Background: Background : Patients with non-rheumatic atrial fibrillation have high risk of thromboembolism especially ischemic stroke usually arising from left atrial appendage .Transoesophageal echocardiography provides useful information for risk stratification in these patients as it detects thrombus in the left atrial or left atrial appendage. Objective : This study was conducted at Al-Kadhimiya Teaching Hospital to assess the prevalence of left atrial chamber thrombi in patients with chronic non-rheumatic atrial fibrillation using transoesophageal echocardiography and its clinical significance as well as to verify the superiority of transoesophageal over transthoracic echocardiography in the detection of these abnormalities. Type of the study: Cross sectional study.Patients and Methods : Forty (40) consecutive patients (11 female and 29 male), at a mean age of 46 ± 9 years (range 28–60) with chronic non-rheumatic Atrial fibrillation were enrolled to this prospective study between March 2006 and December 2006. Tansthoracic and transesophageal two dimensional , M- mode , Doppler, and color- flow echocardiography were obtained with a kretz diagnostic ultrasound system. Results : The prevalence of Left atrium thrombus was 12.5%, 5 patients from the total number which was 40 patients. All of them seen bytransoesophagealechocardiography and non are detected byTansthoracic echocardiography . All the left atrial thrombi were confined to the left atrial appendage (100%). Left atrial spontaneous echo contrast was detected in 10 patients 25% by transoesophageal echocardiography, but was not observed in patient bytransthoracic echocardiography. All the 5 thrombi were found in left atria were significantly associated with spontaneous echo contrast 100% (P-value <0.001), reduced left ventricle ejection fraction (p-value <0.05) , large left atrium diameter ( p-value <0.05) and low LAAV <20 cm/s (p-value <0.001) compared to those without thrombus . Conclusions : The study showed that the prevalence of left atrial thrombus and appendage is not uncommon in patients with non-rheumatic atrial fibrillation and is exclusively seen in patients with left atrial SEC. Low Left ventricle ejection fraction , large Left atrium diameter , and low Left atrial appendages velocity are significantly associated with subsequent thrombus formation , and is more sensitive in the detection of these abnormalities compared with transthoracic echocardiography
In this work, the photocatalytic degradation of indigo carmine (IC) using zinc oxide suspension was studied. The effect of influential parameters such as initial indigo carmine concentration and catalyst loading were studied with the effect of Vis irradiation in the presence of reused ZnO was also investigated. The increased in initial dye concentration decreased the photodegradation and the increased catalyst loading increased the degradation percentage and the reused-ZnO exhibits lower photocatalytic activity than the ZnO catalyst. It has been found that the photocatalytic degradation of indigo carmine obeyed the pseudo-first-order kinetic reaction in presence of zinc oxide. This was found from plotting the relationship between ln
... Show MoreThis work aims to investigate the inhibition of vitality of Streptococcus mutans, which is the causative agent of caries. A 632.8 nm He-Ne laser with the output power of 4.5mW was used in combination with toluidine blue O (TBO) at the concentration of 50μg/ml as a photosensitizer. Streptococcus mutans was isolated from 35 patients if carious teeth. Three isolates were chosen and exposed to different energy densities of He – Ne laser light 3.8, 11.7, 34.5 and 104.1 J/cm². After irradiation, substantial reduction was observed in the number of colony forming units (CFU)/ ml. The reduction in the number of CFU was increasing as the dose increased.
Ultrasound has been used as a diagnostic modality for many intraocular diseases, due its safety, low cost, real time and wide availability. Unfortunately, ultrasound images suffer from speckle artifact that are tissue dependent. In this work, we will offer a method to reduce speckle noise and improve ultrasound image to raise the human diagnostic performance. This method combined undecimated wavelet transform with a wavelet coefficient mapping function: where UDWT used to eliminate the noise and a wavelet coefficient mapping function used to enhance the contrast of denoised images obtained from the first component. This methods can be used not only as a means for improving visual quality of medical images but also as a preprocessing
... Show MorePolyaniline (PANI) and Ag/PANI nanocomposite thin films have prepared by microwave induced plasma. The Ag powder of average particle size of 50 nm, were used to prepare Ag/PANI nanocomposite thin films. The Ag/PANI nanocomposite thin films prepared by polymerization in plasma and characterized by UV-VIS, FTIR, AFM and SEM to study the effect of silver nanoparticles on the optical properties, morphology and structure of the thin films. The optical properties studies showed that the energy band gap of the Ag/PANI (5%wt silver) decreased from 3.6 to 3.2 eV, where the substrate location varied from 4.4 to 3.4 cm from the axis of the cylindrical plasma chamber. Also the optical energy gap decreased systematically from 3.3 to 3 eV with increas
... Show MoreIn this study, aluminum nanoparticles (Al NPs) were prepared using explosive strips method in double-distilled deionized water (DDDW), where the effect of five different currents (25, 50, 75, 100 and 125 A) on particle size and distribution was studied. Also, the explosive strips method was used to decorate zinc oxide particles with Al particles, where Al particles were prepared in suspended from zinc oxide with DDDW. Transmission electron microscopy (TEM), UV-visible absorption spectroscopy, and x-ray diffraction are used to characterize the nanoparticles. XRD pattern were examined for three samples of aluminum particles and DDDW prepared with three current values (25, 75 and 125 A) and three samples prepared with the same currents for zin
... Show MoreAlpha-tocopherol acetate is one of the most important vitamin E derivatives,that were used as antioxidants. Adsorbents like kaolin, magnesium carbonate, and microcrystalline cellulose were used successfully to incorporate oily alpha-tocopherol acetate into an acceptable powder dosage form. The results revealed that microcrystalline cellulose as an adsorbents gave the best results with 50% loading capacity at time, 8 minutes before and after incubation period (3 months at 30C°), while kaolin and magnesium carbonate have been shown a significant difference before and after incubation. Addition of 1% w/w magnesium carbonate to the kaolin enhanced the loading capacity by decreasing the time of adsorption from 20 to 6 minutes and 47
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