Background: One common undesirable side effect of orthodontic treatment with fixed appliances is the development of incipient caries lesions around brackets, particularly in patients with poor oral hygiene. Different methods have been used to prevent demineralization; the recent effort to improve the resistance against the demineralization is by the application of lasers. Materials and method: Thirty human premolars extracted for orthodontic purposes were used to test the effect of two energy level of ER-YAG laser on enamel resistance to demineralization. The brackets were bonded on the teeth and all the labial surface excluding 2 mm area gingival to the brackets were painted with acid resistance varnish. Three groups were generated. The fi

Dental caries (tooth decay) is one of the most prevalent infectious disease and although of multifactorial origin, Streptococcus mutans is considered the principal pathogen in its development (i.e. bacterial processes damage hard tooth structure (enamel, dentine and cementum), producing dental cavities (holes in the teeth). The bactericidal properties of the Nd:YAG laser has been researched analyzing its use in caries prevention and bacterial reduction. One hundred twenty five samples were collected from carious teeth and isolated bacteria were diagnosed using microscopic examination, culture, biochemical tests, and Api 20 strep system. The results of this study showed that a noticeable decrease in the viability of Streptococcus mutans w

This study illustrates effect of cold plasma CAP on the mineral blood components in vivo. the mineral blood component (Ca, Na, Cl, K and Fe) are used. Floating Electrode-Dielectric Barrier Discharge (FE-DBD) system of probe diameter 4cm is used for this purpose, and variable voltage (0-20) kV and variable frequency (0-30) kHz, the output power was ranged from (10 - 70) W. the effect of cold atmospheric plasma on mineral blood is studied with different exposure durations (30,45,60) sec. As the plasma exposure duration increases, the calcium, potassium and iron components in the blood increased, while The sodium and chlorine elements decreased. These results give an indication of the cold plasma receptor to be used to treat many disea

High intraocular pressure (IOP) is a recognized risk factor for glaucoma and optic nerve injury, and it is one of the primary causes of vision loss globally. Anabasis articulata (AA) is a desert plant found in Iraq. The extract of AA is used to cure diabetes, fever, eczema, and kidney infections. The aim of the study is to evaluate the antioxidant effect of methanol extract of AA on intraocular pressure in the glaucoma rat model. Forty-two rats were allocated into seven groups, each with six animals:: group 1 (normal), group 2 (control), in which animals were induced to have elevated IOP by betamethasone suspension injection, groups 3,4 and 5 for evaluating the effect of 50,100 and 150 mg/kg/day of the tested extract, respective

The role of the green areas lies in being one of the systems that plays the vital role in achieving the environmental dimension besides the socio-cultural body and the economic dimension in the hidden value of ecosystem services. However, many developing countries are characterized by a state of low community environmental awareness, which coincides with the basic need for land for housing and other uses, to take precedence over nature protection strategies. In the absence of clear planning and long-term planning strategies, all this led to abuses and violations of urban land use. In Iraq, the situation became more apparent due to the political, security and social conditions that followed the year 2003. Hence, the resea

The purpose of this study is to examine the moderating role of business environment on the relationship between Entrepreneurial Skills (ES) and business performance of Small Business (SB) in Iraq, Baghdad. This study aims to resolve the inconsistencies found in the contemporary literature regarding the relationship between ES and business performance. Questionnaire using a 5-point Likert scale was adopted from previous work to ascertain the responses of the respondents. Survey research design was adopted, and self-administered questionnaires were used to collect the data from small business owners in 9 districts in Baghdad the capital of Iraq. The analysis was conducted using SPSS version 23.0. The direct relationship and hierarchical regre

Fractal image compression gives some desirable properties like fast decoding image, and very good rate-distortion curves, but suffers from a high encoding time. In fractal image compression a partitioning of the image into ranges is required. In this work, we introduced good partitioning process by means of merge approach, since some ranges are connected to the others. This paper presents a method to reduce the encoding time of this technique by reducing the number of range blocks based on the computing the statistical measures between them . Experimental results on standard images show that the proposed method yields minimize (decrease) the encoding time and remain the quality results passable visually.

   SMNs like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, WhatsApp,..etc. are among the most popular sites on the Internet. These sites can provide a powerful means of sharing, organizing, finding information and knowledge. The popularity of these sites provides an opportunity to measure the use them in knowledge sharing, which needs a special scale, but unfortunately, there is no special scale for that. Thus, this study supposes to use SCT as a scale to measure the use of SMNs in electronic knowledge sharing due to it has been used to measure knowledge sharing with its traditional form. This study can help the decision-makers to use these SMNs to share the academics’ knowledge in educational institutes to the communi

Aeromonas hydrophila have been isolated as a cause of a cute gastroenteritis in 23 (5.6%) of 410 patients. Other bacterial enteropathogens have been isolated from 387 patients with diarrhea, were 19 different strains. A. hydrophila occurred more commonly in children with acute diarrhea, the results showed that 18(78.26%) isolates of A. hydrophila found in children under 10 years old ,distributed to 10(43.47%) in male and 8(34.78%) in female ,and in adults with diarrhea 5 (21.73%). In the other hand, we noticed frequency of isolation was higher in male 14(60.86%) when compared with 9(39.14%) in female. Six strains of A. hydrophila have been observed to have bacteriocin activity against 12 of 23 different A. hydrophila ,as well as Staphy