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 issue of penalized regression model has received considerable critical attention to variable selection. It plays an essential role in dealing with high dimensional data. Arctangent denoted by the Atan penalty has been used in both estimation and variable selection as an efficient method recently. However, the Atan penalty is very sensitive to outliers in response to variables or heavy-tailed error distribution. While the least absolute deviation is a good method to get robustness in regression estimation. The specific objective of this research is to propose a robust Atan estimator from combining these two ideas at once. Simulation experiments and real data applications show that the proposed LAD-Atan estimator
... Show MoreElastic magnetic M1 electron scattering form factor has been calculated for the ground state J,T=1/2-,1/2 of 13C. The single-particle model is used with harmonic oscillator wave function. The core-polarization effects are calculated in the first-order perturbation theory including excitations up to 5ħω, using the modified surface delta interaction (MSDI) as a residual interaction. No parameters are introduced in this work. The data are reasonably explained up to q~2.5fm-1 .
A roundabout is a highway engineering concept meant to calm traffic, increase safety, reduce stop-and-go travel, reduce accidents and congestion, and decrease traffic delays. It is circular and facilitates one-way traffic flow around a central point. The first part of this study evaluated the principles and methods used to compare the capacity methods of roundabouts with different traffic conditions and geometric configurations. These methods include gap acceptance, empirical, and simulation software methods. Previous studies mentioned in this research used various methods and other new models developed by several researchers. However, this paper's main aim is to compare different roundabout capacity models for acceptabl
... Show MoreMachine learning has a significant advantage for many difficulties in the oil and gas industry, especially when it comes to resolving complex challenges in reservoir characterization. Permeability is one of the most difficult petrophysical parameters to predict using conventional logging techniques. Clarifications of the work flow methodology are presented alongside comprehensive models in this study. The purpose of this study is to provide a more robust technique for predicting permeability; previous studies on the Bazirgan field have attempted to do so, but their estimates have been vague, and the methods they give are obsolete and do not make any concessions to the real or rigid in order to solve the permeability computation. To
... Show MoreA new application of a combined solvent extraction and two-phase biodegradation processes using two-liquid phase partitioning bioreactor (TLPPB) technique was proposed and developed to enhance the cleanup of high concentration of crude oil from aqueous phase using acclimated mixed culture in an anaerobic environment. Silicone oil was used as the organic extractive phase for being a water-immiscible, biocompatible and non-biodegradable. Acclimation, cell growth of mixed cultures, and biodegradation of crude oil in aqueous samples were experimentally studied at 30±2ºC. Anaerobic biodegradation of crude oil was examined at four different initial concentrations of crude oil including 500, 1000, 2000, and 5000 mg/L. Complete removal of crud
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The administrations of Presidents Clinton and Bush Jr. have seen the emergence of neoconservatives. The neoconservative were the establishment of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) project in 1997 during the Clinton administration. The neoconservatives, through the New Century Project, were able to make important foreign policy decisions, notably the Iraq Liberation Law, which was passed by Congress on January 26, 1998 and signed by President Clinton and became a law legitimized. Clinton became authorized to take whatever measures he saw fit to contribute to regime change in Iraq. The Bush administration has also undergone major and significant shifts in US strategy on US foreign policy. During the Bush admin
... Show MoreNanofiltration (NF) ceramic membrane have found increasing applications particularly in wastewater and water treatment. In order to estimate and optimize the performance of NF membranes, the membrane should be characterized correctly in terms of their basic parameters such as effective pore radius (rp) and equivalent effective thickness as well as effective surface charge ( ), the effective charge density ( ) and Donnan potential ( ). The impact of electrokinetic (zeta) potential on the membrane surface charge density, effective membrane charge density and Donnan potential at two different concentrations of the reference solutions 0.001, 0.01 M sodium chloride at various pH values from 3 to 9, and effective po
... Show MoreThis paper presents L1-adaptive controller for controlling uncertain parameters and time-varying unknown parameters to control the position of a DC servomotor. For the purpose of comparison, the effectiveness of L1-adaptive controller for position control of studied servomotor has been examined and compared with another adaptive controller; Model Reference Adaptive Controller (MRAC). Robustness of both L1-adaptive controller and model reference adaptive controller to different input reference signals and different structures of uncertainty were studied. Three different types of input signals are taken into account; ramp, step and sinusoidal. The L1-adaptive controller ensured uniformly bounded
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