Background: Cigarette smoking is an important risk factor that has a clear strong association with the prevalence and severity of chronic periodontitis (CP). Salivary biochemical parameters may be affected by both smoking and CP together. Materials and methods: Eighty systematically healthy male patients were included in this study. They were grouped based on their periodontal and smoking status. Unstimulated whole saliva (UWS) was collected from all subject. Salivary flow rate (FR) was measured during sample collection. Parameters such as salivary pH, total protein (TP), albumin (Alb), total fucose (TF), protein bound fucose (PBF) and C-reactive protein (CRP) were estimated. Results: Salivary flow rate was not altered regarding to smoking

Concrete filled steel tube (CFST) columns are being popular in civil engineering due to their superior structural characteristics. This paper investigates enhancement in axial behavior of CFST columns by adding steel fibers to plain concrete that infill steel tubes. Four specimens were prepared: two square columns (100*100 mm) and two circular columns (100 mm in diameter). All columns were 60 cm in length. Plain concrete mix and concrete reinforced with steel fibers were used to infill steel tube columns. Ultimate axial load capacity, ductility and failure mode are discussed in this study. The results showed that the ultimate axial load capacity of CFST columns reinforced with steel fibers increased by 28% and 20 % for circular and square c

Collagen triple helix repeat containing-1 (CTHRC1) is an essential marker for Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA), but its relationship with pro-inflammatory, anti-inflammatory, and inflammatory markers has been scantily covered in extant literature. To evaluate the level of CTHRC1 protein in the sera of 100 RA patients and 25 control and compare levels of tumour necrosis factor alpha (TNF-α), interleukin 10 (IL-10), RA disease activity (DAS28), and inflammatory factors. Higher significant serum levels of CTHRC1 (29.367 ng/ml), TNF-α (63.488 pg/ml), and IL-10 (67.1 pg/ml) were found in patient sera as compared to that in control sera (CTHRC1 = 15.732 ng/ml, TNF-α = 33.788 pg/ml, and IL-10 = 25.122 pg/ml). There was no significant correlati

Detection of early clinical keratoconus (KCN) is a challenging task, even for expert clinicians. In this study, we propose a deep learning (DL) model to address this challenge. We first used Xception and InceptionResNetV2 DL architectures to extract features from three different corneal maps collected from 1371 eyes examined in an eye clinic in Egypt. We then fused features using Xception and InceptionResNetV2 to detect subclinical forms of KCN more accurately and robustly. We obtained an area under the receiver operating characteristic curves (AUC) of 0.99 and an accuracy range of 97–100% to distinguish normal eyes from eyes with subclinical and established KCN. We further validated the model based on an independent dataset with

Selenium is naturally present in the human body, animals, and plants, and is one of the important elements in their growth and maintenance. Recently, the nanoform of selenium has attracted attention due to its low toxicity and a high degree of adsorption compared to its organic and inorganic forms. The current study aimed to examine the effect of Cress leaves (Lepidium sativum L.) extract in combination with selenium nanoparticles in alleviating polycystic ovary syndrome in letrozole-induced PCOS in adult female rats. Nonthermal or cold plasma was used in the synthesis of selenium nanoparticles. Subsequently, the produced nanoparticles were identified, the 30 rats were divided into 6 equal groups, the first group was healthy (negative contr

This paper proposes a new method to tune a fractional order PID controller. This method utilizes both the analytic and numeric approach to determine the controller parameters. The control design specifications that must be achieved by the control system are gain crossover frequency, phase margin, and peak magnitude at the resonant frequency, where the latter is a new design specification suggested by this paper. These specifications results in three equations in five unknown variables. Assuming that certain relations exist between two variables and discretizing one of them, a performance index can be evaluated and the optimal controller parameters that minimize this performance index are selected. As a case study, a third order linear time

Research summary: The current research aims to identify:

1-Mental wandering among university students 2- Attentioncontrol among universitey students. 3- The relationship between mental wandering and attention control among university students. 4- The difference in the relationship among university students: accoerding to a- the gender variable (males - females) b- according to the specialization variable) Scientific-human), and the results of the current research reached the following: 1- University students have mental wandering associated with the task, and mental wandering that is not related to the task. 2- University students have attentive control 3- There is no relationship between mental wandering associated with task and