Background Median sternotomy is the gold standard incision for most cardiac operations. However, with the advent of minimal invasive surgery, a new approach emerged in cardiac surgery named mini-sternotomy and has been successfully used to perform a variety of operations.

 The aim of this paper is to present our experience of using mini-sternotomy to harvest the left internal mammary artery (LIMA) for off-pump revascularization of the left anterior descending artery (LAD)

 Methodology Over a 2-year period (October 2012-October 2014), 100 patients underwent coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) via conventional median sternotomy (CMS) (n=80) and mini-sternotomy (MS) (n=20). The

Background: Oral health is a mirror of general health. During pregnancy, oral health is affected by changes in saliva and oral hygiene measures which may lead to more dental caries.

Objective: Assess oral health status in relation to salivary antimicrobial peptides in pregnant women.

Subjects and Method: This cross sectional study was carried out in different primary health care centers in Rusafa sectors/ Baghdad city. The total sample included was 80 women (their  age range from 21-30). The study group consisted of 40 pregnant women: half of them were in the first trimester and  others were in third trimester, while the control group included 40 non-pregnant married fem

The anatomic characteristics of the leaves of 22 taxa of Stachys L. representing seven of the currently recognized sections distributed in northern Iraq, were examined. The study did not found any variations in the characteristics of the stomata system of the leaves.Therewere variations with a good taxonomic value in other anatomic characteristics.Thevariations in characters of the mesophyll tissue in S.kurdica var.brevidens Bom ex Bhattacharjeewas bifacial but in S.kurdica var.kurdica Boiss. & Hohen.was unifacial .The study also found that the taxa S.benthamiana Bioss., S.lanigera (Bornm.) Rech.f. andS.kotscyi Bioss. with 3 vascular bundles in the middle vein while the taxa S.ballotiformis Vatke., S.megalodonta Hausskn. &Bornm.exP.H.Davis

The analysis of the classic principal components are sensitive to the outliers where they are calculated from the characteristic values and characteristic vectors of correlation matrix or variance Non-Robust, which yields an incorrect results in the case of these data contains the outliers values. In order to treat this problem, we resort to use the robust methods where there are many robust methods Will be touched to some of them.

   The robust measurement estimators include the measurement of direct robust estimators for characteristic values by using characteristic vectors without relying on robust estimators for the   variance and covariance matrices. Also the analysis of the princ

Water injection equipments such as pipelines, which are used in the second recovery of oil in the Al-Ahdeb wells, suffer from the corrosion in water during maintaining vacuum deoxygenated tower that used to decrease concentration of the dissolved oxygen gas in the water from 6.2-9.1 ppm to o.5 ppm. This study involved calculation the corrosion rates of the internal surfaces of the
pipelines either during operation of the vacuum unit or when the tower out of operation. Finally, find the solution by one of the following suggestions. In the first suggestion removal of the dissolved O2 from water is achieved by increasing the dosage of the oxygen scavenger (sodium sulphite). The second suggestion involves removing the dissolved O2 from w

The optimum design is characterized by structural concrete components that can sustain loads well beyond the yielding stage. This is often accomplished by a fulfilled ductility index, which is greatly influenced by the arrangement of the shear reinforcement. The current study investigates the impact of the shear reinforcement arrangement on the structural response of the deep beams using a variety of parameters, including the type of shear reinforcement, the number of lacing bars, and the lacing arrangement pattern. It was found that lacing reinforcement, as opposed to vertical stirrups, enhanced the overall structural response of deep beams, as evidenced by test results showing increases in ultimate loads, yielding, and cracking of

The present study has been carried out to estimate heavy metals mobility, bioconcentration and transfer from polluted soil to roots tissues and from roots tissues to aerial parts using bioconcentration factor and translocation factor. Soil samples and the biomass of the eight vegetable species have been collected during summer season, 2019 from four different sites in Wadi Al-Arg, Taif Governorate, KSA. In general, heavy metals content of soil samples in site III and IV have recorded elevated values compared with those of site I and II. The soil from site IV has shown the highest concentration of Mn, Ni, Cr, Pb, Cu, and Cd amounted 31.63, 14.05, 13.56, 22.79, 31.02 and 2.98 mg/kg dry soil respectively, while the soil from site III has sh

An environmentally begnin second derivative spectrometric approach was developed for the estimation of the dissociation constants pKa(s) of metformin, a common anti-diabetic drug.  The ultraviolet spectra of the aqueous solution of metformin were measured at different acidities, then the second derivative of each spectrum was graphed. The overlaid second derivative graphs exhibited two isobestic points at 225.5 nm and 244 nm pointing out to the presence of two dissociation constants for metformin pKa1 and pKa2, respectively. The method was validated by evaluating the reproducibility of the acquired results by comparing the estimated values of the dissociation constants of two different strategies that show excellent matching. As we

Background: The use of electronic apex locators for working length determination eliminates many of the problems associated with the radiographic measurements (interference of anatomical structures, errors in projection such as elongation or shortening, and lack of three-dimensional representation). Its most important advantage over radiography is that it measures the length of the root canal to the apical constriction, not to the radiographic apex. The aim of this study was to assess the accuracy of a new fifth generation apex locator (Joypex 5) in recording the apical constriction and comparing it with a third generation apex locator (Root ZX) in vitro. Materials and method: Twenty four single-rooted sound human premolars, extracted for t