Congenital Fusion of Maxilla and Mandible: A Case Report

Objective: Congenital fusion of jaws is a rare disorder which is observed in infants and cab ne syndromic and non-syndromic. Limited mouth opening in patients can affect the child growth and cause difficulties in feeding, swallowing and breathing.Case: A In this study, a female infant from Afghanistan, settled in Qom referred to  AlZahra maternity with upper and lower fusion jaws is reported. According to clinical and laboratory examinations, infant had no other disorders except the above said disease, and her jaw fusion was non-syndromic.Conclusion: Treatment of this disease in early stages not only is easier, but also can be effective in terms of child’s growth and feeding; because in most cases TMJ ankylosis occurs due to the lack of mobility and loss of function which leads to difficulties in oral operations

Association between Global Monkeypox Cases and Meteorological Factors

The emergence of an outbreak of Monkeypox disease (MPXD) is caused by a contagious zoonotic Monkeypox virus (MPXV) that has spread globally. Yet, there is no study investigating the effect of climatic changes on MPXV transmission. Thus, studies on the changing epidemiology, evolving nature of the virus, and ecological niche are highly paramount. Determination of the role of potential meteorological drivers including temperature, precipitation, relative humidity, dew point, wind speed, and surface pressure is beneficial to understand the MPXD outbreak. This study examines the changes in MPXV cases over time while assessing the meteorological characteristics that could impact these disparities from the onset of the global outbreak. To conduct this data-based research, several well-accepted statistical techniques including Simple Exponential Smoothing (SES), Auto-Regressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA), Automatic forecasting time-series model (Prophet), and Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average with Explanatory Variables (ARIMAX) were applied to delineate the correlation of the meteorological factors on global daily Monkeypox cases. Data on MPXV cases including affected countries spanning from 6 May 2022, to 9 November 2022, from global databases and meteorological data were used to evaluate the developed models. According to the ARIMAX model, the results showed that temperature, relative humidity, and surface pressure have a positive impact [(51.56, 95% confidence interval (CI): -274.55 to 377.68), (17.32, 95% CI: -83.71 to 118.35) and (23.42, 95% CI: -9.90 to 56.75), respectively] on MPXV cases. In addition, dew/frost point, precipitation, and wind speed show a significant negative impact on MPXD cases. The Prophet model showed a significant correlation with rising MPXD cases, although the trend predicts peak values while the overall trend increases. This underscores the importance of immediate and appropriate preventive measures (timely preparedness and proactive control strategies) with utmost priority against MPXD including awareness-raising programs, the discovery, and formulation of effective vaccine candidate(s), prophylaxis and therapeutic regimes, and management strategies.Peer reviewe

On strategic choices faced by large pharmaceutical laboratories and their effect on innovation risk under fuzzy conditions

ObjectivesWe develop a fuzzy evaluation model that provides managers at different responsibility levels in pharmaceutical laboratories with a rich picture of their innovation risk as well as that of competitors. This would help them take better strategic decisions around the management of their present and future portfolio of clinical trials in an uncertain environment. Through three structured fuzzy inference systems (FISs), the model evaluates the overall innovation risk of the laboratories by capturing the financial and pipeline sides of the risk.Methods and materialsThree FISs, based on the Mamdani model, determine the level of innovation risk of large pharmaceutical laboratories according to their strategic choices. Two subsystems measure different aspects of innovation risk while the third one builds on the results of the previous two. In all of them, both the partitions of the variables and the rules of the knowledge base are agreed through an innovative 2-tuple-based method. With the aid of experts, we have embedded knowledge into the FIS and later validated the model.ResultsIn an empirical application of the proposed methodology, we evaluate a sample of 31 large pharmaceutical laboratories in the period 2008–2013. Depending on the relative weight of the two subsystems in the first layer (capturing the financial and the pipeline sides of innovation risk), we estimate the overall risk. Comparisons across laboratories are made and graphical surfaces are analyzed in order to interpret our results. We have also run regressions to better understand the implications of our results.ConclusionsThe main contribution of this work is the development of an innovative fuzzy evaluation model that is useful for analyzing the innovation risk characteristics of large pharmaceutical laboratories given their strategic choices. The methodology is valid for carrying out a systematic analysis of the potential for developing new drugs over time and in a stable manner while managing the risks involved. We provide all the necessary tools and datasets to facilitate the replication of our system, which also may be easily applied to other settings

