of malignant pleural mesothelioma from pleural fluid by Fourier transform-infrared spectroscopy coupled with chemometrics," J.Abstract. This study was conducted to differentiate malignant pleural mesothelioma (MPM) from lung cancer (LC) and benign pleural effusion (BPE) from pleural fluids using the diagnostic power of Fourier transform-infrared spectroscopy with attenuated total reflectance mode coupled with chemometrics. Infrared spectra of MPM (n ¼ 24), LC (n ¼ 20), and BPE (n ¼ 25) were collected, and hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA) and principal component analysis (PCA) were applied to their spectra. HCA results indicated that MPM was differentiated from LC with 100% sensitivity and 100% specificity and from BPE, with 100% sensitivity and 88% specificity, which were also confirmed by PCA score plots. PCA loading plots indicated that these separations originated mainly from lipids, proteins, and nucleic acids-related spectral bands. There was significantly higher lipid, protein, nucleic acid, and glucose contents in the MPM and LC. However, the significant changes in triglyceride and cholesterol ester content, protein and nucleic acid structure, a lower membrane fluidity, and higher membrane order were only observed in the MPM. To check the classification success of some test samples/each group, soft independent modeling of class analogies was performed and 96.2% overall classification success was obtained. This approach can provide a rapid and inexpensive methodology for the efficient differentiation of MPM from other pleural effusions.

Simvastatin is one of the most frequently prescribed statins because of its efficacy in the treatment of hypercholesterolemia, reducing cardiovascular risk and related mortality. Determination of its side effects on different tissues is mandatory to improve safe use of this drug. In the present study, the effects of simvastatin on molecular composition and structure of healthy rat livers were investigated by Fourier transform infrared and Raman imaging. Simvastatin-treated groups received 50 mg/kg/day simvastatin for 30 days. The ratio of the area and/or intensity of the bands assigned to lipids, proteins, and nucleic acids were calculated to get information about the drug-induced changes in tissues. Loss of unsaturation, accumulation of end products of lipid peroxidation, and alterations in lipid-to-protein ratio were observed in the treated group. Protein secondary structure studies revealed significant decrease in α-helix and increase in random coil, while native β-sheet decreases and aggregated β-sheet increases in treated group implying simvastatin-induced protein denaturation. Moreover, groups were successfully discriminated using principal component analysis. Consequently, high-dose simvastatin treatment induces hepatic lipid peroxidation and changes in molecular content and protein secondary structure, implying the risk of liver disorders in drug therapy.

A computer-program "IR-Spectroscopy" for the interpretation of infrared spectra of organic compounds is described. It contains the following basic items for preprocessing and execution of the computer based interpretation process: handling of the rule-base CorTab, routines for automatic rule generation and interpretation modules on the basis of the programming languages PROLOG and C.

A method for Red Blood Corpuscles (RBCs) counting has been developed using RBCs light microscopic images and Matlab algorithm. The Dataset consists of Red Blood Corpuscles (RBCs) images and there RBCs segmented images. A detailed description using flow chart is given in order to show how to produce RBCs mask. The RBCs mask was used to count the number of RBCs in the blood smear image.