Background: Oral mucositis is regarded as one of the major complications of radiation therapy especially in patients with head and neck cancer. The aim of this study was to evaluate the efficacy of glutamine in preventing or minimizing the development of mucositis of the oral cavity. Subjects and methods: Forty-six participants were randomly selected amongst those who were planned to receive radiation therapy for head and neck region cancers. They were randomly divided into two groups of 23 subjects, one group received glutamine and the second group received a placebo. Results: Glutamine had a statistically significant effect in reducing the occurrence and/or severity of oral mucositis in the treated patients compared to patients in the con

Introduction: Although it is discouraged, community pharmacy customers can obtain oral corticosteroids (OCSs) without prescriptions from some community pharmacies in Iraq. Medication abuse is defined as the use of medication for non-medical reasons. Objectives: The study aimed to determine demographics, beliefs, and perceptions associated with the abuse of oral corticosteroids for non-illness reasons among community pharmacy customers. Methods: This cross-sectional study was conducted in fall 2018 in four provinces in Iraq. Customers of 19 community pharmacies asking for OCSs for themselves without a prescription were administered a paper survey. This study used the Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA) to measure the relation

In this paper, two new simple, fast and efficient block matching algorithms are introduced, both methods begins blocks matching process from the image center block and moves across the blocks toward image boundaries. With each block, its motion vector is initialized using linear prediction that depending on the motion vectors of its neighbor blocks that are already scanned and their motion vectors are assessed. Also, a hybrid mechanism is introduced, it depends on mixing the proposed two predictive mechanisms with Exhaustive Search (ES) mechanism in order to gain matching accuracy near or similar to ES but with Search Time ST less than 80% of the ES. Also, it offers more control capability to reduce the search errors. The experimental tests

Nowadays, still images are used everywhere in the digital world. The shortages of storage capacity and transmission bandwidth make efficient compression solutions essential. A revolutionary mathematics tool, wavelet transform, has already shown its power in image processing. The major topic of this paper, is improve the compresses of still images by Multiwavelet based on estimation the high Multiwavelet coefficients in high frequencies sub band  by interpolation instead of sending all Multiwavelet coefficients. When comparing the proposed approach with other compression methods Good result obtained

Numeral recognition is considered an essential preliminary step for optical character recognition, document understanding, and others. Although several handwritten numeral recognition algorithms have been proposed so far, achieving adequate recognition accuracy and execution time remain challenging to date. In particular, recognition accuracy depends on the features extraction mechanism. As such, a fast and robust numeral recognition method is essential, which meets the desired accuracy by extracting the features efficiently while maintaining fast implementation time. Furthermore, to date most of the existing studies are focused on evaluating their methods based on clean environments, thus limiting understanding of their potential a

Image quality plays a vital role in improving and assessing image compression performance. Image compression represents big image data to a new image with a smaller size suitable for storage and transmission. This paper aims to evaluate the implementation of the hybrid techniques-based tensor product mixed transform. Compression and quality metrics such as compression-ratio (CR), rate-distortion (RD), peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), and Structural Content (SC) are utilized for evaluating the hybrid techniques. Then, a comparison between techniques is achieved according to these metrics to estimate the best technique. The main contribution is to improve the hybrid techniques. The proposed hybrid techniques are consisting of discrete wavel

In modern era, which requires the use of networks in the transmission of data across distances, the transport or storage of such data is required to be safe. The protection methods are developed to ensure data security. New schemes are proposed that merge crypto graphical principles with other systems to enhance information security. Chaos maps are one of interesting systems which are merged with cryptography for better encryption performance. Biometrics is considered an effective element in many access security systems. In this paper, two systems which are fingerprint biometrics and chaos logistic map are combined in the encryption of a text message to produce strong cipher that can withstand many types of attacks. The histogram analysis o

This research studies the effect of adding micro, nano and hybrid by ratio (1:1) of (Al2O3,TiO2) to epoxy resin on thermal conductivity before and after immersion in HCl acid for (14 day) with normality (0.3 N) at weight fraction (0.02, 0.04, 0.06, 0.08) and thickness (6mm). The results of thermal conductivity reveled that epoxy reinforced by (Al2O3) and mixture (TiO2+Al2O3) increases with increasing the weight fraction, but the thermal conductivity (k) a values for micro and Nano (TiO2) decrease with increasing the weight fraction of reinforced, while the immersion in acidic solution (HCl) that the (k) values after immersion more than the value in before immersion.