Micro-perforated panel (MPP) absorber is increasingly gaining popularity as an alternative sound absorber in buildings compared to the well-known synthetic porous materials. A single MPP has a typical feature of a Helmholtz resonator with a high amplitude of absorption but a narrow absorption frequency bandwidth. To improve the bandwidth, a single MPP can be cascaded with another single MPP to form a double-layer MPP. This paper proposes the introduction of inhomogeneous perforation in the double-layer MPP system (DL-iMPP) to enhance the absorption bandwidth of a double-layer MPP. Mathematical models are proposed using the equivalent electrical circuit model and are validated with experiments with good agreement. It is revealed that the DL-

A chemical optical fiber sensor based on surface plasmon resonance (SPR) was developed and implemented using multimode plastic optical fiber. The sensor is used to detect and measure the refractive index and concentration of various chemical materials (Urea, Ammonia, Formaldehyde and Sulfuric acid) as well as to evaluate the performance parameters such as sensitivity, signal to noise ratio, resolution and figure of merit. It  was noticed that the value of the sensitivity of the optical fiber-based SPR sensor, with 60nm and 10 mm long, Aluminum(Al) and Gold (Au) metals film exposed sensing region, was 4.4 μm, while the SNR was 0.20, figure of merit was 20 and resolution 0.00045. In this work a multimode

 Inflammatory bowel disease includes both Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, is a chronic, progressive relapsing disease of gastrointestinal tract that require long-term treatment or maintenance therapy. Taking patient’s beliefs about the prescribed medication in consideration had been shown to be an important factor that affects compliance of the patient in whom having positive beliefs is a prerequisite for better compliance. The aim of the current study was to investigate and assess beliefs about medicines among a sample of Iraqi patients with inflammatory bowel disease and to determine possible association between these beliefs and some patient-specific factors.

This study is a cross-sectional study carried out o

Detection of early clinical keratoconus (KCN) is a challenging task, even for expert clinicians. In this study, we propose a deep learning (DL) model to address this challenge. We first used Xception and InceptionResNetV2 DL architectures to extract features from three different corneal maps collected from 1371 eyes examined in an eye clinic in Egypt. We then fused features using Xception and InceptionResNetV2 to detect subclinical forms of KCN more accurately and robustly. We obtained an area under the receiver operating characteristic curves (AUC) of 0.99 and an accuracy range of 97–100% to distinguish normal eyes from eyes with subclinical and established KCN. We further validated the model based on an independent dataset with

In this investigation, Rayleigh–Ritz method is used to calculate the natural frequencies of rectangular isotropic and laminated symmetric and anti-symmetric cross and angle ply composite plate with general elastic supports along its edges. Each of the admissible functions here is composed of a trigonometric function and an arbitrary continuous function that is introduced to ensure the sufficient smoothness of the so-called residual displacement function at the edges. Perhaps more importantly, this study has developed a general approach for deriving a complete set of admissible functions that can be applied to various boundary conditions. Several numerical examples are studied to demonstrate the accuracy and convergence of the current s

Rheumatoid arthritis is one of the common chronic disease, which lead to great disability and chronic pain, and has a main adverse economic and social effect upon patients. The reason for the addition of quality of life as a pointer for health outcome result is attributed to the affectability of this measure for the evaluation of patient's health status after taken treatment and its health outcome. The purpose of the current study was to assess quality of life among a sample of Iraqi patients with rheumatoid arthritis and to determine the possible association between health’s related quality of life and some patient-certain factors. This study is a cross-sectional study carried out on 250 already diagnosed rheumatoid arthritis pat

BACKGROUND: Burkholderia cepacia adhesion and biofilm formation onto abiotic surfaces is an important feature of clinically relevant isolates. The in vitro biofilm formation of B. cepacia onto coated indwelling urinary catheters (IDCs) with moxifloxacin has not been previously investigated. OBJECTIVES: To examine the ability of B. cepacia to form biofilms on IDCs and the effect of coating IDCs with moxifloxacin on biofilm formation by B. cepacia in vitro. MATERIAL AND METHODS: The adhesion of B. cepacia to coated and uncoated IDCs with moxifloxacin was evaluated. Pieces of IDCs were coated with moxifloxacin (adsorption method). The spectrophotometric method was used to check moxifloxacin leaching into tubes. Coated and uncoated tubes were i