In hemodialysis patients, pain associated with needle insertion into an arteriovenous fistula is a physical and psychological problem. The aim of this study was to assess the effectiveness of pre‐puncture application of an ice pack, EMLA cream, or lidocaine spray to reduce pain associated with access puncture.

The application of ultrafiltration (UF) and nanofiltration (NF) processes in the handling of raw produced water have been investigated in the present study. Experiments of both ultrafiltration and nanofiltration processes are performed in a laboratory unit, which is operated in a cross-flow pattern. Various types of hollow fiber membranes were utilized in this study such as poly vinyl chloride (PVC) UF membrane, two different polyether sulfone (PES) NF membranes, and poly phenyl sulfone PPSU NF membrane. It was found that the turbidity of the treated water is higher than 95 % by using UF and NF membranes. The chemical oxygen demand COD (160 mg/l) and Oil content (26.8 mg/l) were found after treatment according to the allowable limits set

Analyzing sentiment and emotions in Arabic texts on social networking sites has gained wide interest from researchers. It has been an active research topic in recent years due to its importance in analyzing reviewers' opinions. The Iraqi dialect is one of the Arabic dialects used in social networking sites, characterized by its complexity and, therefore, the difficulty of analyzing sentiment. This work presents a hybrid deep learning model consisting of a Convolution Neural Network (CNN) and the Gated Recurrent Units (GRU) to analyze sentiment and emotions in Iraqi texts. Three Iraqi datasets (Iraqi Arab Emotions Data Set (IAEDS), Annotated Corpus of Mesopotamian-Iraqi Dialect (ACMID), and Iraqi Arabic Dataset (IAD)) col

This work examines the ability of a special type of smart antenna array known as Switched Active Switched Parasitic Antenna (SASPA) to produce a directive and electronically steerable radiation pattern. The SASPA array consists of antenna elements that are switchable between active and parasitic states by using P-Intrinsic-N (PIN) diodes. The active element is the element that is supplied by the radio frequency while short-circuiting the terminals of an element in the array results in a parasitic element. Due to the strong mutual coupling between the elements, a directional radiation pattern with high gain and a small beamwidth can be produced with only one active element operating at a time. By changing the parasitic state to the active

A digital elevation model (DEM) is a digital representation of ground surface topography or terrain. It can be represented as a raster (a grid of squares) and it is commonly estimated by utilizing remote sensing techniques, or from land surveying. In this research a 3D building of Baghdad university campus have been performed using DEM, where the easting, northing, and elevation of 400 locations have been obtained by field survey using global positioning system (GPS). The image of the investigated area has been extracted from QuickBird satellite sensor (with spatial resolution of 0.6 m). This image has been geo-referenced by selecting ground control points of the GPS. The rectification is running, using 1st order polynomial transformation.

      Data security is an important component of data communication and transmission systems. Its main role is to keep sensitive information safe and integrated from the sender to the receiver. The proposed system aims to secure text messages through two security principles encryption and steganography. The system produced a novel method for encryption using graph theory properties; it formed a graph from a password to generate an encryption key as a weight matrix of that graph and invested the Least Significant Bit (LSB) method for hiding the encrypted message in a colored image within a green component. Practical experiments of (perceptibility, capacity, and robustness) were calculated using similarity measures like PSNR, MSE, and

Leishmania species are the causative agent of a tropical disease known as leishmaniasis. Previous studies on the old world species Leishmania major, showed that the amastigotes form which resides inside the macrophage of the vertebrate host, utilize host’s sphingolipids for survival and proliferation. In this study, gene expression of serine palmitoyltransferase (SPT) subunit two (MmLCB2) of the mouse macrophage cell line (RAW264.7), which is the first enzyme in the de novo sphingolipid biosynthesis, was detected in both infected and non-infected macrophages. This was detected under condition where available sphingolipid was reduced, with the new world species Leishmania mexicana. Results of qPCR analysis showed that there was no differen

The simulation study has been conducted for the harmonics of Nd: YAG laser, namely the second harmonic generation SHG, the third harmonic generation THG, and the fourth harmonic generation FHG. Determination of beam expander's expansion ratio for specific wavelength and given detection range is the key in beam expander design for determining minimum laser spot size at the target. Knowing optimum expansion ratio decreases receiving unit dimensions and increases its performance efficiency. Simulation of the above mentioned parameters is conducted for the two types of refractive beam expander, Keplerian and Galilean. Ideal refractive indices for the lenses are chosen adequately for Nd: YAG laser harmonics wavelengths, so that increasing transm