Background: 37% phosphoric acid (PA) is the traditional enamel etching technique prior to bracket adhesion, yet it has been implicated in numerous enamel injuries. The purpose of the current study was to create a calcium phosphate (CaP) etching paste in a simplified capsule formula that can underpin clinically adequate bracket bond strength without jeopardizing the integrity of enamel upon the debracketing procedure. Materials and Methods: micro-sized hydroxyapatite (HA) powder was mixed with 40% PA solution to prepare experimental acidic CaP paste. Sixty human premolars were assigned into two groups of 30 each. Enamel conditioning was accomplished using 37% PA-gel for control group and CaP paste for experimental group. Each group was further divided into two subgroups regarding the water storage (WS) period (24 h and 30 days). Shear bond strength (SBS) test conducted with examination of debonded surfaces for adhesive remnants and enamel damage using a digital microscope. Results: CaP paste produced significantly lower SBS values than PA (p < 0.01), yet sufficient for clinical use. PA etching caused often cracked enamel surfaces with excessive retention of adhesive remnants (mainly ARI scores 2 and 3). Contrarily, enamel treated with the experimental CaP paste exhibited smooth, unblemished surfaces mostly clean of adhesives residues (scores 0 and 1). Conclusion: a newly developed CaP paste in a capsule formula fosters clinically adequate bracket adhesion with a sustained bonding performance, allows a harmless bracket removal with minimal or no adhesive residues on debonded surfaces; thus, it can be introduced as a suitable alternative to PA.
Recent years have seen an explosion in graph data from a variety of scientific, social and technological fields. From these fields, emotion recognition is an interesting research area because it finds many applications in real life such as in effective social robotics to increase the interactivity of the robot with human, driver safety during driving, pain monitoring during surgery etc. A novel facial emotion recognition based on graph mining has been proposed in this paper to make a paradigm shift in the way of representing the face region, where the face region is represented as a graph of nodes and edges and the gSpan frequent sub-graphs mining algorithm is used to find the frequent sub-structures in the graph database of each emotion. T
... Show MoreA method has been demonstrated to synthesise effective zeolite membranes from existing crystals without a hydrothermal synthesis step.
An automatic text summarization system mimics how humans summarize by picking the most significant sentences in a source text. However, the complexities of the Arabic language have become challenging to obtain information quickly and effectively. The main disadvantage of the traditional approaches is that they are strictly constrained (especially for the Arabic language) by the accuracy of sentence feature functions, weighting schemes, and similarity calculations. On the other hand, the meta-heuristic search approaches have a feature tha
... Show MoreIn the present work, the thermo-fluid characteristics of a heat exchanger formed of helical coiled tubes immersed in cold water are investigated experimentally. Two types of helical coiled tube are tested, a conventional vertical single helical coiled tube and a new triple vertical helical coiled tube in parallel connection called as meshed coils. The effect of hot water flow rates inside the tubes (ranges from 2.67 to 7.08 l/min), and its inlet temperatures (namely 50, 60, 70 and 80 °C) are investigated. The experimental results show that increasing the flow rate inside the meshed coils leads to decrease the temperature difference between inlet and outlet. An enhancement of heat transfer for meshed coils compared to single coil has been n
... Show MoreBACKGROUND: Idiopathic immune thrombocytopenia purpura is an autoimmune bleeding disorder that accounts for approximately one-third of clinical hemorrhagic diseases. Pathophysiologically, it involves a complicated imbalance in the immune system. OBJECTIVES: This study focuses on evaluating the levels of the immunomodulatory cytokines interleukin (IL)-35, interleukin-10, and transforming growth factor-β (TGF)-β in patients with refractory idiopathic immune thrombocytopenia undergoing treatment with romiplostim. MATERIALS AND METHODS: A cross-sectional study encompassed 78 individuals with idiopathic immune thrombocytopenia and conducted measurements of different immunomodulatory cytokines in response to different responses of idiopath
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