Background: Waterpipe tobacco smoking has become common especially among young people, Waterpipe smoking misconcepted as a safer mean of smoking, so in this study we will highlight the effect of Waterpipe smoking ‎on periodontal and oral health.‎ Materials and method. The selected ‎‎‎100 male subjects of 30-40 years, ‎categorized into 4 groups (each group ‎‎25 subject): Waterpipe smoker ‎with ‎healthy periodontium, ‎Waterpipe smoker ‎‎with chronic periodontitis, Non-‎‎smoker ‎with healthy periodontium and Non-smoker ‎with chronic periodontitis. Whole ‎unstimulated ‎saliva was collected. Clinical measurements: plaque ‎index

The rise of edge-cloud continuum computing is a result of the growing significance of edge computing, which has become a complementary or substitute option for traditional cloud services. The convergence of networking and computers presents a notable challenge due to their distinct historical development. Task scheduling is a major challenge in the context of edge-cloud continuum computing. The selection of the execution location of tasks, is crucial in meeting the quality-of-service (QoS) requirements of applications. An efficient scheduling strategy for distributing workloads among virtual machines in the edge-cloud continuum data center is mandatory to ensure the fulfilment of QoS requirements for both customer and service provider. E

Introduction: Cardiovascular diseases are the main cause of death among type 2 diabetic patients. Higher levels of plasminogen activator urokinase receptor have been found to predict morbidity and mortality across acute and chronic diseases in the common populace. This study aims to explore the role of serum plasminogen activator urokinase receptor levels as a cardiometabolic risk factor among type 2 diabetic Iraqi patients. Methods: Seventy type 2 diabetic patients (40 male and 30 female) (mean age: 46.20±7.56 years) participated in this study; 35 patients were with cardiovascular disease and 35 were without cardiovascular disease; their ages range was 40-55 years. In addition, 30 individuals who apparently healthy were selected a

Maximum power point tracking (MPPT) is used in photovoltaic (PV) systems to enhance efficiency and maximize the output power of PV module, regardless the variation of temperature, irradiation, and the electrical characteristics of the load. A new MPPT system has been presented in this research, consisting of a synchronous DC-DC step-down Buck converter controlled by an Arduino microcontroller based unit. The MPPT process with Perturb and Observe method is performed with a DC-DC converter circuit to overcome the problem of voltage mismatch between the PV modules and the loads. The proposing system has high efficiency, lower cost and can be easily modified to handle more energy sources. The test results indicate that the u

In this study, an efficient compression system is introduced, it is based on using wavelet transform and two types of 3Dimension (3D) surface representations (i.e., Cubic Bezier Interpolation (CBI)) and 1 st order polynomial approximation. Each one is applied on different scales of the image; CBI is applied on the wide area of the image in order to prune the image components that show large scale variation, while the 1 st order polynomial is applied on the small area of residue component (i.e., after subtracting the cubic Bezier from the image) in order to prune the local smoothing components and getting better compression gain. Then, the produced cubic Bezier surface is subtracted from the image signal to get the residue component. Then, t

       Human detection represents a main problem of interest when using video based monitoring. In this paper, artificial neural networks, namely multilayer perceptron (MLP) and radial basis function (RBF) are used to detect humans among different objects in a sequence of frames (images) using classification approach. The classification used is based on the shape of the object instead of depending on the contents of the frame. Initially, background subtraction is depended to extract objects of interest from the frame, then statistical and geometric information are obtained from vertical and horizontal projections of the objects that are detected to stand for the shape of the object. Next to this step, two ty

n each relapse. Objjec tt iiv es :: To sttudy diifffferentt ffacttors whiich miightt be associiatted or lleadiing tto
tthe occurrence off rellapse iin nephrottiic syndrome
Metthods:: A retrospective study of seventy patients with nephrotic syndrome with age range of 1-14 years, who were diagnosed and treated in Child's Central Teaching Hospital over the period of 1st of January and 1st of July 2008.
The patients were divided into three groups; frequent relapses group, infrequent relapses group and undetermined group. We compared between frequent relapses group and infrequent relapses group in regard to age, sex, type of presentation, biochemical findings which include; total serum protein, serum albumin and renal function test,

Activation of farnesoid X receptor (FXR) markedly attenuates development of atherosclerosis in animal models. However, the underlying mechanism is not well elucidated. Here, we show that the FXR agonist, obeticholic acid (OCA), increases fecal cholesterol excretion and macrophage reverse cholesterol transport (RCT) dependent on activation of hepatic FXR. OCA does not increase biliary cholesterol secretion, but inhibits intestinal cholesterol absorption. OCA markedly inhibits hepatic cholesterol 7α‐hydroxylase (Cyp7a1) and sterol 12α‐hydroxylase (Cyp8b1) partly through inducing small heterodimer partner, leading to reduced bile acid pool size and al