and Fuzzy Cognitive Map (FCM) was applied for the classification. FCM is a simple, but also powerful intelligent method which is used for modeling and analysis of information. This paper is the first attempt to present FCM for IR small target detection. The obtained results indicate that FCM can detect the IR small targets with higher accuracy than any other pattern recognition methods.

Manholes are commonly used in subsurface drainage networks while the hydraulic characteristics of this structure for design purposes and for determining the discharge capacity of the network have not investigated yet. In this research a prototype scale experimental setup was prepared using drainage corrugated pipes in order to determine the minor head loss coefficient of the manhole and to investigate its influence on the water surface profile. Data was gathered for a wide range of pipe longitudinal slopes and main pipe to lateral pipe discharge ratios. The data indicated that when the discharge ratio tends to unity the head loss coefficient decreases to a constant value. Accordingly، an average value was proposed for practical design purposes. The impact of applying such average value on the water surface profile directly upstream of the manhole was investigated and reported herein. The results indicated that applying such average value predicts the water surface elevation within a maximum error of ±15%. Higher errors belong to lower discharge values which are not of practical importance. Therefore، the application of proposed average head loss coefficient is recommended for design procedures.

Cancer research is one of the essential activities for its control and treatment. Hospital based cancer registry system is an information system designed to collect, organize and analyze data on cancer. The objective of the present study was to compare hospital based cancer registry system in Iran with that in the USA.

This research was a comparative study. Studied population included all the health care centers of Tehran, Shaheed Beheshti and Iran medical sciences universities having a pathology laboratory.

The findings indicate that “Pars” software program is mainly used in pathology, while “ADS-9” program in medical record departments of the hospitals .Furthermore, requested information about cancer cases was mostly by researchers and students and the least by the hospital heads, cancer committees and physicians councils. 4-8% of cancer information from the pathology departments was demanded by hospital managers, pathology committees, physicians, researchers and students. 60% of cancer information from “medical record departments” was reported to the drug and care deputy of the medical sciences universities to which the hospitals were affiliated. 56% of cancer information from the pathology departments was reported to the health centers outside the hospitals.

The hospital based cancer registry system in Iran is imperfect and limited in scope as compared to the registry system in the U.S. The cancer registry in Iran only records demographic information of patients and the type of tumors. Learning from the hospital based cancer registry of the U.S.A can help to improve the hospital cancer registry based system in Iran.