Background:Ankylosing spondylitis (AS) is a progressive, chronic inflammatory illness with an unclear etiology that explicitly targets the vertebral column, peripheral joints, and extraarticular tissues. The purpose of this research was to investigate if the existence of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in the promoter region of the tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-α) gene at positions -1031T/C (rs199964), -857C/T (rs1799724) and -806C/T (rs4248158) in a sample of Iraqi AS patients could influence the patients' outcomes with etanercept.

Methods:Sixty patients with established AS receiving only etanercept were selected to enroll in this study, with a mean age of 40.75±8.6

The aim of this study is to identify the effect of enabling the effectiveness of the work of the audit committees in private commercial banks and to identify the extent of awareness of the importance of empowerment in the work of these committees, especially as it is known that these committees, especially the inspection committees that go to private banks and from various sources including committees of the Central Bank of Iraq Committees of the Securities Commission and finally committees of the external audit offices, through an analysis of the determinants of empowerment in the performance of the most important work of the audit committees, namely: supervising the process of preparing reports, supervising the system of intern

     The searching process using a binary codebook of combined Block Truncation Coding (BTC) method and Vector Quantization (VQ), i.e. a full codebook search for each input image vector to find the best matched code word in the codebook, requires a long time.   Therefore, in this paper, after designing a small binary codebook, we adopted a new method by rotating each binary code word in this codebook into 900 to 2700 step 900 directions. Then, we systematized each code word depending on its angle  to involve four types of binary code books (i.e. Pour when , Flat when  , Vertical when, or Zigzag). The proposed scheme was used for decreasing the time of the coding procedure, with very small distortion per block, by designing s

In the spreading of the Internet, mobile smart devices, and interactive websites such as YouTube, the educational video becomes more widespread and deliberative among users. The reasons for its spread are the prevalence of technologies, cheap cost, and easy to use. However, these products often lack to the distinction in video production. By following videos of an educational channel on YouTube, some comments found to discuss the lack of the content presented to motivate the learners, which lead to reduce the viewers of the videos. Therefore, there is an important decision to find general standards for the design and production of educational videos. A list of standards has been drawn up to help those interested in producing educational

The constructed building in the urban area is subject to wind characteristics due to the influence of surrounding buildings. The residential complexes currently being built in Iraq represent a case study for the subject of this research. Therefore, the objective of this study is to identify the interference effect because of adjacent buildings effects on the mid-rise building. The speed and pressure of the wind have been numerically simulated as well as wind load has been simulated by using a virtual wind tunnel which is available in Autodesk Robot Structural Analysis, RSA, software. Two identical adjacent buildings have been simulated and many coefficients were included in this study such as the spacing, directionality,

optical properties of pure poly(vinyl Alcohol) films and poly(vinyl Alcohol) doped with methyl red were study, different percentage prepared with constant thickness using casting technique. Absorption, Transmission spectra have been recorded in order to study the optical parameters such as absorption coefficient, energy gap, refractive index, Extinction coefficient and dispersion parameters were measured in the wavelength range (200-800)nm. This study reveals that the optical properties of PVA affect by increasing the impurity concentration.

An aircraft's landing stage involves inherent hazards and problems associated with many factors, such as weather, runway conditions, pilot experiences, etc. The pilot is responsible for selecting the proper landing procedure based on information provided by the landing console operator (LCO). Given the likelihood of human decisions due to errors and biases, creating an intelligent system becomes important to predict accurate decisions. This paper proposes the fuzzy logic method, which intends to handle the uncertainty and ambiguity inherent in the landing phase, providing intelligent decision support to the pilot while reducing the workload of the LCO. The fuzzy system, built using the Mamdani approach in MATLAB software, considers critical

The aim of this paper is to approximate multidimensional functions f∈C(R^s) by developing a new type of Feedforward neural networks (FFNS) which we called it Greedy ridge function neural networks (GRGFNNS). Also, we introduce a modification to the greedy algorithm which is used to train the greedy ridge function neural networks. An error bound are introduced in Sobolov space. Finally, a comparison was made between the three algorithms (modified greedy algorithm, Backpropagation algorithm and the result in [1]).