Breast cancer constitutes about one fourth of the registered cancer cases among the Iraqi population (1)
and it is the leading cause of death among Iraqi women (2)
. Each year more women are exposed to the vicious
ramifications of this disease which include death if left unmanaged or the negative sequels that they would
experience, cosmetically and psychologically, after exposure to radical mastectomy.
The World Health Organization (WHO) documented that early detection and screening, when coped
with adequate therapy, could offer a reduction in breast cancer mortality; displaying that the low survival rates
in less developed countries, including Iraq, is mainly attributed to the lack of early detection programs coupled
with inadequate diagnostic and treatment facilities (3)
. Although mammography machines, as main screening
tools for breast cancer, are available in the major hospitals in each province in Iraq, yet those are mainly used
for diagnostic purposes in patients who present with palpable breast lumps. Obviously, due to cost effective
measures, lack of resources and the economical challenges that Iraq is facing, it is not expected that the
authorities could provide mammography devices across every health care centre in the country to be used for
screening of all Iraqi women.
Accordingly, promoting other feasible tools could support in solving that dilemma. Clinical Breast
Examination (CBE) for women, by highly trained health care providers in Primary Health Care Centers, along
with diagnostic mammography in the major hospitals for referred cases, could offer cost effective approaches
for early detection of breast cancer in Iraq. The resources required to provide these services are within the
reach of all countries with limited resources
(4)
.
The issue of raising awareness on breast cancer and its early detection measures needs to be addressed.
Observations reported in Iraqi studies obviously reflect the the limited knowledge of the general population
about the disease, its preventive measures and their ignorance regarding the significance of CBE and early
medical consultation (5, 6)
. Public health awareness campaigns should be endorsed by policy makers to encourage every Iraqi women to look for abnormal signs and symptoms in their breasts and to seek medical
advice promptly.
The searching process using a binary codebook of combined Block Truncation Coding (BTC) method and Vector Quantization (VQ), i.e. a full codebook search for each input image vector to find the best matched code word in the codebook, requires a long time. Therefore, in this paper, after designing a small binary codebook, we adopted a new method by rotating each binary code word in this codebook into 900 to 2700 step 900 directions. Then, we systematized each code word depending on its angle to involve four types of binary code books (i.e. Pour when , Flat when , Vertical when, or Zigzag). The proposed scheme was used for decreasing the time of the coding procedure, with very small distortion per block, by designing s
... Show MoreSemantic segmentation is an exciting research topic in medical image analysis because it aims to detect objects in medical images. In recent years, approaches based on deep learning have shown a more reliable performance than traditional approaches in medical image segmentation. The U-Net network is one of the most successful end-to-end convolutional neural networks (CNNs) presented for medical image segmentation. This paper proposes a multiscale Residual Dilated convolution neural network (MSRD-UNet) based on U-Net. MSRD-UNet replaced the traditional convolution block with a novel deeper block that fuses multi-layer features using dilated and residual convolution. In addition, the squeeze and execution attention mechanism (SE) and the s
... Show MoreIn this modern Internet era and the transition to IPv6, routing protocols must adjust to assist this transformation. RIPng, EIGRPv6 and OSPFv3 are the dominant IPv6 IGRP (Interior Gateway Routing Protocols). Selecting the best routing protocol among the available is a critical task, which depends upon the network requirement and performance parameters of different real time applications. The primary motivation of this paper is to estimate the performance of these protocols in real time applications. The evaluation is based on a number of criteria including: network convergence duration, Http Page Response Time, DB Query Response Time, IPv6 traffic dropped, video packet delay variation and video packet end to end de
... Show MoreThe spectrum of clinical efficacy of Methotrexate (MTX) is broad in that MTX is used in the treatment of certain cancers, severe psoriasis and rheumatoid arthritis.Various mechanisms by which cancer cells grown in tissue culture become resistant to anticancer drugs. The use of multiple drugs with different mechanisms of entry into cells and different cellular targets allows for effective chemotherapy and high cure rates. In an efforts to develop effective strategies that increase the therapeutic potential of anticancer drugs with less systemic toxicity ,are being directed towards the investigation of dietary supplements and other phytotherapeutic agents for their synergistic efficacy in combination with anticancer drugs. A promi
... Show MoreIn this paper, a methodology is presented for determining the stress and strain in structural concrete sections, also, for estimating the ultimate combination of axial forces and bending moments that produce failure. The structural concrete member may have a cross-section with an arbitrary configuration, the concrete region may consist of a set of subregions having different characteristics (i.e., different grades of concretes, or initially identical, but working with different stress-strain diagrams due to the effect of indirect reinforcement or the effect of confinement, etc.). This methodology is considering the tensile strain softening and tension stiffening of concrete in additio
This paper focuses on Load distribution factors for horizontally curved composite concrete-steel girder bridges. The finite-element analysis software“SAP2000” is used to examine the key parameters that can influence the distribution factors for horizontally curved composite steel
girders. A parametric study is conducted to study the load distribution characteristics of such bridge system due to dead loading and AASHTO truck loading using finite elements method. The key parameters considered in this study are: span-to-radius of curvature ratio, span length, number of girders, girders spacing, number of lanes, and truck loading conditions. The results have shown that the curvature is the most critical factor which plays an important
In many industries especially oil companies in Iraq consumed large quantities of water which will produce oil-contaminated water which can cause major pollution in agricultural lands and rivers. The aim of the present work is to enhance the efficiency of dispersed air flotation technique by using highly effective and cost-efficient coagulant to treating gas oil emulsion. The experimental work was carried out using bubble column made of Perspex glass (5cm I.D, 120cm height). A liquid was at depth of 60cm. Different dosage of sawdust +bentonite at ratio 2:1 (0.5+ 0.25; 1+ 0.5 and 2+1) gm and alum at concentration (10,20and30mg/l) at different pH ( 4 and 7) were used to determine optimum dosages of coagulant. Jar test exper
... Show MoreThe aim of this research work is to study the effect of stabilizing gypseous soil, which covers
vast areas in the middle, west and south parts of Iraq, using liquid asphalt on its strength properties
to be used as a base course layer replacing the traditional materials of coarse aggregate and broken
stones which are scarce at economical prices and hauling distances.
Gypseous soil brought from Al-Ramadi City, west of Iraq, with gypsum content of 66.65%,
medium curing cutback asphalt (MC-30), and hydrated lime are used in this study.
The conducted tests on untreated and treated gypseous soil with different percentages of medium
curing cutback asphalt (MC-30), water, and lime were: unconfined compression strength, and o