Background: Extracorporeal Shock wave lithotripsy (ESWL) is widely used in treating patients with ureteralstones because it is effective, safe, and noninvasive. Based on factors such as size and the location of stones,there is a significant variation in the overall stone-free rate (SFR).Aim of the study: To evaluate the effect of ureteral wall thickness (UWT), stone attenuation, the time fromfirst attack of pain till first session of ESWL and stone/ rib density on the outcome of SWL in the treatmentof upper ureteral stones (UUS).Patient and methods: A prospective study when 127 patients with radio-opaque UUS ranging from 7 to 20mm and treated by ESWL were included in this study. The effect of (stone/ 12th rib) density by KUB, ureteralwall thickness by NCCT and the time from first attack of pain till first ESWL session was studied.Results: The overall successful fragmentation was 75.5%, with the overall success rates in the low density(LD) and high density (HD) groups were 83.8% and 52.94%, respectively. The average number of SWLsessions needed in the two groups for success was 1.9 compared with 2.7 sessions (p<0.05). For stones <10 mm; those with ureteral wall thickness <3.25 mm have success rate about 90.3% VS 69.7% with uretericwall thickness > 3.25 mm which is highly significant. Early ESWL within the first 24 hours of acute attackof first pain has successful fragmentation of 85.45%. With significant effect on number of ESWL sessions.The stone free rate reaches 91.1% for stones <10 mm.Conclusions: The stone free rate is inversely affected by stone /12th rib density ; ureteral wall thickness andthe time from first attack of pain till first session of ESWL, were important predictors of successful ESWL.
Data-driven models perform poorly on part-of-speech tagging problems with the square Hmong language, a low-resource corpus. This paper designs a weight evaluation function to reduce the influence of unknown words. It proposes an improved harmony search algorithm utilizing the roulette and local evaluation strategies for handling the square Hmong part-of-speech tagging problem. The experiment shows that the average accuracy of the proposed model is 6%, 8% more than HMM and BiLSTM-CRF models, respectively. Meanwhile, the average F1 of the proposed model is also 6%, 3% more than HMM and BiLSTM-CRF models, respectively.
Data generated from modern applications and the internet in healthcare is extensive and rapidly expanding. Therefore, one of the significant success factors for any application is understanding and extracting meaningful information using digital analytics tools. These tools will positively impact the application's performance and handle the challenges that can be faced to create highly consistent, logical, and information-rich summaries. This paper contains three main objectives: First, it provides several analytics methodologies that help to analyze datasets and extract useful information from them as preprocessing steps in any classification model to determine the dataset characteristics. Also, this paper provides a comparative st
... Show MoreAggregate production planning (APP) is one of the most significant and complicated problems in production planning and aim to set overall production levels for each product category to meet fluctuating or uncertain demand in future. and to set decision concerning hiring, firing, overtime, subcontract, carrying inventory level. In this paper, we present a simulated annealing (SA) for multi-objective linear programming to solve APP. SA is considered to be a good tool for imprecise optimization problems. The proposed model minimizes total production and workforce costs. In this study, the proposed SA is compared with particle swarm optimization (PSO). The results show that the proposed SA is effective in reducing total production costs and req
... Show MoreInternal conversion coefficients (ICC) and electron–positron pair conversion coefficients (PCC) for multipole transition of the core nucleus 88Sr have been calculated theoretically. The calculation is based on the relativistic Dirac–Fock (DF) solutions using the so called ‘‘Frozen Orbital’’ approximation, takes into account the effect of atomic vacancies created in the conversion process, covering a transition energies of 1–5000 keV. A large number of points were used to minimize any errors due to mesh-size effects. The internal conversion coefficients display a smooth monotonic dependence on transition energy, multipolarity and atomic shell. Comparing the values of PCC to ICC, it is interesting to note, that the energy dep
... Show MoreThe aim of the present study was to develop theophylline (TP) inhalable sustained delivery system by preparing solid lipid microparticles using glyceryl behenate (GB) and poloxamer 188 (PX) as a lipid carrier and a surfactant respectively. The method involves loading TP nanoparticles into the lipid using high shear homogenization – ultrasonication technique followed by lyophilization. The compositional variations and interactions were evaluated using response surface methodology, a Box – Behnken design of experiment (DOE). The DOE constructed using TP (X1), GB (X2) and PX (X3) levels as independent factors. Responses measured were the entrapment efficiency (% EE) (Y1), mass median
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Measurement of radon concentration level was carried out in 40 houses in Al – Najaf city during summer season of 2012. Long term measurement of indoor of old building radon concentrations have been taken, using a previously calibrated passive diffusion dosimeters containing CR – 39 solid state nuclear track detectors which are very sensitive for alpha particles. The measurement of the indoor radon concentration obtained in summer in these regions ranged from 11.654±4.216 Bq.m-3 to 53.610±8.777 Bq.m-3. The results were within universally permitted levels. |
Ultrasound has been used as a diagnostic modality for many intraocular diseases, due its safety, low cost, real time and wide availability. Unfortunately, ultrasound images suffer from speckle artifact that are tissue dependent. In this work, we will offer a method to reduce speckle noise and improve ultrasound image to raise the human diagnostic performance. This method combined undecimated wavelet transform with a wavelet coefficient mapping function: where UDWT used to eliminate the noise and a wavelet coefficient mapping function used to enhance the contrast of denoised images obtained from the first component. This methods can be used not only as a means for improving visual quality of medical images but also as a preprocessing
... Show MoreComputer literacy is an urgent necessity for university students, given the rapid development in the means of communication in which we live in this era, and the flow of abundant information. Mainly on the computer in all administrative and academic transactions, where first of all the registration for the semester is done through the computer. Computer culture has many characteristics and advantages that distinguish it from other sciences, including the concept of computer culture that cannot be defined absolutely, and it is difficult to define its levels, because the specifications of the computer-educated individual differ from one individual to another, and from time to time also, you find it a luxury in a country What, and you
... Show MoreSeveral correlations have been proposed for bubble point pressure, however, the correlations could not predict bubble point pressure accurately over the wide range of operating conditions. This study presents Artificial Neural Network (ANN) model for predicting the bubble point pressure especially for oil fields in Iraq. The most affecting parameters were used as the input layer to the network. Those were reservoir temperature, oil gravity, solution gas-oil ratio and gas relative density. The model was developed using 104 real data points collected from Iraqi reservoirs. The data was divided into two groups: the first was used to train the ANN model, and the second was used to test the model to evaluate their accuracy and trend stability
... Show MoreSentiment analysis refers to the task of identifying polarity of positive and negative for particular text that yield an opinion. Arabic language has been expanded dramatically in the last decade especially with the emergence of social websites (e.g. Twitter, Facebook, etc.). Several studies addressed sentiment analysis for Arabic language using various techniques. The most efficient techniques according to the literature were the machine learning due to their capabilities to build a training model. Yet, there is still issues facing the Arabic sentiment analysis using machine learning techniques. Such issues are related to employing robust features that have the ability to discrimina
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