BACKGROUND: SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) is considered a highly infectious and life threatening disease. OBJECTIVE: The present paper aims to evaluate various aspects of preventive measures and clinical management of the scheduled visits for orthodontic patients to the dental clinics during the outbreak of COVID-19, and to assess how orthodontists dealt with this challenge. METHODS: Orthodontists in private and public clinics were invited to fill a questionnaire that addressed infection control protocols and concerns about clinical management of patients in the clinics during the pandemic. Frequncies and percentages of the responses were obtained and compared using Chi-square tests. RESULTS: About 77% of those working in private clinics, a

Aspect-based sentiment analysis is the most important research topic conducted to extract and categorize aspect-terms from online reviews. Recent efforts have shown that topic modelling is vigorously used for this task. In this paper, we integrated word embedding into collapsed Gibbs sampling in Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). Specifically, the conditional distribution in the topic model is improved using the word embedding model that was trained against (customer review) training dataset. Semantic similarity (cosine measure) was leveraged to distribute the aspect-terms to their related aspect-category cognitively. The experiment was conducted to extract and categorize the aspect terms from SemEval 2014 dataset.

Piled raft is commonly used as foundation for high rise buildings. The design concept of piled raft foundation is to minimize the number of piles, and to utilize the entire bearing capacity. High axial stresses are therefore, concentrated at the region of connection between the piles and raft. Recently, an alternative technique is proposed to disconnect the piles from the raft in a so called unconnected piled raft (UCPR) foundation, in which a compacted soil layer (cushion) beneath the raft, is usually introduced.  The piles of the new system are considered as reinforcement members for the subsoil rather than as structural members. In the current study, the behavior of unconnected piled rafts systems has been studie

A computational investigation has been carried out on the design and properties of the electrostatic mirror. In this research, we suggest a mathematical expression to represent the axial potential of an electrostatic mirror. The electron beam path under zero magnification condition had been investigated as mirror trajectory with the aid of fourth – order – Runge – Kutta method. The spherical and chromatic aberration coefficients of mirror has computed and normalized in terms of the focal length. The choice of the mirror depends on the operational requirements, i.e. each optical element in optical system has suffer from the chromatic aberration, for this case, it is use to operate the mirror in optical system at various values

The theory of probabilistic programming  may be conceived in several different ways. As a method of programming it analyses the implications of probabilistic variations in the parameter space of linear or nonlinear programming model. The generating mechanism of such probabilistic variations in the economic models may be due to incomplete information about changes in demand, pro­duction and technology, specification errors about the econometric relations presumed for different economic agents, uncertainty of various sorts and the consequences of imperfect aggregation or disaggregating of economic variables. In this Research we discuss the probabilistic programming problem when the coefficient b_i is random variable

Fractal image compression depends on representing an image using affine transformations. The main concern for researches in the discipline of fractal image compression (FIC) algorithm is to decrease encoding time needed to compress image data. The basic technique is that each portion of the image is similar to other portions of the same image. In this process, there are many models that were developed. The presence of fractals was initially noticed and handled using Iterated Function System (IFS); that is used for encoding images. In this paper, a review of fractal image compression is discussed with its variants along with other techniques. A summarized review of contributions is achieved to determine the fulfillment of fractal ima

Objective: The study aimed to assess Leucine-rich alpha-2-glycoprotein-1 biomarker serum level in hospitalized COVID-19 patients. Methods: The case control study from multi-centers in Baghdad included 45 adult patients (19 females and 26 males) with COVID-19, diagnosed with a positive real-time reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction and excluded negative RT-PCR for COVID-19 and comorbidity conditions. Second group, was 43 control (20 females and 23 males). Results: This study found a decrease Leucine-rich alpha-2-glycoprotein-1 biomarker serum level in these patients and a significant difference in D. dimer, neutrophil count, lymphocyte count, and the neutrophil-lymphocyte ratio between the patients and controls at a P valu

Susceptibility to the pandemic coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has recently been associated with ABO blood groups in patients of different ethnicities. This study sought to understand the genetic association of this polymorphic system with risk of disease in Iraqi patients. Two outcomes of COVID-19, recovery and death, were also explored. ABO blood groups were determined in 300 hospitalized COVID-19 Iraqi patients (159 under therapy, 104 recovered, and 37 deceased) and 595 healthy blood donors. The detection kit for 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) RNA (PCR-Fluorescence Probing) was used in the diagnosis of disease.