This study aimed to compare the safety and efficacy of laser lithotripsy and pneumatic lithotripsy, the two most commonly used transurethral lithotripsy methods for treating bladder stones in children in Iraq. Between January 2013 and December 2016, 64 children with bladder stones were included in this prospective randomized study, after ethical committee approval and written consent from the children’s parents or caregivers were obtained. Patients were assigned randomly by computer software to two groups treated with either pneumatic cystolithotripsy or laser lithotripsy. A 9 Fr. semirigid ureteroscope was used to pass the lithotripter through and fragment the stone. A catheter of 8–12 Fr. was then introduced and kept in place for 24 h. All children were hospitalized for 24 h, and the catheter was removed the next morning. Outpatient follow-up was maintained for 6–12 months. In terms of operation outcomes and complications, the laser lithotripsy group had a significantly longer duration of operation (74.5 ± 26.6 min vs. 51.5 ± 17.2 min, p = 0.001), whereas the number of patients requiring an extended hospital stay was significantly higher in the pneumatic lithotripsy group (48.5% vs. 16.1%, p = 0.006). Moreover, pneumatic lithotripsy was associated with a significantly greater risk of having at least one adverse effect (64% greater than that in the laser group). Stone clearance rates did not significantly differ between treatment groups. In conclusion, both pneumatic and laser lithotripters can be used to treat children with bladder stones with high efficacy and safety.
The psychological scientific studies suggest that basic human situations stem from human emotional abilities and those with a lack of emotional intelligence are unable to cope with life, which might lead to anxiety and psychological depression. The current study aimed to investigate this problem by identifying the level of emotional intelligence and psychological depression among the students of the University of Anbar. To achieve the objectives of the study, the researchers created two questionnaires: 1) to measure emotional intelligence. 2) to measure psychological depression and applied these questionnaires on (300) students. The results revealed that the participants showed a high level of emotional intelligence with a low level of p
... Show MoreFinger vein recognition and user identification is a relatively recent biometric recognition technology with a broad variety of applications, and biometric authentication is extensively employed in the information age. As one of the most essential authentication technologies available today, finger vein recognition captures our attention owing to its high level of security, dependability, and track record of performance. Embedded convolutional neural networks are based on the early or intermediate fusing of input. In early fusion, pictures are categorized according to their location in the input space. In this study, we employ a highly optimized network and late fusion rather than early fusion to create a Fusion convolutional neural network
... Show MoreThis study assesses the short-term and long-term interactions between firm performance, financial education and political instability in the case of Malaysia Small to Medium Enterprises (SMEs). The simultaneous insertion of financial education and political instability within the study is done intentionally to inspect the effect of these two elements in one equation for the Malaysian economy. Using the bound testing methodology for cointegration and error correction models, advanced within an autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) framework, we examine whether a long-run equilibrium connection survives between firm performance and the above mentioned independent variables. Using this method, we uncover evidence of a positive long-term link b
... Show MoreThis work analyzes the effectiveness of an artificial intelligence (AI) community- building workshop designed for high school teachers and it focuses on contemporary issues related to AI concepts and applications. A group of high school teachers from local education districts attended a one-day AI hands-on workshop at our university. The workshop included several AI-related topics and hands-on examples and exercises aiming to introduce AI concepts and tools relevant to pre-college education. The participating teachers were expected to become a part of a collaborative network created to design, develop, and implement novel AI learning modules for high school students. Initial and a post-training surveys have been used to measure the
... Show MoreECG is an important tool for the primary diagnosis of heart diseases, which shows the electrophysiology of the heart. In our method, a single maternal abdominal ECG signal is taken as an input signal and the maternal P-QRS-T complexes of original signal is averaged and repeated and taken as a reference signal. LMS and RLS adaptive filters algorithms are applied. The results showed that the fetal ECGs have been successfully detected. The accuracy of Daisy database was up to 84% of LMS and 88% of RLS while PhysioNet was up to 98% and 96% for LMS and RLS respectively.
The spectral response of the Si solar cell does not coincidence with the sun irradiance spectrum, so the efficiency of the Si solar cell is not high. To improve the Si solar cell one try to make use of most region of the sun spectrum by using dyes which absorb un useful wavelengths and radiate at useful region of spectrum (by stock shift). Fluorescence's dye is used as luminescent concentrator to increase the efficiency of the solar cell. The results show that the performance efficiency and out power for crystalline silicon solar cells are improved.
Faintly continuous (FC) functions, entitled faintly S-continuous and faintly δS-continuous functions have been introduced and investigated via a -open and -open sets. Several characterizations and properties of faintly S-continuous and faintly -Continuous functions were obtained. In addition, relationships between faintly s- Continuous and faintly S-continuous function and other forms of FC function were investigated. Also, it is shown that every faintly S-continuous is weakly S-continuous. The Convers is shown to be satisfied only if the co-domain of the function is almost regular.
Numeral recognition is considered an essential preliminary step for optical character recognition, document understanding, and others. Although several handwritten numeral recognition algorithms have been proposed so far, achieving adequate recognition accuracy and execution time remain challenging to date. In particular, recognition accuracy depends on the features extraction mechanism. As such, a fast and robust numeral recognition method is essential, which meets the desired accuracy by extracting the features efficiently while maintaining fast implementation time. Furthermore, to date most of the existing studies are focused on evaluating their methods based on clean environments, thus limiting understanding of their potential a
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