Background: Although underdeveloped in Iraq, telehealth was one tool used to continue health service provision during the COVID-19 pandemic. Aim: To assess women’s experiences and satisfaction with gynaecological and obstetric telehealth services in Iraq during the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods: Free telehealth services were provided by 4 obstetrician-gynaecologists associated with private clinics in 2020–2021. All patients who accessed the services between June 2020 and February 2021 were invited to complete a postconsultation survey on their experience and satisfaction with services. Results were analysed using descriptive statistics and logistic regression conducted using SPSS version 25. Results: A total of 151 (30.2%) women responded to the survey. Two-thirds (61.6%) of them were between the ages of 19 and 30 years. Some 50.3% learned about telehealth through social media. Gynaecological consultations accounted for 48.3% of all visits, obstetric consultations 42.4% and consultations for both gynaecological and obstetric care 9.3%. Overall, 57.0% of the women were satisfied, 7.9% were dissatisfied and 35.1% neither satisfied nor dissatisfied. Some 82.7 % intended to continue using telehealth after the pandemic. Conclusion: The high-level satisfaction of women with telehealth for gynaecological and obstetric services during the COVID-19 pandemic suggests that telehealth may be a valuable complement to in-person services. Strengthening telehealth systems could be a promising strategy for increasing access to, and efficiency of, select health services beyond the pandemic.
Many international studies indicated that the polymorphisms of some genes disturbed the folate homocysteine (Hcy) metabolism and increased the vulnerability to Down syndrome (DS). We aimed to measure the serum levels of folate and Hcy in DS children and compare the levels with age and sex-matched apparently normal healthy children. We also aimed to study the A80G polymorphism of the gene reduced folate carrier (RFC1) in the DS children as a risk factor. Forty children with DS (24 were boys, and 16 were girls) with the age range between 5-13 years, and 26 normal healthy children (16 boys and ten girls) were included in this study. The results show that the highest genotype in the control group was AG (53.85%) followed by AA and GG (30.
... Show MoreCancer is in general not a result of an abnormality of a single gene but a consequence of changes in many genes, it is therefore of great importance to understand the roles of different oncogenic and tumor suppressor pathways in tumorigenesis. In recent years, there have been many computational models developed to study the genetic alterations of different pathways in the evolutionary process of cancer. However, most of the methods are knowledge-based enrichment analyses and inflexible to analyze user-defined pathways or gene sets. In this paper, we develop a nonparametric and data-driven approach to testing for the dynamic changes of pathways over the cancer progression. Our method is based on an expansion and refinement of the pathway bei
... Show MoreA hand gesture recognition system provides a robust and innovative solution to nonverbal communication through human–computer interaction. Deep learning models have excellent potential for usage in recognition applications. To overcome related issues, most previous studies have proposed new model architectures or have fine-tuned pre-trained models. Furthermore, these studies relied on one standard dataset for both training and testing. Thus, the accuracy of these studies is reasonable. Unlike these works, the current study investigates two deep learning models with intermediate layers to recognize static hand gesture images. Both models were tested on different datasets, adjusted to suit the dataset, and then trained under different m
... Show MoreEvolutionary algorithms (EAs), as global search methods, are proved to be more robust than their counterpart local heuristics for detecting protein complexes in protein-protein interaction (PPI) networks. Typically, the source of robustness of these EAs comes from their components and parameters. These components are solution representation, selection, crossover, and mutation. Unfortunately, almost all EA based complex detection methods suggested in the literature were designed with only canonical or traditional components. Further, topological structure of the protein network is the main information that is used in the design of almost all such components. The main contribution of this paper is to formulate a more robust E
... Show MoreThis paper presents a research for magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) flow of an incompressible generalized Burgers’ fluid including by an accelerating plate and flowing under the action of pressure gradient. Where the no – slip assumption between the wall and the fluid is no longer valid. The fractional calculus approach is introduced to establish the constitutive relationship of the generalized Burgers’ fluid. By using the discrete Laplace transform of the sequential fractional derivatives, a closed form solutions for the velocity and shear stress are obtained in terms of Fox H- function for the following two problems: (i) flow due to a constant pressure gradient, and (ii) flow due to due to a sinusoidal pressure gradient. The solutions for
... Show MoreIn this study, we made a comparison between LASSO & SCAD methods, which are two special methods for dealing with models in partial quantile regression. (Nadaraya & Watson Kernel) was used to estimate the non-parametric part ;in addition, the rule of thumb method was used to estimate the smoothing bandwidth (h). Penalty methods proved to be efficient in estimating the regression coefficients, but the SCAD method according to the mean squared error criterion (MSE) was the best after estimating the missing data using the mean imputation method