Frequency of intra and extra oral manifestations of pregnant women in Rasht (2013)

Background: Pregnancy is a specific condition that may affected the oral mucosa. The knowledge from intra & extra oral manifestation is necessary for medical doctor and dentists for diagnosis and treatment. Objective: The aim of this study was determination of intra & extra oral manifestations frequency of pregnant women in Rasht city. Methods: This descriptive-cross sectional study was conducted on 300 pregnant women referring to Alzahra and Tamin Ejtemaei Hospital in Rasht city in 2013. A questionnaire was designed that included biographical characteristics, month of pregnancy, oral hygiene, frequency of dental visits, systemic diseases, nausea and vomiting and entered the data in questionnaire after patients’ examination. The data was analyzed by student's t-test, and chi-square test. Findings: The average of age of studied women was 26.6±4.5 year (16-43 years old) and the frequency of intra and extra oral manifestation was 80.3% and 7.3% respectively. Pregnancy gingivitis (59%), and halitosis (37.7%) were the most intra oral manifestation, and choloasma (6.7%) was the most extra oral manifestations. The most oral manifestations were seen in third trimester (8th and 9th month of pregnancy). The frequency of pregnancy tumor was 1%. Fifty-nine percent of women had gingival bleeding during tooth brushing. The correlation between nausea, vomiting and sialorhea was significant. Conclusion: As the relative high frequency of intra oral manifestations in pregnant women, it is necessary to alert the physicians to refer these people to dentists, and training pregnant women for oral hygiene, and preventing incidence of oral and dental diseases and pregnancy gingivitis. Keywords: Pregnancy, Mouth Disease, Tooth Disease, Oral Manifestation

A comparative study of artificial intelligence models for predicting monthly river suspended sediment load

When high precision modelling is required, for example, with the estimation of suspended sediment load (SSL), data-driven models are preferred over physically-based numerical models for their real-time, short-horizon prediction ability. The investigation of SSL, as an important index in engineering practices assessment, like design and operation of the hydraulic structures not only shows the hydrological behaviour of the river, but also illustrates the valuable information about the water quality deterioration, surface-groundwater interaction and land-use changes of the watershed. The following data-driven methods were compared in order to predict SSL at the Seyra gauging station on the Karaj River in Iran: Fuzzy logic (FL), two adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference systems (i.e., ANFIS-GP and ANFIS-FCM models), an artificial neural network (ANN), and least squares support vector machine (LSSVM). Monthly average river flow and SSL data for 50 years were obtained from the Tehran Regional Water Authority (TRWA). The data was first divided into training, validation and test sets and the SSL was then predicted using the ANN, FL, ANFIS, and LSSVM models. The reliability of the applied models was evaluated by the correlation coefficient (R), root mean square error (RMSE), and mean absolute error (MAE). The results showed that the ANFIS models outperformed the ANN, FL, and LSSVM models for predicting SSL using the given input and output data. Overall, the performances of the artificial intelligence models used in the present study were satisfactory in predicting the non-linear behaviour of the SSL

An Evaluation Framework for Environmentally Sustainable Development of the Historic Cities within the Context of City Squares in Isfahan-Iran

Abstract The urban development involves more sensitive challenges for evaluation of the urban land use in respect of the framework of sustainable development. In the last three decades, the concept of sustainable development has developed into a broad area that embraces all methods and techniques in different levels of human activities and knowledge gaoling to save energy, time, financial and natural resources. Accordingly, environmental sustainability as a major aspect of the concept has concerned the environmental issues such as: climate change, global warming, waste management, sound masking, etc. The principal goal of this paper is to investigate the role of public squares in new urban developments in the historic cities from the perspective of environmental sustainability. Therefore, the paper considers some examples of the city squares in a case study (Isfahan-Iran) to highlight some problems in adaptation with the new 21 st century-style of urban development in such cities. Hence, the investigation compares the original historic squares vs. some recently developed ones. The literature review of this paper is based on the data gathered from internet, books and journals and previously published conference papers. Moreover, a qualitative research has been conducted through local observation and survey in the location of the case study (Isfahan-Iran). The results will reveal the major principles of environmental sustainability in design of new public squares in such cities. This, in turn, opens new doors to future studies about adoption of old cities with new developments regarding to the concept of environmental sustainability