Objectives: Dickkopf-1 (DKK-1) is WNT/b-catenin pathway antagonist which plays a detrimental role in the development of diabetic retinopathy (DR). This research aimed to assess serum DKK-1 levels in diabetic patients who have and have not developed DR and, compare them with the control subjects finding out whether we can use it as an indicator for DR early diagnosis and to find out which one of the widely used two groups of antidiabetic treatments had the greater effect on this biomarker and hence on the progression of DR. Methods: The study participants were divided into two subgroups: First, 70 patients (36 male, 34 female) with type 2 diabetes mellitus, among them 35 patients diagnosed with DR and 35 with no evidence of DR, and s

Millions of pilgrims and visitors from numerous parts of the world flock to Karbala (one of the most prominent ideological and religious places in central Iraq) each year to visit the holy shrines in Karbala due to their sanctity. Many improvements have been made to the Two Holy Shrines (THS), the Shrines of Imam Husayn and Imam Abbas, and the area between them (ATHS), due to the high temperatures in this region and to improve pedestrian thermal comfort. Studies on improving outdoor thermal comfort in Karbala are scarce. Hence, this research aims to look into historical and current architectural changes and how they affect thermal comfort. On the hottest summer day, the ENVI-met software program was used to simulate the building des

Millions of pilgrims and visitors from numerous parts of the world flock to Karbala (one of the most prominent ideological and religious places in central Iraq) each year to visit the holy shrines in Karbala due to their sanctity. Many improvements have been made to the Two Holy Shrines (THS), the Shrines of Imam Husayn and Imam Abbas, and the area between them (ATHS), due to the high temperatures in this region and to improve pedestrian thermal comfort. Studies on improving outdoor thermal comfort in Karbala are scarce. Hence, this research aims to look into historical and current architectural changes and how they affect thermal comfort. On the hottest summer day, the ENVI-met software program was used to simulate the building des

The integration of decision-making will lead to the robust of its decisions, and then determination optimum inventory level to the required materials to produce and reduce the total cost by the cooperation of purchasing department with inventory department and also with other company^,s departments. Two models are suggested to determine Optimum Inventory Level (OIL), the first model (OIL-model 1) assumed that the inventory level for materials quantities equal to the required materials, while the second model (OIL-model 2) assumed that the inventory level for materials quantities more than the required materials for the next period.             &nb

  Survival analysis is the analysis of data that are in the form of times from the origin of time until the occurrence of the end event, and in medical research, the origin of time is the date of registration of the individual or the patient in a study such as clinical trials to compare two types of medicine or more if the endpoint It is the death of the patient or the disappearance of the individual. The data resulting from this process is called survival times. But if the end is not death, the resulting data is called time data until the event. That is, survival analysis is one of the statistical steps and procedures for analyzing data when the adopted variable is time to event and time. It could be d

Abstract: Word sense disambiguation (WSD) is a significant field in computational linguistics as it is indispensable for many language understanding applications. Automatic processing of documents is made difficult because of the fact that many of the terms it contain ambiguous. Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) systems try to solve these ambiguities and find the correct meaning. Genetic algorithms can be active to resolve this problem since they have been effectively applied for many optimization problems. In this paper, genetic algorithms proposed to solve the word sense disambiguation problem that can automatically select the intended meaning of a word in context without any additional resource. The proposed algorithm is evaluated on a col

As s widely use of exchanging private information in various communication applications, the issue to secure it became top urgent. In this research, a new approach to encrypt text message based on genetic algorithm operators has been proposed. The proposed approach follows a new algorithm of generating 8 bit chromosome to encrypt plain text after selecting randomly crossover point. The resulted child code is flipped by one bit using mutation operation. Two simulations are conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed approach including execution time of encryption/decryption and throughput computations. Simulations results prove the robustness of the proposed approach to produce better performance for all evaluation metrics with res

In the current digitalized world, cloud computing becomes a feasible solution for the virtualization of cloud computing resources.  Though cloud computing has many advantages to outsourcing an organization’s information, but the strong security is the main aspect of cloud computing. Identity authentication theft becomes a vital part of the protection of cloud computing data. In this process, the intruders violate the security protocols and perform attacks on the organizations or user’s data. The situation of cloud data disclosure leads to the cloud user feeling insecure while using the cloud platform. The different traditional cryptographic techniques are not able to stop such kinds of attacks. BB84 protocol is the first quantum cry