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.
This paper proposed a new method for network self-fault management (NSFM) based on two technologies: intelligent agent to automate fault management tasks, and Windows Management Instrumentations (WMI) to identify the fault faster when resources are independent (different type of devices). The proposed network self-fault management reduced the load of network traffic by reducing the request and response between the server and client, which achieves less downtime for each node in state of fault occurring in the client. The performance of the proposed system is measured by three measures: efficiency, availability, and reliability. A high efficiency average is obtained depending on the faults occurred in the system which reaches to
... Show MoreCrime is a threat to any nation’s security administration and jurisdiction. Therefore, crime analysis becomes increasingly important because it assigns the time and place based on the collected spatial and temporal data. However, old techniques, such as paperwork, investigative judges, and statistical analysis, are not efficient enough to predict the accurate time and location where the crime had taken place. But when machine learning and data mining methods were deployed in crime analysis, crime analysis and predication accuracy increased dramatically. In this study, various types of criminal analysis and prediction using several machine learning and data mining techniques, based o
In the recent years the research on the activated carbon preparation from agro-waste and byproducts have been increased due to their potency for agro-waste elimination. This paper presents a literature review on the synthesis of activated carbon from agro-waste using microwave irradiation method for heating. The applicable approach is highlighted, as well as the effects of activation conditions including carbonization temperature, retention period, and impregnation ratio. The review reveals that the agricultural wastes heated using a chemical process and microwave energy can produce activated carbon with a surface area that is significantly higher than that using the conventional heating method.
The rapid development of telemedicine services and the requirements for exchanging medical information between physicians, consultants, and health institutions have made the protection of patients’ information an important priority for any future e-health system. The protection of medical information, including the cover (i.e. medical image), has a specificity that slightly differs from the requirements for protecting other information. It is necessary to preserve the cover greatly due to its importance on the reception side as medical staff use this information to provide a diagnosis to save a patient's life. If the cover is tampered with, this leads to failure in achieving the goal of telemedicine. Therefore, this work provides an in
... Show MoreDisease diagnosis with computer-aided methods has been extensively studied and applied in diagnosing and monitoring of several chronic diseases. Early detection and risk assessment of breast diseases based on clinical data is helpful for doctors to make early diagnosis and monitor the disease progression. The purpose of this study is to exploit the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) in discriminating breast MRI scans into pathological and healthy. In this study, a fully automated and efficient deep features extraction algorithm that exploits the spatial information obtained from both T2W-TSE and STIR MRI sequences to discriminate between pathological and healthy breast MRI scans. The breast MRI scans are preprocessed prior to the feature
... Show MoreThe Bangestan reservoir, which occurs in the Ahwaz oilfield, consists of the middle Cretaceous limestone Ilam and Sarvak Formations that were deposited in the Zagros Basin. The reservoir is divided into ten Zones (A to J) formed in the upper Albian-Santonian and contains considerable hydrocarbon accumulations. The limestones were deposited on an extensive shallow carbonate platform on a passive margin and are dominated by rudist biostrome and grainstone facies. Paleogeographical changes mean that identification of the facies is complex. Seismic stratigraphy and isotopic data are used to better understand the structural and geological setting and develop an understanding of the sedimentary environment. The results show that the rudist biostr
... Show MoreIn recent years, there has been expanding development in the vehicular part and the number of vehicles moving on the roads in all the sections of the country. Arabic vehicle number plate identification based on image processing is a dynamic area of this work; this technique is used for security purposes such as tracking of stolen cars and access control to restricted areas. The License Plate Recognition System (LPRS) exploits a digital camera to capture vehicle plate numbers is used as input to the proposed recognition system. Basically, the proposed system consists of three phases, vehicle license plate localization, character segmentation, and character recognition, the
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