Background: Laparoscopic cholecystectomy is the standard treatment for symptomatic gallbladder disease. Preoperative prediction of a difficult laparoscopic cholecystectomy can help the surgeon to prepare better for intraoperative risk and the risk of conversion to open cholecystectomy.
Objectives: Evaluation of the influence of gallbladder wall thickness, assessed by sonography preoperatively, on the outcome of laparoscopic cholecystectomy and to evaluate any intra- or postoperative complications in relation to them.
Patients and Methods: This prospective clinical trial conducted in Department of Surgery, Al-yarmouk Teaching Hospital, between October 2010 and October 2012.Abdominal sonography performed in 122 consecutive patients b

The majority of systems dealing with natural language processing (NLP) and artificial intelligence (AI) can assist in making automated and automatically-supported decisions. However, these systems may face challenges and difficulties or find it confusing to identify the required information (characterization) for eliciting a decision by extracting or summarizing relevant information from large text documents or colossal content.   When obtaining these documents online, for instance from social networking or social media, these sites undergo a remarkable increase in the textual content. The main objective of the present study is to conduct a survey and show the latest developments about the implementation of text-mining techniqu

Silver nanoparticles (AgNPs) were biosynthesized using the cell free supernatant of putative probiotic Lactobacillus paracasei A26. Several biological activities of biogenic AgNPs were investigated in respect to in vitro anti-oxidant and anti-tumor potentials.  Anti-oxidant potentials were screened in terms of free radical scavenging activity against two free radicals, 2, 2-Diphenyl-1-picrylhydrazyl (DPPH) and resazurin dye. AgNPs exhibited a potent scavenging activity against resazurin dye (91±0.046%) with an EC₅₀ concentration of 146.823 µg/ml, while scavenging of DPPH was significantly (P≤0.05) reduced to 72.330±0.114% using a higher EC₅₀ concentration of 176.12 µg/ml. The

Software Defined Networking (SDN) with centralized control provides a global view and achieves efficient network resources management. However, using centralized controllers has several limitations related to scalability and performance, especially with the exponential growth of 5G communication. This paper proposes a novel traffic scheduling algorithm to avoid congestion in the control plane. The Packet-In messages received from different 5G devices are classified into two classes: critical and non-critical 5G communication by adopting Dual-Spike Neural Networks (DSNN) classifier and implementing it on a Virtualized Network Function (VNF). Dual spikes identify each class to increase the reliability of the classification

Disturbances of lipid metabolism is a predisposing factor of cardiovascular diseases, which are accompanied by high mortality rates of the population - ischemic heart disease and ischemic stroke. Plant polysaccharides can be promising remedies for correction of lipid imbalance.

In this regard, the aim of the study was to assess the hypolipidemic activity of polysaccharides isolated from the leaves of mistletoe.

The test-object was the leaves of the white mistletoe (Viscum album L.) growing on the apple (Malus domestica Borkh.), and the pear (Pyrus communis L.). Polysaccharides (water-soluble polysaccharides and pectin substances) were quantitatively determined by the gravimetric method followed

A three species food web model involving a stage structure and cannibalism in the top predator species is proposed and studied. It is assumed that the prey species growth logistically in the absence of predator and the predation process occurred according to theLotka-Volterra functional response. The existence, uniqueness and bounded-ness of the solution of the model are investigated. The local and global stability conditions of all possible equilibrium points are established.The persistence conditions of the model are also determined. The local bifurcation near each of the equilibrium points is analyzed. The global dynamics of the model is investigated numerically and compared with the obtained analytical results. It is observed that the p

The paper investigates the impact of role-playing as a classroom technique on Iraqi EFL students’ speaking skill on Iraqi EFL students at the college level. The students are 40 college language students in University of Baghdad, College of Education Ibn-Rushd randomly chosen. Then, they were divided into two groups, experimental and control groups. Thirty questions were applied to both groups as a pre-test of speaking and the students asked to answer them orally. The experimental group was taught speaking skill of the targeted role-play technique while the control group was taught in traditional method. After 20 lessons of the teaching, the post-test of speaking was conducted in which the students in both groups were asked to answ

A total of 157 clinical samples were collected from different clinical specimens (urine, sputum, blood, swabs, and cannula) from several hospitals in Iraq. Among the samples, 51 isolates (32.48%) of Klebsiella pneumoniae were identified according to morphologicaland cultural characteristics as well as the Enterosystem 18R test. Higher numbers of K. pneumoniae isolates were observed in urine samples (26, 52%) than the other samples, and in females (70.6%) than males (29.4%) (female: male ratio of about 2.4:1). Antibiotic susceptibility of K. pneumoniae against 12 commonly used antibiotics was determined through the disc-diffusion method. The results revealed a higher resistance rate in 51 isolates (100%) against Cephalexin, followed by Ce

The impacts of the inflammatory process on neoplasia development were observed in many cancer, it has a great role in the etiology, development and progression of invasive colorectal tumors. This study was designed to investigate the BRAF mutation and assist the clinicopathological parameter in some Iraqi bowel inflammation and colorectal cancer patients. Thirty patients were enrolled in this study (15 suffering bowel inflammation and 15 having colorectal cancer). BRAF gene was screened for the presence of mutations using PCR technique and direct  sequencing. .The results revealed no BRAF mutation in position 1799 for exon fifteen in both samples of bowel inflammation and colorectal cancer. These results were confirmed previous arti

Background: Oral Lichen planus (OLP) is a T-cell mediated chronic inflammatory oral mucosal disease of unknown etiology. Recent studies have reported an increased oxidative stress and lipid peroxidation in such patients. This suggests that reactive oxygen species may have a role in the pathogenesis of lichen planus. Oxidative stress in OLP release molecules consisting of granzymes resulting in local tissue damage in the effectors. Antioxidants that can defend against oxidative stress in the body cells include enzymes, as well as non- enzymatic antioxidants, such as melatonin, uric acid, vitamin A and E. Purpose: To study the level of salivary vitamin E and uric acid as antioxidant agents in patients with OLP and compared with healthy con