Background: The first and second choice for vascular access in patients with end stage renal disease (ESRD) is radio cephalic and brachio cephalic arteriovenous fistula (AVF).In patients with failed previous AVF e or poorly visualized or impalpable cephalic veins, the basilic vein can be mobilized and superficialized to create an AVF with the brachial artery.Objective: The aim of this study is to report our experience at the Vascular Surgery Department/ Surgical Specialty Hospital in brachio-basilic (BB) vascular access for hemodialysis.Methods: From January 2006 to December 2009, 31 patients with ESRD whose cephalic veins were thrombosed or impalpable or had previous unsuccessful vascular access procedures were referred to the Vascular

In this paper, an approach for object tracking that is inspired from human oculomotor system is proposed and verified experimentally. The developed approach divided into two phases, fast tracking or saccadic phase and smooth pursuit phase. In the first phase, the field of the view is segmented into four regions that are analogue to retinal periphery in the oculomotor system. When the object of interest is entering these regions, the developed vision system responds by changing the values of the pan and tilt angles to allow the object lies in the fovea area and then the second phase will activate. A fuzzy logic method is implemented in the saccadic phase as an intelligent decision maker to select the values of the pan and tilt angle based

Market share is a major indication of business success. Understanding the impact of numerous economic factors on market share is critical to a company’s success. In this study, we examine the market shares of two manufacturers in a duopoly economy and present an optimal pricing approach for increasing a company’s market share. We create two numerical models based on ordinary differential equations to investigate market success. The first model takes into account quantity demand and investment in R&D, whereas the second model investigates a more realistic relationship between quantity demand and pricing.

Background: Nursing interventions tailored to the smoking triggers in patients with non-communicable chronic diseases are essential. However, these interventions are scant due to the nature of factors associated with smoking cessation and the poor understanding of the effect of nurse-led intervention in Iraq.Purpose: This study aimed to determine the dominant smoking triggers and examine the effects of a tailored nursing intervention on smoking behavior in patients with non-communicable chronic diseases.Methods: Convenience samples of 128 patients with non-communicable chronic diseases, male and female patients, who were 18-70 years old, were recruited in this quasi-experimental, randomized comparative trial in the outpatient clinic

The application of the test case prioritization method is a key part of system testing intended to think it through and sort out the issues early in the development stage. Traditional prioritization techniques frequently fail to take into account the complexities of big-scale test suites, growing systems and time constraints, therefore cannot fully fix this problem. The proposed study here will deal with a meta-heuristic hybrid method that focuses on addressing the challenges of the modern time. The strategy utilizes genetic algorithms alongside a black hole as a means to create a smooth tradeoff between exploring numerous possibilities and exploiting the best one. The proposed hybrid algorithm of genetic black hole (HGBH) uses the

Semantic 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

Background: Nursing interventions tailored to the smoking triggers in patients with non-communicable chronic diseases are essential. However, these interventions are scant due to the nature of factors associated with smoking cessation and the poor understanding of the effect of nurse-led intervention in Iraq.Purpose: This study aimed to determine the dominant smoking triggers and examine the effects of a tailored nursing intervention on smoking behavior in patients with non-communicable chronic diseases.Methods: Convenience samples of 128 patients with non-communicable chronic diseases, male and female patients, who were 18-70 years old, were recruited in this quasi-experimental, randomized comparative trial in the outpatient clinic

The 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 pr

The present work aims to study forward osmosis process using different kinds of draw solutions and membranes. Three types of draw solutions (sodium chloride, sodium formate, and sodium acetate) were used in forward osmosis process to evaluate their effectiveness with respect to water flux and reverse salt flux. Experiments conducted in a laboratory-scale forward osmosis (FO) unit in cross flow flat sheet membrane cell.  Three types of membranes (Thin film composite (TFC), Cellulose acetate (CA), and Cellulose triacetate (CTA)) were used to determine the water flux under osmotic pressure as a driving force. The effect of temperature, draw solution concentration, feed and draw solution flow rate, and membrane types, were studied with