Background: Dietary intakes are critical during pregnancy, because inadequate amounts of key nutrients may compromise fetal development or maternal health. In addition to that maternal diet could be one of the methods to select the gender of the baby. The aim of the study is to correlate the level of the minerals in the mother’s blood with the gender and wellbeing of the baby after delivery.Patients and Methods: Fifty women were involved in this study with a mean age (23.92 ± 4.75), collected from the labor room during labor in the period between December 2013 and May 2014, in Baghdad teaching hospital. After taking a full history from the women, 10 ml of blood was withdrawn from them, 2ml in EDTA tubes for lead estimation and 8 ml in pl

Article information: COVID-19 has roused the scientic community, prompting calls for immediate solutions to avoid the infection or at least reduce the virus's spread. Despite the availability of several licensed vaccinations to boost human immunity against the disease, various mutated strains of the virus continue to emerge, posing a danger to the vaccine's ecacy against new mutations. As a result, the importance of the early detection of COVID-19 infection becomes evident. Cough is a prevalent symptom in all COVID-19 mutations. Unfortunately, coughing can be a symptom of various of diseases, including pneumonia and inuenza. Thus, identifying the coughing behavior might help clinicians diagnose the COVID-19 infection earlier and distinguish

Background: Acute appendicitis is the most common abdominal surgical emergency. The diagnosis of this condition is still essentially clinical and there is difficulty in the clinical diagnosis, especially among elderly, children and patients with a typical presentation, so early and accurate diagnosis of acute appendicitis is important to avoid its complications.Objectives: To evaluate the degree of accuracy of Alvarado scoring system in the diagnosis of acute appendicitis.Method: Two hundred patients were admitted to the Alkindy Teaching Hospital from January 2011 to april 2014- presented with symptoms and signs suggestive of acute appendicitis. After examination and investigations all patients were given a score according to Alvarado sc

Background: breast cancer is commonest cancer globally and the 1st cancer in Iraq among females, its management and prognosis depend on early diagnosis, the traditional method was excisional biopsy which is expensive and invasive leading to delayed diagnosis, FNAB is cheap nom invasive more acceptable to women, Aim of the study: to test the reliability of FNAB in preoperative diagnosis of breast lump.

Methodology: This is a retrospective study of 204 cases, 102 breast cancer cases and 102 benign breast lesions, taken between Jan. 2017 – Nov. 2017. The sample taken from the breast cancer early detection center in  Al-Alwiyaa maternity teaching hospital, during the year 2017

Composite steel-concrete sections have a broad benefit through increasing structural strength as well as minimizing the self-loads. All past researches were concerned with pre-installed shear connectors (PRSC) in the manufacturing of composite sections. A new fabrication technique for steel-concrete-steel composite sections were presented in the current study by the post-installation shear connectors (POSC) passed-through an embedded polymerizing vinyl chloride (PVC) pipes. The performance of normal strength concrete prisms with a specified strength of 32 MPa connected to square steel tubes (SST) was investigated. Six specimens were fabricated in both methodologies, PRSC and POSC were experimentally tested by Push-out test. The spac

Rutting is a crucial concern impacting asphalt concrete pavements’ stability and long-term performance, negatively affecting vehicle drivers’ comfort and safety. This research aims to evaluate the permanent deformation of pavement under different traffic and environmental conditions using an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) prediction model. The model was built based on the outcomes of an experimental uniaxial repeated loading test of 306 cylindrical specimens. Twelve independent variables representing the materials’ properties, mix design parameters, loading settings, and environmental conditions were implemented in the model, resulting in a total of 3214 data points. The network accomplished high prediction accuracy with an R

Nonlinear time series analysis is one of the most complex problems ; especially the nonlinear autoregressive with exogenous variable (NARX) .Then ; the problem of model identification and the correct orders determination considered the most important problem in the analysis of time series . In this paper , we proposed splines  estimation method for model identification , then we used three criterions for the correct orders determination. Where ; proposed method used to estimate the additive splines for model identification , And the rank determination depends on the additive property  to avoid the problem of curse dimensionally . The proposed method is one of the nonparametric methods , and the simulation results give a

The calibration of a low-speed wind tunnel (LSWT) test section had been made in the present work. The tunnel was designed and constructed at the Aerodynamics Lab. in the Mechanical Engineering Department/University of Baghdad. The test section design speed is 70 m/s. Frictional loses and uniformity of the flow inside the test section had been tested and calibrated based on the British standards for flow inside ducts and conduits. Pitot-static tube, boundary layer Pitot tube were the main instruments which were used in the present work to measure the flow characteristics with emphasize on the velocity uniformity and boundary layer growth along the walls of the test section. It is found that the maximum calibrated velocity for empty test s

Table tennis is considered one of the fast base sports that the player needs to have the speed of performance and awareness, especially in straight forward and back strikes, which is an important offensive skills, and the player success depends on his perception speed to the point of the fall of the ball in the arena of his competitor. But there is no way to measure cognitive processing speed. Therefore, the researchers sought to design a test that measures this ability to ensure its scientific evaluation, and then establish standard scores for this test for the players of the specialized school of table tennis, to help evaluate them objectively and move away from subjective estimates when evaluating and developing measuring instruments in