Background: Osteoporosis is an extra-articular complication of rheumatoid arthritis that results in increased risk of fractures and associated morbidity, mortality, and healthcare costs. Objective: To evaluate changes in bone mineral density in a sample of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) patients on biological (anti tumor necrosis factor (TNF) alpha) and non-biological agent disease modifying antirheumatic drugs (DMARDs). Patients and Methods: A cross sectional study enrolled 60 RA patients diagnosed by rheumatologist according to the 2010 American College of Rheumatology/European League Against Rheumatism (2010 ACR/EULAR) classification criteria for RA. Thirty patient on biological agent (anti TNF alpha) and 30 patient on non-biological agent (D

This paper considers and proposes new estimators that depend on the sample and on prior information in the case that they either are equally or are not equally important in the model. The prior information is described as linear stochastic restrictions. We study the properties and the performances of these estimators compared to other common estimators using the mean squared error as a criterion for the goodness of fit. A numerical example and a simulation study are proposed to explain the performance of the estimators.

The spread of novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has resulted in chaos around the globe. The infected cases are still increasing, with many countries still showing a trend of growing daily cases. To forecast the trend of active cases, a mathematical model, namely the SIR model was used, to visualize the spread of COVID-19. For this article, the forecast of the spread of the virus in Malaysia has been made, assuming that all Malaysian will eventually be susceptible. With no vaccine and antiviral drug currently developed, the visualization of how the peak of infection (namely flattening the curve) can be reduced to minimize the effect of COVID-19 disease. For Malaysians, let’s ensure to follow the rules and obey the SOP to lower the

Almost all thermal systems utilize some type of heat exchanger. In a lot of cases, evaporators are important for systems like organic Rankine cycle systems. Evaporators give a share in a large portion of the capital cost, and their cost is significantly attached to their size or transfer area. Open-cell metal foams with high porosity are taken into consideration to enhance thermal performance without increase the size of heat exchangers. Numerous researchers have tried to find a representation of the temperature distribution closer to reality due to the different properties between the liquid and solid phases. Evaporation heat transfer in an annular pipe of double pipe heat exchanger (DPHEX) filled with cooper foam is investigated numerical

The fingerprints are the more utilized biometric feature for person identification and verification. The fingerprint is easy to understand compare to another existing biometric type such as voice, face. It is capable to create a very high recognition rate for human recognition. In this paper the geometric rotation transform is applied on fingerprint image to obtain a new level of features to represent the finger characteristics and to use for personal identification; the local features are used for their ability to reflect the statistical behavior of fingerprint variation at fingerprint image. The proposed fingerprint system contains three main stages, they are: (i) preprocessing, (ii) feature extraction, and (iii) matching. The preprocessi