Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a progressive disorder that affects cognitive brain functions and starts many years before its clinical manifestations. A biomarker that provides a quantitative measure of changes in the brain due to AD in the early stages would be useful for early diagnosis of AD, but this would involve dealing with large numbers of people because up to 50% of dementia sufferers do not receive formal diagnosis. Thus, there is a need for accurate, low-cost, and easy to use biomarkers that could be used to detect AD in its early stages. Potentially, electroencephalogram (EEG) based biomarkers can play a vital role in early diagnosis of AD as they can fulfill these needs. This is a cross-sectional study that aims to demon

Wastewater projects are one of the most important infrastructure projects, which require developing strategic plans to manage these projects. Most of the wastewater projects in Iraq don’t have a maintenance plan. This research aims to prepare the maintenance management plan (MMP) for wastewater projects. The objective of the research is to predict the cost and time of maintenance projects by building a model using ANN. The research sample included (15) completed projects in Wasit Governorate, where the researcher was able to obtain the data of these projects through the historical information of the Wasit Sewage Directorate. In this research artificial neural networks (ANN) technique was used to build two models (cost

The current research deals with practical studies that explain to the Iraqi consumer multiple instances about the phenomenon of water hammer which occur in the water pipeline operating with pressure. It concern a practical study of the characteristics of this phenomenon and economically harmful to the consumer the same time. Multiple pipe fittings are used aimed to reduce this phenomenon and its work as alternatives to the manufactured arresters that used to avoid water hammer in the sanitary installations, while the consumer did not have any knowledge as to the non-traded for many reasons, including the water pressure decreases in the networks and the use of consumer pumps to draw water directly from the network. Study found a number of

Based on a finite element analysis using Matlab coding, eigenvalue problem has been formulated and solved for the buckling analysis of non-prismatic columns. Different numbers of elements per column length have been used to assess the rate of convergence for the model. Then the proposed model has been used to determine the critical buckling load factor () for the idealized supported columns based on the comparison of their buckling loads with the corresponding hinge supported columns . Finally in this study the critical buckling factor () under end force (P) increases by about 3.71% with the tapered ratio increment of 10% for different end supported columns and the relationship between normalized critical load and slenderness ratio was g

The convolutional neural networks (CNN) are among the most utilized neural networks in various applications, including deep learning. In recent years, the continuing extension of CNN into increasingly complicated domains has made its training process more difficult. Thus, researchers adopted optimized hybrid algorithms to address this problem. In this work, a novel chaotic black hole algorithm-based approach was created for the training of CNN to optimize its performance via avoidance of entrapment in the local minima. The logistic chaotic map was used to initialize the population instead of using the uniform distribution. The proposed training algorithm was developed based on a specific benchmark problem for optical character recog

Background: Atherosclerosis is well known related to age and certain cardiovascular diseases. Aging is one reason of arteries function deterioration which can cause loss of compliance and plaque accumulation, this effect increases by the presence of certain diseases such as hypertension and diabetes disease. Aim: To investigate the reduction of blood supply to the brain in patients with diabetes and hypertension with age and the role of resistive index in the diagnosis of reduced blood flow. Method: Patients with both diseases diabetic and hypertension were classified according to their age to identify the progression of the disease and factors influencing the carotid artery blood flow. By using ultrasound and standard Doppler techniq

The plant licorice is considered important plants as nutritionally and medically and economically, as a rich in phytochemical, vitamins and minerals, and being widely available, Research indicated the presence of many nutrients such as (proteins, Carbohydrates, vitamins and minerals) as well as presence of Glycyrrhizin which responsible of sweet taste, that allowing the possibility to use it as natural intensity sweetener with few calories in Sweetening of many food. This research is aimed to study the Stability of Glycyrrhizin toward the various manufacturing conditions such as (thermal treatment, pH of foods and microwaves), so three factorial experiments was implemented to find out the Stability as following: 100C° - 121C° - Microwa