Background: Neural tube defects (NTDs) are said to be inherited in a multifactorial fashion, i.e. genetic-environmental interaction. Maternal nutritional deficiencies had long been reported to cause NTDs, especially folate deficiency during early pregnancy. More attention had been paid to the exact mechanism by which this deficiency state causes these defects in the developing embryo. The most significant of all researches was that connecting reduced folate and increased homocysteine level in maternal serum on one hand and the risk of developing a NTD baby on the other hand. Objectives : to determine the significance of homocysteine level in Iraqi mothers who gave birth to babies with NTDs as compared to normal controls. Patients, Materials

Modeling the microclimate of a greenhouse located in Baghdad under its weather conditions to calculate the heating and cooling loads by computer simulation. Solar collectors with a V-corrugated absorber plate and an auxiliary heat source were used as a heating system. A rotary silica gel desiccant dehumidifier, a sensible heat exchanger, and an evaporative cooler were added to the collectors to form an open-cycle solar assisted desiccant cooling system. A dynamic model was adopted to predict the inside air and the soil surface temperatures of the greenhouse. These temperatures are used to predict the greenhouse heating and cooling loads through an energy balance method which takes into account the soil heat gain. This is not included in

This study aimed to investigate the influence of longitudinal steel embedded tubes located at the center of the column cross-section on the behavior of reinforced concrete (RC) columns. The experimental program consisted of 8 testing pin-ended square sectional columns of 150×150 mm, having a total height of 1400 mm, subjected to eccentric load. The considered variables were the steel square tube sizes of 25, 51 and 68 mm side dimensions and the load eccentricity (50 and 150) mm. RC columns were concealed steel tubes with hollow ratios of 3%, 12% and 20% depending on tube sizes used. The experimental results indicated an improvement in the overall behavior of eccentric columns when steel embedded tubes are used. The maximum gain in

Adverse drug reactions (ADR) are important information for verifying the view of the patient on a particular drug. Regular user comments and reviews have been considered during the data collection process to extract ADR mentions, when the user reported a side effect after taking a specific medication. In the literature, most researchers focused on machine learning techniques to detect ADR. These methods train the classification model using annotated medical review data. Yet, there are still many challenging issues that face ADR extraction, especially the accuracy of detection. The main aim of this study is to propose LSA with ANN classifiers for ADR detection. The findings show the effectiveness of utilizing LSA with ANN in extracting AD

Sediment accumulated in sewers is a major concern source as it induces numerous operational and environmental problems. For instance, during wet weather flow, the re-suspension of this sediment accompanied by the combined sewer overflow may cause huge pollutant load to the receiving water body. The characteristics of the sewer sediment are important as it shapes its behaviour and determines the extent of the pollution load. In this paper, an investigation of sewer sediment and its characterization is done for a case study in Baghdad city. Sediment depth covers more than 50% of the sewer cross-sectional area; several operational causes are comprised to cause this huge depths of sediment depositions. The testing and analysis of the s

In this paper, variable gain nonlinear PD and PI fuzzy logic controllers are designed and the effect of the variable gain characteristic of these controllers is analyzed to show its contribution in enhancing the performance of the closed loop system over a conventional linear PID controller. Simulation results and time domain performance characteristics show how these fuzzy controllers outperform the conventional PID controller when used to control a nonlinear plant and a plant that has time delay.

In this paper, variable gain nonlinear PD and PI fuzzy logic controllers are designed and the effect of the variable gain characteristic of these controllers is analyzed to show its contribution in enhancing the performance of the closed loop system over a conventional linear PID controller. Simulation results and time domain performance characteristics show how these fuzzy controllers outperform the conventional PID controller when used to control a nonlinear plant and a plant that has time delay.

Circular thin walled structures have wide range of applications. This type of structure is generally exposed to different types of loads, but one of the most important types is a buckling. In this work, the phenomena of buckling was studied by using finite element analysis. The circular thin walled structure in this study is constructed from; cylindrical thin shell strengthen by longitudinal stringers, subjected to pure bending in one plane. In addition, Taguchi method was used to identify the optimum combination set of parameters for enhancement of the critical buckling load value, as well as to investigate the most effective parameter. The parameters that have been analyzed were; cylinder shell thickness, shape of stiffeners section an