Background: Adjustment of any premature occlusal contact of any zirconia restoration requires its polishing or glazing in order to restore the smoothness of the restoration. The objective of this in vitro study was to evaluate the effects of different polishing systems and glazing on the surface roughness of full-contour zirconia. Material and methods: Forty disks (diameter: 8 mm, thickness: 6.4 mm) were prepared from pre-sintered full-contoured zirconia block; they were colored and sintered in a high-temperature furnace at 1500˚C for 8 hours. The specimens were then leveled and finished using grinding and polishing machine and adjusted using diamond disk. The specimens were then randomly divided into four groups (n=10), group I involves samples that were polished using (karat diamond polishing set, Vita zahnfabrik, Germany), group II involves samples that were polished with (zirconia polishing kit, SMEdent, Shanghai, China), group III involves samples that were polished with (OptraFine® diamond polishing system, Ivoclar Vivadent, Germany), while group IV involves samples that were glazed using glazing medium (VITA Akzent Glaze AKZ 25, Vita zahnfabrik, Germany). Surface roughness values (Ra) (in µm) of all the specimens were recorded at each stage of surface treatment of zirconia disks (leveling and finishing, adjustment of the samples and polishing / glazing) using surface roughness tester. Statistical analysis was carried out using one-way ANOVA and LSD tests. Results: The results showed that the glazing group recorded the lowest surface roughness mean value, followed by (OptraFine® polishing system), then (zirconia polishing kit) and finally (karat polishing set) which showed the highest mean of surface roughness. For all groups, there was a statistically very high significant difference of (Ra) value before and after adjustment of the samples. Moreover, there was a statistically very high significant difference in (Ra) value when comparing the adjusted samples with the polished and glazed ones. Karat polishing set group showed a statistically highly significant difference with zirconia polishing kit group (P<0.01). Both, karat polishing set and zirconia polishing kit groups showed a statistically very highly significant difference (P<0.001) with (OptraFine® polishing system) and glazing groups. On the other hand, no statistically significant difference was found between glazing and (OptraFine® polishing system) groups (P>0.05). Conclusions: Adjusting full-contour zirconia with diamond bur or disk resulted in a significant increase in (Ra) that necessitates its polishing or glazing to restore the surface smoothness. Furthermore, both glazing and OptraFine® polishing system provided the best surface smoothness, so glazing can be substituted with chairside polishing using OptraFine® polishing system.
Background: The beneficial gut bacterium E. coli can cause blood poisoning, diarrhoea, and other gastrointestinal and systemic disorders. Objective: This study amid to examines the antibiofilm activity of Laurus nobilis leaves extract on E. coli isolates and compares pre- and post-treatment gene expression of fimA and papC genes. Subjects and Methods: Ten isolates of E. coli were obtained from the Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology Institute, University of Baghdad, which was previously collected from Baghdad city hospitals and diagnosed by chemical tests, the diagnosis was confirmed using VITEK-2 System. The preparation of the aqueous and methanolic Laurus nobilis leaves extracts was done by using the maceration method and Soxhlet appara
... Show MoreBackground: Bone mineral density has been assessed using Dual-Energy X-Ray Absorptiometry. Bone mineral density is measured according to the results of the Dual-Energy X-Ray Absorptiometry examination of the vertebral column and pelvis. Although diabetes mellitus type II (DM) is known to affect bone mineral density, at the present time this particular relationship is not clear. Objective: The aim of current study was to evaluate the effects of type II diabetes mellitus on bone mineral density of the upper and lower limbs as well as gender differences. Patients and Methods: This study involved 165 patients complaining of bone pain (85 males and 80 females), 85 patients of who suffered from diabetes, involving both genders. In addition,
... Show MoreBackground: The discriminative power of the classical WHO parameters in relation to male fertility is quite low, because they only address few aspects of sperm quality and function. This has led investigators to focus their attention on the male gamete and in particular its genome.Objective: To explore which of the sperm DNA damage parameters measured by comet assay are more reliable, and their relations with the standard semen parameters.Methods: Study was done on 40 infertile men selected from couples attending the Institute of Embryo Reasearch and Infertility Treatment at Al-Kadhimiya City/ Baghdad in the period between February 2009 and May 2009, with a history of infertility of ≥1 years; and 15 healthy volunteers of proven fertili
... Show Morehas experienced a step-change since the inception of ambient mass spectrometry removed the requirement for samples to be investigated under vacuum conditions. Approaches based on surface– plasma interactions are especially promising, including PADI. Whilst the mechanisms involved in generating PADI spectra still need to be unravelled, PADI shows significant promise to become a valuable and versatile tool in the instrumental arsenal available to the surface analyst
Electromyogram (EMG)-based Pattern Recognition (PR) systems for upper-limb prosthesis control provide promising ways to enable an intuitive control of the prostheses with multiple degrees of freedom and fast reaction times. However, the lack of robustness of the PR systems may limit their usability. In this paper, a novel adaptive time windowing framework is proposed to enhance the performance of the PR systems by focusing on their windowing and classification steps. The proposed framework estimates the output probabilities of each class and outputs a movement only if a decision with a probability above a certain threshold is achieved. Otherwise (i.e., all probability values are below the threshold), the window size of the EMG signa
... Show MoreOptical fiber chemical sensor based surface Plasmon resonance for sensing and measuring the refractive index and concentration for Acetic acid is designed and implemented during this work. Optical grade plastic optical fibers with a diameter of 1000μm were used with a diameter core of 980μm and a cladding of 20μm, where the sensor is fabricated by a small part (10mm) of optical fiber in the middle is embedded in a resin block and then the polishing process is done, after that it is deposited with about (40nm) thickness of gold metal and the Acetic acid is placed on the sensing probe.