Toxic heavy metals and nutrient concentration in the milk of goat herds in two Iranian industrial and non-industrial zones.

This work aimed to explore the concentration of nickel, manganese, iron, copper, chromium, and lead in the milk of goat herds in the industrial area of Asaluyeh (southern Iran) and the non-industrial area of Kaki. The milk of 16 goat herds (each herd had at least ten goats) was collected in several villages in each area, and at the same time, the drinking water and forage of goats were sampled. The concentration of elements in the samples was determined by ICP-OES. The mean concentrations of chromium, copper, iron, manganese, lead, and nickel in milk samples of the Asaluyeh area were 16.423 ± 0.349, 0.146 ± 0.118, 6.111 ± 0.501, 0.239 ± 0.016, 0.141 ± 0.030, and 1.447 ± 0.101 mg/kg, respectively. Concentrations of heavy metals (except for copper) in the milk of goats in the industrialized area of Asaluyeh were significantly higher than that of Kaki (P < 0.05). Also, the content of heavy metals was significantly correlated with lactose levels (P < 0.05). The hazard index for drinking the goat milk was computed to be 0.444 and 0.386 for the Asaluyeh and Kaki area, respectively, which shows a minimal effect of this exposure pathway.

Data on metals biomonitoring in the body of schoolchildren in the vicinity of a heavily industrialized site.

This data is obtained from analyzing the concentration of metals include Al, Co, Cr, Cu, Fe, Mo, Pb, and Zn in the urine of schoolchildren in Asalouyeh city in vicinity to a heavily industrialized site and comparison with a reference city. The significance of sex groups on urine metal level was evaluated through this data. The urinary content of metals was measured by inductively coupled plasma atomic emission spectroscopy (ICP-OES). Statistical analyze of data were done by Mann-Whitney test. The herein presented date could beneficial for health assessment of gas and petrochemical companies.

Merkel cell carcinoma in a 17-year-old boy, report of a highly aggressive fatal case and review of the literature.

Merkel cell carcinoma is a rare tumor frequently involving the skin with an aggressive behavior and fatal outcome. It occurs mostly in the caucasian race between 60-80 years of age and it is rare in children. Herein we report our experience with a highly aggressive fatal Merkel cell carcinoma in an immunocompetent 17-year-old boy. Its characteristics and treatment modalities will be also discussed.

Testicular papillary serous cystadenocarcinoma: a rare case report and review of the literature.

Papillary serous cystadenocarcinoma of the ovary is a common tumor but occurrence of ovarian type papillary serous cystadenocarcinoma in the testis is very rare. Herein we report such a case in a 49-year-old man presenting with testicular swelling. In this tumor, mesothelioma of tunica vaginalis should be excluded by immunohistochemistry. The best treatment is radial orchiectomy and it is very resistant to chemoradiation. Our case was well after orchiectomy and now after a year he is doing well and completely symptom free.

Novel genetic-neuro-fuzzy filter for speckle reduction from sonography images.

Edge-preserving speckle noise reduction is essential to computer-aided ultrasound image processing and understanding. A new class of genetic-neuro-fuzzy filter is proposed to optimize the trade-off between speckle noise removal and edge preservation. The proposed approach combines the advantages of the fuzzy, neural, and genetic paradigms. Neuro-fuzzy approaches are very promising for nonlinear filtering of noisy images. Fuzzy reasoning embedded into the network structure aims at reducing errors while fine details are being processed. The learning method based on the real-time genetic algorithms (GAs) performs an effective training of the network from a collection of training data and yields satisfactory results after a few generations. The performance of the proposed filter has been compared with that of the commonly used median and Wiener filters in reducing speckle noises on ultrasound images. We evaluate this filter by passing the filter's output to the edge detection algorithm and observing its ability to detect edge pixels.Experimental results show that the proposed genetic-neuro-fuzzy technique is very effective in speckle noise reduction as well as detail preserving even in the presence of highly noise corrupted data, and it works significantly better than other well-known conventional methods in the literature.