Background: Oral mucositis is regarded as one of the major complications of radiation therapy especially in patients with head and neck cancer. The aim of this study was to evaluate the efficacy of glutamine in preventing or minimizing the development of mucositis of the oral cavity. Subjects and methods: Forty-six participants were randomly selected amongst those who were planned to receive radiation therapy for head and neck region cancers. They were randomly divided into two groups of 23 subjects, one group received glutamine and the second group received a placebo. Results: Glutamine had a statistically significant effect in reducing the occurrence and/or severity of oral mucositis in the treated patients compared to patients in the con

Background: Mitral regurgitation (MR) is the most commonly encountered valve lesion in modern clinical practice. Severe mitral regurgitation may cause systolic dysfunction. Left ventricular ejection fraction may not be an accurate measurement of LV function in patients with mitral insufficiency. Myocardial performance index (MPI) is a simple non invasive measure of myocardial function. Methods: The study involved 50 patients with valvular mitral regurgitation and 50 healthy subjects as a control group. Transthoracic echocardiography was carried out for all patients and control group. The echocardiographic measurements included left ventricular end diastolic and end systolic dimensions, left atrial diameter, ejection fraction (EF), and myoca

     The aim of the current study was to investigate endosulfan effects on the Acetylcholinesterase (AChE) enzyme and gene in albino mice. Thirty selected male albino mice were randomly divided into 3 groups. The first group was control group (G1), while the other two treated groups were injected intraperitoneally twice per week with two doses of endosulfanG2 (3 mg/kg) and G3 (17 mg/kg) for 21 and 45 days respectively. The results recorded a significant decrease in AChE enzyme in the group treated with 17 mg/kg b.wt. (3986.67 ±170.32 U/L),compared to the control (5584.33 ±140.35 U/L)and treatment group with 3 mg/kg b.wt.(5556.00 ±341.01) U/L for 21 days. Also, there was a significant decrease in the enzyme level

Medical imaging is a technique that has been used for diagnosis and treatment of a large number of diseases. Therefore it has become necessary to conduct a good image processing to extract the finest desired result and information. In this study, genetic algorithm (GA)-based clustering technique (K-means and Fuzzy C Means (FCM)) were used to segment thyroid Computed Tomography (CT) images to an extraction thyroid tumor. Traditional GA, K-means and FCM algorithms were applied separately on the original images and on the enhanced image with Anisotropic Diffusion Filter (ADF). The resulting cluster centers from K-means and FCM were used as the initial population in GA for the implementation of GAK-Mean and GAFCM. Jaccard index was used to s

The synthesis and properties of two new series of compounds having 1,3-Oxazepineand 1,3-thiazole rings connected through azo linkage are reported. These compounds weresynthesized by the reaction of phthalic anhydride with Schiff bases. The molecular structuresof these compounds were verified by elemental analysis, FTIR and 1HNMR spectroscopy.The mesomorphic behaviors of these compounds were studied by optical polarizedmicroscopy (OPM) and differential scanning calorimetry (DSC). All compounds of the twoseries show liquid crystalline properties. The influence of the central oxazepine and thiazolerings and the terminal substituents on the type and temperature range of the mesomorphousproperties of these compounds has been elucidated

This paper presents a hybrid genetic algorithm (hGA) for optimizing the maximum likelihood function ln(L(phi(1),theta(1)))of the mixed model ARMA(1,1). The presented hybrid genetic algorithm (hGA) couples two processes: the canonical genetic algorithm (cGA) composed of three main steps: selection, local recombination and mutation, with the local search algorithm represent by steepest descent algorithm (sDA) which is defined by three basic parameters: frequency, probability, and number of local search iterations. The experimental design is based on simulating the cGA, hGA, and sDA algorithms with different values of model parameters, and sample size(n). The study contains comparison among these algorithms depending on MSE value. One can conc

Objective: Detection the level of YKL-40 biochemical marker and vitamin D level in sera of Iraqi uterine cancer
females' patients.
Methodology: This study included 90 female volunteers, 30 of them were healthy volunteers who were
considered as a control group, while sixty serum samples were collected from women patients suffering from
uterine tumors (30 malignant and 30 fibroid benign tumors), benign cases were considered as a disease
control group for malignant tumors. The average age of those females was 30-75 years, which matched the
control group. All the samples were collected from Azady hospital in Kirkuk and the gynecologic department at
Medical City in Baghdad during October /2012 to May /2013. All the serum

The increasing Global Competitive and the continuous improvement in information technology has led the way to the development of the modern systems and using modern techniques. One of these techniques is benchmarking style and Total Quality Management all of them are used to improve the production process and target rid from the losts on the other side.

The Benchmarking style has become a very important for all the industrial systems and the serving systems as well. And an instrument to improve their performance specially those which are suffering from the highness of the costs or waste in time on the other side.

This study aims to depend on virtual Benchmarking style in the eval

Background: Orthodontic tooth movement is characterized by tissue reactions, which consist of an inflammatory response in periodontal ligament and followed by bone remodeling in the periodontium depending on the forces applied. These processes trigger the secretion of various proteins and enzymes into the saliva.The purpose of this study was to evaluate the activity of alkaline phosphatase (ALP) in saliva during orthodontic tooth movement using different magnitude of continuous orthodontic forces. Materials and Methods: Thirty orthodontic patients (12 males and 18 females) aged 17-23 years with class II division I malocclusion all requiring bilateral maxillary first premolar extractions were randomly divided into three groups according to t