Background:. Children with spina bifida occulta require early surgery to prevent neurological deficits. The treatment of patients with a congenitally tethered cord who present in adulthood remains controversial.

Objective: The aim of this study is to describe the outcome obtained in 61 adult patients with congenital TCS and no prior surgical treatment who underwent surgical untethering.

Methods: This prospective study was conducted on 61 adult patients who underwent surgical untethering for spina bifida occulta at four neurosurgical centers in Baghdad / Iraq  between March 2000 and January 2018. Patients who had undergone prior myelomeningocele repair or tet

Unlike fault diagnosis approaches based on the direct analysis of current and voltage signals, this paper proposes a diagnosis of induction motor faults through monitoring the variations in motor's parameters when it is subjected to an open circuit or short circuit faults. These parameters include stator and rotor resistances, self-inductances, and mutual inductance. The genetic algorithm and the trust-region method are used for the estimation process. Simulation results confirm the efficiency of both the genetic algorithm and the trust-region method in estimating the motor parameters; however, better performance in terms of estimation time is obtained when the trust-region method is adopted. The results also show the po

Pavement crack and pothole identification are important tasks in transportation maintenance and road safety. This study offers a novel technique for automatic asphalt pavement crack and pothole detection which is based on image processing. Different types of cracks (transverse, longitudinal, alligator-type, and potholes) can be identified with such techniques. The goal of this research is to evaluate road surface damage by extracting cracks and potholes, categorizing them from images and videos, and comparing the manual and the automated methods. The proposed method was tested on 50 images. The results obtained from image processing showed that the proposed method can detect cracks and potholes and identify their severity levels wit

Zerumbone (ZER), a natural compound has been extracted from Zingiber zerumbet with known pharmacological activities. The aim was to determine the anti-human Burkitt’s lymphoma (Raji) cell effect of ZER. The 3-(4,5-dimethylthiazol-2-yl)-2,5,-diphenyltetrazolium bromide (MTT) assay was used to determine cytotoxic effect while the Annexin-V-fluorescein isothiocyanate/propidium iodide-PI flow cytometric assays was used to determine apoptotic effect of ZER on the human Burkitt’s lymphoma (Raji) cell (ATCC CCL-86) cell line. The expressions of Bax, Bcl-2, and c-Myc genes were determined via real-time PCR. ZER suppressed the proliferation of Raji cells with a 48 h IC50 value of 5.1 μg/mL. Treated Raji cells also underwen

Background: Very low birth weight (VLBW) neonates constitute approximately 4–7 percent of all live births and their mortality is very high.
Objective: to find out if there is a relationship between Very Low Birth Weight Neonates and increased neonatal mortality for age 0 to 7 days.
Methods: A retrospective study of VLBW neonates admitted to NICU at Ibn Al- Baladi Pediatrics and Maternity hospital over one year (2012)were studied, The study period was from April till August 2013. Exclusion criteria were: (1) neonates weighing less than 700 g and with gestational age less than 24 weeks (abortion) (2) death in the delivery room (3) neonates weighing more than 1500 g. (4) Postnatal age more than 7 days. The outcome measure was in-hos

B aa cc kk gg r oo uu nn dd : Very low birth weight (VLBW) neonates constitute approximately 4–7 percent of all live births and their mortality is very high. O bb j ee cc t i vv ee: to find out if there is a relationship between Very Low Birth Weight Neonates and increased neonatal mortality for age 0 to 7 days. M ee t hh oo dd ss A retrospective study of VLBW neonates admitted to NICU at Ibn Al- Baladi Pediatrics and Maternity hospital over one year (2012)were studied, study period was from April till August 2013. Exclusion criteria were: (1) neonates weighing less than 700 g and with gestational age less than 24 weeks (abortion) (2) death in the delivery room (3) neonates weighing more than 1500 g. (4) Postnatal age more than 7 days.

Active vibration control is the main problem in different structure. Smart material like piezoelectric make a structure smart, adaptive and self-controlling so, they are effective in active vibration control. In this paper piezoelectric elements are used as sensors and actuators in flexible structures for sensing and actuating purposes, and to control the vibration of a cantilever beam by using sliding mode control. The sliding mode controller (SMC) is designed to attenuate the vibration induced by initial tip displacement which is equal to 15 mm.  It is designed based on the balance realization reduction method where three states are selected for the reduced model from the 24^th states that describe the c

The rate of gas induction was measured in gas-inducing type mechanically agitated contactors provided with two impellers. A reactor of 0.5 m i.d. was used with a working capacity of 60 liters of liquid. Tap water was used as the liquid phase, and air was used as the gas phase. The bioreactor mixing system consists of two equal diameter stirrers; the top impeller is shrouded-disk/curved-blade turbine with six evacuated bending blades, while the bottom impeller was disk turbine. The impeller speed was varied in the range of 50 to 800 rpm. The ratio of impeller diameter to tank diameter (D/T) and the submergence (S) of upper impeller from the top were varied. The effects of clearance of lower impeller from the tank bottom (C₂) an