Background: Neural tube defects (NTDs) are said to be inherited in a multifactorial fashion, i.e. genetic-environmental interaction. Maternal nutritional deficiencies had long been reported to cause NTDs, especially folate deficiency during early pregnancy. More attention had been paid to the exact mechanism by which this deficiency state causes these defects in the developing embryo. The most significant of all researches was that connecting reduced folate and increased homocysteine level in maternal serum on one hand and the risk of developing a NTD baby on the other hand. Objectives : to determine the significance of homocysteine level in Iraqi mothers who gave birth to babies with NTDs as compared to normal controls. Patients, Materials and Methods: Fifty Iraqi women having babies born with NTDS, referred to the genetic clinic in Baghdad Teaching Hospital, were included in this study (the study group) as well as 37 healthy women having normal children (the control group). This study was conducted from November, 2002 till October, 2003. Analysis of total serum homocysteine level for all women was done using a computerized HPLC system. Results : the age of women in both groups was comparable (mean+SD in the study group was 26.2+5.14 years vs. 26.3+4.57 years in the controls). Among the study group, 4 (8%) had normal tHcy level; 44 (88%) had mildly elevated level, and only 2 (4%) had moderately elevated tHcy level, while all (100%) women in the control group had their tHcy level within normal level. This difference was statistically highly significant (p<0.001). Conclusions : Women become at an increased risk of delivering a baby with NTD when having an elevated tHcy level in their sera, and that tHcy level is an important marker in maternal serum that is associated significantly with pregnancy outcome.
When optimizing the performance of neural network-based chatbots, determining the optimizer is one of the most important aspects. Optimizers primarily control the adjustment of model parameters such as weight and bias to minimize a loss function during training. Adaptive optimizers such as ADAM have become a standard choice and are widely used for their invariant parameter updates' magnitudes concerning gradient scale variations, but often pose generalization problems. Alternatively, Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) with Momentum and the extension of ADAM, the ADAMW, offers several advantages. This study aims to compare and examine the effects of these optimizers on the chatbot CST dataset. The effectiveness of each optimizer is evaluat
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Background: Although bleaching is typically considered a safe procedure, various investigations have found minor negative effects and changes in mineral composition. The aim was to Evaluate and compare the efficacy of using Nanohydroxyapatite serum on surface microhardness of enamel surface before and after bleaching with chemically cured Boost bleaching. Material and methods: ten sound human permanent upper and lower premolar teeth were used and their roots were removed 2 mm apically to the cementoenamel junction, the crowns were sectioned mesiodistally into two halves buccal and lingual/palatal, the buccal surface was further subdivided into two halves. The samples were embeded in an acrylic resin, resulting in 30 specimens divide
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Hypertension is a cardiovascular problem with high rates of epidemiology and risks of morbidity and mortality in the global area. Nitric oxide (NO) is one of the reactive oxygen species (ROS) that produced from L-arginine by nitric oxide synthase (NOS) enzyme. NO involves in various vital processes in human health, one of which is the modulation of vasoconstriction and relaxation of the vascular system. We have aimed to investigate the link between NO and NOS with hypertension in women. The relationship between NO and NOS, as well as the usefulness of them as indicators of hypertension risks were subjects of study in this article. The results have revealed that hypertensive women had significant (P<0.05) lower levels of NO (15.07±3.41 IU/m
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Background A prospective clinical study was
performed to compare the efficacy of the use of lowmolecular-
weight heparin group (enoxparin group)
with control group in the prevention of deep-vein
thrombosis after total knee arthroplasty.
Aim of the study: to assess the prevalence of DVT
after total knee arthroplasty and evaluate the
importance of the use of low molecular weight
heparin in the prevention of this DVT.
Methods Thirty-three patients undergoing total
knee arthroplasty were randomly divided into two
groups. One group consisted of 12 patients who
received no prophylaxis with an anticoagulant (the
control group), other group consisted of 21 patients
who received the low-molecular-weight h
Background: A recent discoveries used for reconstruction in maxillofacial surgery is the composite bone graft materials. The availability of collagen I matrix make our choice to use this material in surgery .It is biomaterials that its structure could be modified by simple techniques. Studies to find a new materials use for bone reconstruction is to overcome the disadvantages of autogenous bone and the synthetic resorbable bone substitutes.
Objectives: This study was done to evaluate the effect of biphasic calcium phosphate collagen composite (ccpc) on healing of bone defects after oral surgical procedures.
Type of the study: A cross sectional study.
Method: It involved 60 patients, 35 male and 25 female, age (15-
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In information security, fingerprint verification is one of the most common recent approaches for verifying human identity through a distinctive pattern. The verification process works by comparing a pair of fingerprint templates and identifying the similarity/matching among them. Several research studies have utilized different techniques for the matching process such as fuzzy vault and image filtering approaches. Yet, these approaches are still suffering from the imprecise articulation of the biometrics’ interesting patterns. The emergence of deep learning architectures such as the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) has been extensively used for image processing and object detection tasks and showed an outstanding performance compare
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Objectives: Dickkopf-1 (DKK-1) is WNT/b-catenin pathway antagonist which plays a detrimental role in the development of diabetic retinopathy (DR). This research aimed to assess serum DKK-1 levels in diabetic patients who have and have not developed DR and, compare them with the control subjects finding out whether we can use it as an indicator for DR early diagnosis and to find out which one of the widely used two groups of antidiabetic treatments had the greater effect on this biomarker and hence on the progression of DR. Methods: The study participants were divided into two subgroups: First, 70 patients (36 male, 34 female) with type 2 diabetes mellitus, among them 35 patients diagnosed with DR and 35 with no evidence of DR, and s
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