Background Osteoarthritis is a chronic degenerative disorder with rising prevalence. Early detection of structural damage is difficult. Consequently, there is a pressing demand for reliable biomarkers that enable an earlier diagnosis of osteoarthritis. The aim is to investigate the level of serum fibulin-3 in patients with primary knee osteoarthritis and its correlation with disease severity. Subjects and methods A case–control study was conducted at the Baqubah Teaching Hospital from November 2023 to January 2024. One hundred twenty persons participated in this study (eighty females with the diagnosis of knee osteoarthritis in its early and late stages, and forty age-matched, apparently healthy control. Serum fibulin-3, ESR, CRP, and cal
... Show MoreThe availability of low- cost adsorbent namely Al-Khriet ( a substance found in the legs of Typha Domingensis) as an agricultural waste material, for the removal of lead and cadmium from aqueous solution was investigated. In the batch tests experimental parameters were studied, including adsorbent dosage between (0.2-1) g, initial metal ions concentration between (50-200) ppm (single and binary) and contact time (1/2-6) h. The removal percentage of each ion onto Al-Khriet reached equilibrium in about 4 hours. The highest adsorption capacity was for lead (96%) while for cadmium it was (90%) with 50 ppm ions concentration, 1 g dosage of adsorbent and pH 5.5. Adsorption capacity in the binary mixture were reduce at about 8% for lead a
... Show MoreAs the demands of sixth-generation (6G) networks escalate towards achieving high speeds and improved energy efficiency, there is an increasing need for intelligent and real-time adaptive solutions within the physical processing layer. This study proposes an innovative engineering framework based on an encapsulated architecture utilising FBGA (micro-distributed spherical array) technology, integrated with an internal artificial intelligence module, to achieve adaptive beamforming with high efficiency in dense wireless environments. The primary objective of this research is to develop an intelligent communication architecture that determines the optimal transmission angles and regulates power consumption in real-time by integrating ar
... Show MoreEGFR-mutant non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) initially responds well to EGFR tyrosine kinase inhibitors (EGFR-TKIs), yet resistance is nearly inevitable and responses to immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs) remain limited. In a retrospective cohort of 57 patients with advanced EGFR-mutant NSCLC treated with nivolumab or pembrolizumab, the objective response rate was 12.3%, although responses were concentrated in a small subgroup with concurrent high PD-L1 expression and dense intratumoral CD8⁺ immune-cell infiltration. Emerging evidence links these outcomes to chemokine-network dysregulation that alters immune trafficking and spatial organization. Oncogenic EGFR signaling shifts chemokine networks away from effector T-cell recruitment
... Show MoreThis work presents a canned-food defect-detection method using the EfficientDet model with four backbones (MobileNet, EfficientNet, Swin-T, and ConvNeXt). The dataset included 8046 images with a resolution of 512 × 512 pixels. The performance criteria in this study accuracy “mAP”, computational cost “FLOPs”, and Frames Per Second “FPS”. The lightweight backbone with EfficientDet achieves a mean Average Precision (mAP) of 90% with MobileNet, while EfficientNet achieves mAP accuracy of 92% and 94%. The heavy backbone for EfficientDet (Swin-T, and ConvNeXt) achieves mAP accuracy of 96% and 98%. The main contribution of this study is to optimize the speed of conveyor belts in industrial production lines to considers the
... Show MoreIn this paper, a new class of non-convex functions called semi strongly (
In the framework of this study, the phenomenon of transfer is probed pragma-linguistically and socio-linguistically concerning marriage situations among Iraqi EFL learners. The study also strives to look at the refusal strategies most commonly employed by Iraqi female English as a foreign Language (EFL) learners compared to their counterparts, American native speakers of English. The study involved 70 female participants who answered a Discourse Completion Task (DCT), which contained ten marriage proposals to be refused. Each situation entailed refusal of a person from a higher, an equal, and lower status. The researchers adapted Beebe, Takahashi, and Uliss Weltz’s (1990) taxonomy of refusal for analyzing the data comprehensively. The
... Show More