Objective: The approximate life span of a silicone maxillofacial prosthesis is as short as1.5–2 years of clinical service, then a new prosthesis should be fabricated. The most common reasonfor re-making the prosthesis is silicone mechanical properties degradation. The aim of this studywas to assess some mechanical properties of VST-30 silicone for maxillofacial prostheses after addi-tion of intrinsic pigments.Methods: Two types of intrinsic pigments (rayon flocking and burnt sienna); each of them wasincorporated into silicone. One hundred and twenty samples were prepared and split into 4 groupsaccording to the conducted tests (tear strength, hardness, surface roughness, and tensile strengthand elongation percentage) with 30 samples for ea

Community detection is useful for better understanding the structure of complex networks. It aids in the extraction of the required information from such networks and has a vital role in different fields that range from healthcare to regional geography, economics, human interactions, and mobility. The method for detecting the structure of communities involves the partitioning of complex networks into groups of nodes, with extensive connections within community and sparse connections with other communities. In the literature, two main measures, namely the Modularity (Q) and Normalized Mutual Information (NMI) have been used for evaluating the validation and quality of the detected community structures. Although many optimization algo

A three-stage learning algorithm for deep multilayer perceptron (DMLP) with effective weight initialisation based on sparse auto-encoder is proposed in this paper, which aims to overcome difficulties in training deep neural networks with limited training data in high-dimensional feature space. At the first stage, unsupervised learning is adopted using sparse auto-encoder to obtain the initial weights of the feature extraction layers of the DMLP. At the second stage, error back-propagation is used to train the DMLP by fixing the weights obtained at the first stage for its feature extraction layers. At the third stage, all the weights of the DMLP obtained at the second stage are refined by error back-propagation. Network structures an

The technology of subsurface soil water retention (SWRT) uses a polyethylene ‎trough that is fixed under the root zone of the plant. It is a modern technology to increase the values of water ‎use efficiency, plant productivity and saving irrigation water by applying as little irrigation water ‎as possible. This study work aims at improving the crop yield and water use efficiency of a cucumber plant with less applied irrigation water by installing membrane trough below the soil surface. The field experiment was conducted in the Hawr Rajab District of ‎Baghdad Governorate in Winter 2018 for testing various trickle irrigation ‎systems. Two agricultural ‎treatment plots were utilized in a greenhouse for the compa

This research is devoted to investigating the thermal buckling analysis behaviour of laminated composite plates subjected to uniform and non-uniform temperature fields by applying an analytical model based on a refined plate theory (RPT) with five unknown independent variables. The theory accounts for the parabolic distribution of the transverse shear strains through the plate thickness and satisfies the zero-traction boundary condition on the surface without using shear correction factors; hence a shear correction factor is not required. The governing differential equations and associated boundary conditions are derived by using the virtual work principle and solved via Navier-type analytical procedure to obtain critica

Background: The COVID-19 virus outbreak had a massive effect on many parts of people's lives, as they were advised to quarantine and lockdown to prevent the virus from spreading, which had a big impact on people's mental health, anxiety, and stress. Many internal and external factors lead to stress. This negatively influences the body's homeostasis. As a result, stress may affect the body's capacity to use energy to defend against pathogens. Many recent investigations have found substantial links between human mental stress and the production of hormones, prohormones, and/or immunological chemicals. some of these researches have verified the link between stress and salivary cortisol levels. The aim of this study is to measure salivary corti