The frequency and suppressive marker of circulating T-regs are elevated in TT patients. Patients with LL and ENL express significantly lower frequency of T-regs and higher FoxP3 expression (in ENL), consistent with disease progression and immune hyper-activation in these disease categories. Thus, rather than being detrimental to immunity, intact T-regs activity may be beneficial to leprosy patients.

The need for cybersecurity increases to protect the exchange of information for improving the data privacy. This paper presents an investigation of the encryption efficiency of the chaotic-based image block ciphering in the spatial and Fractional Fourier Transform (FrFT) domains. The main aim of this investigation is to examine the efficiency of different chaotic maps, while considering the parameters of the FrFT as additional keys for encryption and achieving reliable cybersecurity for robust image communication. In this paper, Cat, Baker, and Logistic map confusion approaches are applied in the spatial and FrFT domains to study and analyze the cybersecurity and ciphering efficiency of chaos-based image cryptosystems. The confusion features of the chaotic maps in spatial and FrFT domains are investigated using information entropy, differential analysis, histograms, visual observation, attack analysis, impact of noise, and encryption quality tests. Simulation results prove that the chaotic-based image encryption in the FrFT domain increases the efficiency of the confusion process and achieves a high nonlinear relation between the plainimage and the cipherimage in a symmetric ciphering approach. Moreover, the results demonstrate that the Cat-FrFT scheme is more susceptible to channel noise attacks than the Baker-FrFT and the Logistic-FrFT schemes. Hence, they can be implemented efficiently in the scenarios of noisy channels due to their high robustness to channel noise.

This paper investigates and presents a block-based opto-color cipher using double random phase encoding (DRPE) with different block sizes. The color plainimage is divided into equal-sized blocks and then converted to an optical signal by an optical emitter. The obtained optical signal is encrypted by employing the DRPE technique, which applies two types of phase modulation, time, and Fourier domains. Finally, the optical color cipherimage is, upon detection, converted to digital format by a charge-coupled device digital camera. Experiments and security analysis show that the proposed block-based optical color image cipher using DRPE with increased block size is secure, effective, and including a good immunity to channel noise. INDEX TERMS DRPE, Fourier domain, optical color image, time domain, and image encryption.

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