Inflammatory bowel disease includes both Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, is a chronic, progressive relapsing disease of gastrointestinal tract that require long-term treatment or maintenance therapy. Taking patient’s beliefs about the prescribed medication in consideration had been shown to be an important factor that affects compliance of the patient in whom having positive beliefs is a prerequisite for better compliance. The aim of the current study was to investigate and assess beliefs about medicines among a sample of Iraqi patients with inflammatory bowel disease and to determine possible association between these beliefs and some patient-specific factors.

This study is a cross-sectional study carried out o

This paper proposes and tests a computerized approach for constructing a 3D model of blood vessels from angiogram images. The approach is divided into two steps, image features extraction and solid model formation. In the first step, image morphological operations and post-processing techniques are used for extracting geometrical entities from the angiogram image. These entities are the middle curve and outer edges of the blood vessel, which are then passed to a computer-aided graphical system for the second phase of processing. The system has embedded programming capabilities and pre-programmed libraries for automating a sequence of events that are exploited to create a solid model of the blood vessel. The gradient of the middle c

Abstract

       The grey system model GM(1,1) is the model of the prediction of the time series and the basis of the grey theory. This research presents the methods for estimating parameters of the grey model GM(1,1) is the accumulative method (ACC), the exponential method (EXP), modified exponential method (Mod EXP) and the Particle Swarm Optimization method (PSO). These methods were compared based on the Mean square error (MSE) and the Mean Absolute percentage error (MAPE) as a basis comparator and the simulation method was adopted for the best of the four methods, The best method was obtained and then applied to real data. This data represents the consumption rate of two types of oils a he

The levels of circulating angiogenic and anti-angiogenic factors, namely vascular endothelial growth factor–A (VEGF-A) and soluble vascular endothelial growth factor receptor-1 (sVEGFR-1), have been linked to the development of renal dysfunction due to the proliferation of microvasculature within the kidneys of type 2 diabetic (T2DM) patients. The study aims to scrutinize serum levels of VEGF and sVEGFR-1 in a sample of Iraqi diabetic nephropathy patients to support their reliability as markers for the prediction of nephropathy in type 2 diabetes mellitus patients as well as to assess the ACE inhibitor’s effect on the levels of these two markers. Method: The ninety participants of this case-control study were split into three gr

A chemical optical fiber sensor based on surface plasmon resonance (SPR) was developed and implemented using multimode plastic optical fiber. The sensor is used to detect and measure the refractive index and concentration of various chemical materials (Urea, Ammonia, Formaldehyde and Sulfuric acid) as well as to evaluate the performance parameters such as sensitivity, signal to noise ratio, resolution and figure of merit. It  was noticed that the value of the sensitivity of the optical fiber-based SPR sensor, with 60nm and 10 mm long, Aluminum(Al) and Gold (Au) metals film exposed sensing region, was 4.4 μm, while the SNR was 0.20, figure of merit was 20 and resolution 0.00045. In this work a multimode

The present study aims to study the correlation between visfatin levels and metabolic syndrome in Iraqi obese adolescence (with and without metabolic syndrome) and its relation with other studied biochemical parameters. Sixty obese adolescences were depended in this study (with and without metabolic syndrome), compared with (30) non-obese children as control group. This study was done in the period from April 2020 until the end of December 2020, in the National Diabetes Centre/Mustansiriya University, Baghdad/Iraq. There were no significant differences in age, height, waist circumferences (WC), and diastolic blood pressure (DBP) in the patients' groups. In contrast, a significant increase differs (p<0.05) was recorded in the values of

Air-conditioning systems (ACs) are essential in hot and humid climates to ensure acceptable ambient air quality as well as thermal comfort for buildings users. It is essential to improve refrigeration system performance without increasing the effects of global warming potential (GWP) and ozone depletion potential (ODP). The main objective of this study is to evaluate the performance of an air conditioning system that operates with a liquid suction heat exchanger (LSHX) through implementing refrigerants with zero OPD and low GWP (i.e., R134a and R1234yf). Liquid suction heat exchanger (LSHX) was added to an automobile air conditioning system (AACS).When Liquid suction heat exchanger was added to the cycle, primary results indicated t

Most studies on deep beams have been made with reinforced concrete deep beams, only a few studies investigate the response of prestressed deep beams, while, to the best of our knowledge, there is not a study that investigates the response of full scale (T-section) prestressed deep beams with large web openings. An experimental and numerical study was conducted in order to investigate the shear strength of ordinary reinforced and partially prestressed full scale (T-section) deep beams that contain large web openings in order to investigate the prestressing existence effects on the deep beam responses and to better understand the effects of prestressing locations and opening depth to beam depth ratio on the deep beam performance and b