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 control group. Gender and age had no effect in the development or severity of oral mucositis in the studied patients. Conclusions: It can be concluded that glutamine can be used effectively to prevent or minimize oral mucositis amongst cancer patients who receive radiation therapy.
Abstract
The aim of this paper is to investigate and discuss the mechanisms of corrosion of epoxy coatings used for potable water tanks. Two distinct types of Jotun epoxy coatings: Tankguard 412 contained polyamine cured epoxy and Penguard HB contained polyamide cured epoxy, were tested and studied using the electrochemical impedance spectroscopic (EIS) method. The porosity of epoxy coatings was determined using EIS method. The obtained results showed that the two epoxy coatings have excellent behavior when applied and tested in potable water of Basrah city. Polyamine is more resistance to water corrosion compared to polyamide curing epoxy and has high impedance values. Microscopic inspection after te
... Show MoreThis paper proposes a novel finite-time generalized proportional integral observer (FTGPIO) based a sliding mode control (SMC) scheme for the tracking control problem of high order uncertain systems subject to fast time-varying disturbances. For this purpose, the construction of the controller consists of two consecutive steps. First, the novel FTGPIO is designed to observe unmeasurable plant dynamics states and disturbance with its higher time derivatives in finite time rather than infinite time as in the standard GPIO. In the FTGPO estimator, the finite time convergence rate of estimations is well achieved, whereas the convergence rate of estimations by classical GPIO is asymptotic and slow. Secondly, on the basis of the finite and fast e
... Show MoreNanofluids, liquid suspensions of nanoparticles (NPs) dispersed in deionized (DI) water, brine, or surfactant micelles, have become a promising solution for many industrial applications including enhanced oil recovery (EOR) and carbon geostorage. At ambient conditions, nanoparticles can effectively alter the wettability of the strongly oil-wet rocks to water-wet. However, the reservoir conditions present the greatest challenge for the success of this application at the field scale. In this work, the performance of anionic surfactant-silica nanoparticle formulation on wettability alteration of oil-wet carbonate surface at reservoir conditions was investigated. A high-pressure temperature vessel was used to apply nano-modification of oil-wet
... Show MoreIn low-latitude areas less than 10° in latitude angle, the solar radiation that goes into the solar still increases as the cover slope approaches the latitude angle. However, the amount of water that is condensed and then falls toward the solar-still basin is also increased in this case. Consequently, the solar yield still is significantly decreased, and the accuracy of the prediction method is affected. This reduction in the yield and the accuracy of the prediction method is inversely proportional to the time in which the condensed water stays on the inner side of the condensing cover without collection because more drops will fall down into the basin of the solar-still. Different numbers of scraper motions per hour (NSM), that is
... Show MoreSoftware Defined Network (SDN) is a new technology that separate the control plane from the data plane. SDN provides a choice in automation and programmability faster than traditional network. It supports the Quality of Service (QoS) for video surveillance application. One of most significant issues in video surveillance is how to find the best path for routing the packets between the source (IP cameras) and destination (monitoring center). The video surveillance system requires fast transmission and reliable delivery and high QoS. To improve the QoS and to achieve the optimal path, the SDN architecture is used in this paper. In addition, different routing algorithms are used with different steps. First, we eva
... Show MoreMetal oxide nanoparticles demonstrate uniqueness in various technical applications due to their suitable physiochemical properties. In particular, yttrium oxide nanoparticle(Y2O3NPs) is familiar for technical applications because of its higher dielectric constant and thermal stability. It is widely used as a host material for a variety of rare-earth dopants, biological imaging, and photodynamic therapies. In this investigation, yttrium oxide nanoparticles (Y2O3NPs) was used as an ecofriendly corrosion inhibitor through the use of scanning electron microscopy (SEM), Fourier transforms infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR), UV-Visible spectroscopy, X-ray diffraction (XRD), and energy dispersive X-ray spe
... Show MoreAs one type of heating furnaces, the electric heating furnace (EHF) typically suffers from time delay, non-linearity, time-varying parameters, system uncertainties, and harsh en-vironment of the furnace, which significantly deteriorate the temperature control process of the EHF system. In order to achieve accurate and robust temperature tracking performance, an integration of robust state feedback control (RSFC) and a novel sliding mode-based disturbance observer (SMDO) is proposed in this paper, where modeling errors and external disturbances are lumped as a lumped disturbance. To describe the characteristics of the EHF, by using convection laws, an integrated dynamic model is established and identified as an uncertain nonlinear second ord
... Show MoreIn general, path-planning problem is one of most important task in the field of robotics. This paper describes the path-planning problem of mobile robot based on various metaheuristic algorithms. The suitable collision free path of a robot must satisfies certain optimization criteria such as feasibility, minimum path length, safety and smoothness and so on. In this research, various three approaches namely, PSO, Firefly and proposed hybrid FFCPSO are applied in static, known environment to solve the global path-planning problem in three cases. The first case used single mobile robot, the second case used three independent mobile robots and the third case applied three follow up mobile robot. Simulation results, whi
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