Background Median sternotomy is the gold standard incision for most cardiac operations. However, with the advent of minimal invasive surgery, a new approach emerged in cardiac surgery named mini-sternotomy and has been successfully used to perform a variety of operations.

 The aim of this paper is to present our experience of using mini-sternotomy to harvest the left internal mammary artery (LIMA) for off-pump revascularization of the left anterior descending artery (LAD)

 Methodology Over a 2-year period (October 2012-October 2014), 100 patients underwent coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) via conventional median sternotomy (CMS) (n=80) and mini-sternotomy (MS) (n=20). The

In this paper an attempt to provide a single degree of freedom lumped model for fluid structure interaction (FSI) dynamical analysis will be presented. The model can be used to clarify some important concept in the FSI dynamics such as the added mass, added stiffness, added damping, wave coupling ,influence mass coefficient and critical fluid depth . The numerical results of the model show that the natural frequency decrease with the increasing of many parameters related to the structure and the fluid .It is found that the interaction phenomena can become weak or strong depending on the depth of the containing fluid .The damped and un damped free response are plotted in time domain and phase plane for different model parameters It is fou

Background: To elucidate the possible role of human cytomegalovirus in pregnancy loss through induction of certain pro-inflammatory adhesion molecules.
Methods: Paraffin embedded sections of curate samples were obtained from 34 women had spontaneous abortion, and 5 women had elective termination of pregnancy (as control), and then subjected for immunohistochemistry analysis to detect human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) early protein and VCAM-1 molecule.
Results: Nine out of 34 women with spontaneous abortion were positive for HCMV early protein, with a
significantly higher expression of VCAM-1 in HCMV positive cases as compared with HCMV negative and the control groups (p = 0.05, 0.001 respectively).
Conclusion: HCMV infection may p

The current work aims to evaluate the association between genetic mutations in thymidylate synthetase (TYMS gene in exon1 and partial regions of promotor and intron 1 [877 bp, 657,220–658,096 bp]) and the therapeutic outcomes for rheumatoid arthritis (RA) Iraqi patients. An observational cross-sectional study involving 95 RA patients with established RA patients based on their methotrexate treatment responsiveness. Genetic sequencing of the TYMS gene was performed for all patients according to the instruction manuals of the sequencing company (Macrogen Inc. Geumchen, South Korea). Four polymorphisms were identified by sequencing 95 randomly selected patients in the noncoding region of TYMS

Objective: the objective of this study was to compare the intraoperative blood loss, intraoperative time, postoperative pain and secondary hemorrhage between electrodissection and cold steel dissection tonsillectomy.

Methods: One hundred and six patients were enrolled in this study, the patients were randomly allocated into electrodissection group A (n=51) and cold steel dissection tonsillectomy group B (n=53). All patients are above 7 years and had history of recurrent tonsillitis and/or tonsillar hypertrophy with obstructive symptoms. Intraoperative parameters and postoperative outcome were assessed.

Results: In group A patients had statically significa

Image recognition is one of the most important applications of information processing, in this paper; a comparison between 3-level techniques based image recognition has been achieved, using discrete wavelet (DWT) and stationary wavelet transforms (SWT), stationary-stationary-stationary (sss), stationary-stationary-wavelet (ssw), stationary-wavelet-stationary (sws), stationary-wavelet-wavelet (sww), wavelet-stationary- stationary (wss), wavelet-stationary-wavelet (wsw), wavelet-wavelet-stationary (wws) and wavelet-wavelet-wavelet (www). A comparison between these techniques has been implemented. according to the peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR), root mean square error (RMSE), compression ratio (CR) and the coding noise e (n) of each third

In this paper, some commonly used hierarchical cluster techniques have been compared. A comparison was made between the agglomerative hierarchical clustering technique and the k-means technique, which includes the k-mean technique, the variant K-means technique, and the bisecting K-means, although the hierarchical cluster technique is considered to be one of the best clustering methods. It has a limited usage due to the time complexity. The results, which are calculated based on the analysis of the characteristics of the cluster algorithms and the nature of the data, showed that the bisecting K-means technique is the best compared to the rest of the other methods used.

The area of character recognition has received a considerable attention by researchers all over the world during the last three decades. However, this research explores best sets of feature extraction techniques and studies the accuracy of well-known classifiers for Arabic numeral using the Statistical styles in two methods and making comparison study between them. First method Linear Discriminant function that is yield results with accuracy as high as 90% of original grouped cases correctly classified. In the second method, we proposed algorithm, The results show the efficiency of the proposed algorithms, where it is found to achieve recognition accuracy of 92.9% and 91.4%. This is providing efficiency more than the first method.