Early detection of eye diseases can forestall visual deficiency and vision loss. There are several types of human eye diseases, for example, diabetic retinopathy, glaucoma, arteriosclerosis, and hypertension. Diabetic retinopathy (DR) which is brought about by diabetes causes the retinal vessels harmed and blood leakage in the retina. Retinal blood vessels have a huge job in the detection and treatment of different retinal diseases. Thus, retinal vasculature extraction is significant to help experts for the finding and treatment of systematic diseases. Accordingly, early detection and consequent treatment are fundamental for influenced patients to protect their vision. The aim of this paper is to detect blood vessels from

The impact of undergraduate research experiences on students' academic development and retention in STEM fields is significant. Students' success in STEM fields is based on developing strong research and critical thinking skills that make it essential for students to engage in research activities throughout their academic programs. This work evaluates the effectiveness of undergraduate research experiences with respect to its influence on student retention and academic development. The cases presented are based on years of experience implementing undergraduate research programs in various STEM fields at Colorado State University Pueblo (CSU Pueblo) funded by HSI STEM Grants. The study seeks to establish a correlation between students' reten

The thermal performance of indirect expansion solar assisted heat pump, IX-SAHP, was investigated experimentally under Iraqi climate. An Indirect-Solar Assisted Heat Pump system was designed, built, instrumented and tested. Experimental tests were conducted by varying the controlling parameters to investigate their effects on the thermal performance of the IX-SAHP such as cooling water flow rate, heating water flow rate, ambient temperature and solar radiation intensity. The investigation covered values of cooling water flow rate of (2, 3, 4, 5 l/min) and heating water flow rate of (2, 3, 4, 5 l/min) under meteorological condition of Baghdad from November 2014 to January 2015.

The results indicated that the performance of the IX-

Applying load to a structural member may result in a bottle-shaped compression field especially when the width of the loading is less than the width of bearing concrete members. At the Building and Construction Department – the University of Technology-Iraq, series tests on fibre reinforced concrete specimens were carried out, subjected to compression forces at the top and bottom of the specimens to produce compression field. The effects of steel fibre content, concrete compressive strength, transverse tension reinforcement, the height of test specimen, and the ratio of the width of loading plate to specimen width were studied by testing a total of tenth normal strength concrete blocks with steel fibre and one normal s

Twelve compounds containing a sulphur- or oxygen-based heterocyclic core, 1,3- oxazole or 1,3-thiazole ring with hydroxy, methoxy and methyl terminal substituent, were synthesized and characterized. The molecular structures of these compounds were performed by elemental analysis and different spectroscopic tequniques. The liquid crystalline behaviors were studied by using hot-stage optical polarizing microscopy and differential scanning calorimetry. All compounds of 1,4- disubstituted benzene core with oxazole ring display liquid crystalline smectic A (SmA) mesophase. The compounds of 1,3- and 1,4-disubstituted benzene core with thiazole ring exhibit exclusively enantiotropic nematic liquid crystal phases.

Multi-belled piles are piles with enlarged ends; these piles have one or further bells at the lower third part of the pile. These piles are suitable for many soils with problems such as softening clay, the variation of groundwater table, expansive soils, black cotton soil, and loose sand. The current study reviewed the behavior of belled piles in multi-layer soils subjected to axial compression and pullout loading. The review covered the experimental and theoretical works on belled piles in multi-layered soils. These piles were subjected to static and dynamic loadings in compression and pullout cases. Most theoretical results focused on software such as PLAXIS 3D. The axial load applied on the piles comes from the upper

Human skin detection, which usually performed before image processing, is the method of discovering skin-colored pixels and regions that may be of human faces or limbs in videos or photos. Many computer vision approaches have been developed for skin detection. A skin detector usually transforms a given pixel into a suitable color space and then uses a skin classifier to mark the pixel as a skin or a non-skin pixel. A skin classifier explains the decision boundary of the class of a skin color in the color space based on skin-colored pixels. The purpose of this research is to build a skin detection system that will distinguish between skin and non-skin pixels in colored still pictures. This performed by introducing a metric that measu

In this work a fragile watermarking scheme is presented. This scheme is applied to digital color images in spatial domain. The image is divided into blocks, and each block has its authentication mark embedded in it, we would be able to insure which parts of the image are authentic and which parts have been modified. This authentication carries out without need to exist the original image. The results show the quality of the watermarked image is remaining very good and the watermark survived some type of unintended modification such as familiar compression software like WINRAR and ZIP

Compressing an image and reconstructing it without degrading its original quality is one of the challenges that still exist now a day. A coding system that considers both quality and compression rate is implemented in this work. The implemented system applies a high synthetic entropy coding schema to store the compressed image at the smallest size as possible without affecting its original quality. This coding schema is applied with two transform-based techniques, one with Discrete Cosine Transform and the other with Discrete Wavelet Transform. The implemented system was tested with different standard color images and the obtained results with different evaluation metrics have been shown. A comparison was made with some previous rel