BACKGROUND: The primary cause of blindness in diabetics is diabetic retinopathy (DR), the most common microvascular complication of diabetes, and visual impairment. Visfatin is an adipocytokine that aids in insulin activity during gestational diabetes and pregnancy.

AIM: This study aimed to estimate serum visfatin levels in DR, proliferative (PDR), non-proliferative (NPDR), and healthy subjects (HS).

MATERIALS AND METHODS: A 120-patient case-control study with a history of T2DM for more than 5 years as well as 30 healthy subjects enrolled in the study. Patients group divided into three sub-groups, DM, PDR, and NPDR. Visfatin levels w

Background: Thermocycling simulates the temperature dynamics in the oral environment. This in vitro study done to measure and compare the effect of thermocycling on the shear bond strength of stainless steel and sapphire brackets bonded to human enamel teeth using light cured orthodontic adhesive and debonded at various time, and to measure adhesive remnant index after debonding. Materials and Methods: one-hundred-twenty extracted upper first premolars for orthodontic reason were used in this study; depending on weather thermocycled or not, the sample was divided into two main groups, then within each group 30 teeth were used for stainless-steel brackets (Bionic®) and for sapphire brackets (Pure®). Both groups were subdivided into three

Objectives: This study aimed to evaluate and compare the effect of plasma treatment versus conventional treatment on the micro shear bond strength (μSBS), surface roughness, and wettability of three different CAD/CAM materials. Materials and methods: Sixty cylindrical specimens (5 mm diameter ×3 mm height) were prepared from three different CAD/CAM materials: Group A: Zirconia, Group B: Lithium disilicate, and Group C: Resin nano-ceramic. Each group was subdivided into two subgroups according to surface treatment used: Subgroup I: Conventional treatment, zirconia was sandblasted with Al2O3, while lithium disilicate and resin nano-ceramic were etched with hydrofluoric acid. Subgroup II: Plasma treatment, the surface of each material was tr

The fingerprints are the more utilized biometric feature for person identification and verification. The fingerprint is easy to understand compare to another existing biometric type such as voice, face. It is capable to create a very high recognition rate for human recognition. In this paper the geometric rotation transform is applied on fingerprint image to obtain a new level of features to represent the finger characteristics and to use for personal identification; the local features are used for their ability to reflect the statistical behavior of fingerprint variation at fingerprint image. The proposed fingerprint system contains three main stages, they are: (i) preprocessing, (ii) feature extraction, and (iii) matching. The preprocessi

RG Majeed, AS Ahmed, Jornal of Al-Muthanna for Agricultural Sciences, 2023

A field study was conducted at the college of Agriculture, Baghdad University-Jadiriyah to investigate the effect of adding potassium fertilizer and organic nutrient (Reef Amirich) on the population density of two sucking pests of cucumber, cotton whitefly, Bemisia tabaci and onion thrips, Thrips tabaci during the spring season/2016. Results indicated that potassium sulphate (50, 100 and 150 kg/ha) and organic nutrient (0.8 and 1.6ml/l) reduced both the population density of B. tabaci and T. tabaci nymphs depending on the fertilizer level of the user, the treatment 150 kg/ha for the potassium fertilizer and 1.6 ml/L for organic nutrient was the highest among others when minimized density of nymphs by 1.62 nymphs of B. tabaci/disk leaf and 0