Background: Skull secondary tumors are malignant bone tumors which are increasing in incidence.Objective: The objectives of this study were to present clinical features , asses the outcome of patients with secondary skull tumors ,characterize the MRI features, locations, and extent of secondary skull tumors to determine the frequency of the symptomatic disease.Type of the study: This is a prospective study.Methods: This is a prospective study from February 2000 to February 2008. The patients were selected from five neurosurgical centers and one oncology hospital in Baghdad/Iraq. The inclusion criteria were MRI study of the head(either as an initial radiological study or following head CT scan when secondary brain tumor is suspected , visible or palpabable skull mass is noted ) that revealed either calvarial or skull base metastases were included in this study.Results: During the period of the study 175 patients were included according the inclusion criteria. Primary sites were breast cancer (54.85%), lung cancer (14.28%), prostate cancer (6.28%), malignant lymphoma (5.14%), and others (19.42%). The mean time from primary diagnosis to skull metastasis diagnosis was 71 months for cases of breast cancer, 26 months for prostate cancer, 9 months for lung cancer, and 4 months for malignant lymphoma. Calvarial circumscribed intraosseous metastases were found most frequently (25.7%). The patients were mainly asymptomatic. However, some patients suffered from local pain or cranial nerve palsies that harmed their quality of life. Treatment, mainly for symptomatic cases, was by local or whole-skull irradiation.Conclusion: Secondary skull tumors are not rare, and most are calvarial circumscribed intraosseous tumors. MRI contribute to understanding their type, location, and multiplicity, and their relationship to the brain, cranial nerves, and dural sinuses. Radiation therapy improved the quality of life (QOL) of patients with neurological symptoms.
In this paper, a compact genetic algorithm (CGA) is enhanced by integrating its selection strategy with a steepest descent algorithm (SDA) as a local search method to give I-CGA-SDA. This system is an attempt to avoid the large CPU time and computational complexity of the standard genetic algorithm. Here, CGA dramatically reduces the number of bits required to store the population and has a faster convergence. Consequently, this integrated system is used to optimize the maximum likelihood function lnL(φ1, θ1) of the mixed model. Simulation results based on MSE were compared with those obtained from the SDA and showed that the hybrid genetic algorithm (HGA) and I-CGA-SDA can give a good estimator of (φ1, θ1) for the ARMA(1,1) model. Anot
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Deixes belong to the field of both semantics and pragmatics as they lie in the edge of these two fields. Pragmatically, they are concerned with the relationship between the structure of a language and the contexts. The present work aims at analyzing the use of deixes using Levinson’s (1983) and Yule's (1996) concept of deixes, where the latter maintained that the referents of the deixes cannot be realized apart from the context where they are used. He added that the contextual information of certain utterances involves information about the participants (the speaker and the addressee), the time and the place. Consequently, a qualitative- descriptive approach has been adopted to meet the objective of the study which reads, “exam
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The health care industry is witnessing an increasing trend in the use of generic medicines because of their presumed low cost compared with innovator medicines. The aim of this study was to determine and compare the performance of the copy drug Osveral®and its innovator drug deferasirox (Exjade®).
A prospective observational study including 223 patients receiving the branded medicine Exjade®and 101 patients receiving the copy Osveral®was carried out. Data were assessed for a 1-year period and included clinical symptoms, serum ferrit
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In this paper , some of lexical stylistic , syntactical stylistic devices , and one phonetic stylistic device are going to be illustrated in the study of the aphorisms of “life and death” . These stylistic devices are parallelism , hyperbole , alliteration , meiosis , irony , oxymoron , cliché , litotes , metalepsis , and loose sentences. This paper aims at identifying the functions and the frequencies of these devices. These stylistic devices make one speech and writing more interesting and help to get the attention of readers/ listeners
The Internet of Things (IoT) technology is every object around us and it is used to connect these objects to the Internet to verify Machine to Machine (M2M) communication. The smart house system is the most important application of IoT technology; it is increase the quality of life and decrease the efforts. There were many problems that faced the existing smart house networking systems, including the high cost of implementation and upgrading, high power consumption, and supported limited features. Therefore, this paper presents the design and implementation of smart house network system (SHNS) using Raspberry Pi and Arduino platforms as network infrastructure with ZigBee technology as wireless communication. SHNS consists of two mai
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Since the appearance of COVID-19 disease as an epidemic and pandemic disease, many studies are performed to uncover the genetic nature of the newly discovered coronavirus with unique clinical features. The last three human coronavirus outbreaks, SARS-CoV, MERS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2 are caused by Beta-Coronaviruses. Horizontal genetic materials transfer was proven from one coronavirus to the other coronavirus of non-human origin like infectious bronchitis virus (IBV) of avian. Horizontal genetic materials transfer was also from non-corona viruses like astroviruses and equine rhinovirus (ERV-2) or from coronavirus-unrelated viruses, like influenza virus type C. However, SARS-CoV-2 is identical to SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV. Interestingly, Wuhan ci
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A review of the literature on intellectual capital development was conducted using systemic criteria for the inclusion of relevant studies. The concepts behind the ideas explored in the present study were discussed in respect to the subject matter. Examining the past state of the art in the intellectual capital sector for achieving high levels of innovation performance provided a multidimensional picture of intellectual capital, innovation performance, and dynamic capabilities. The present review was designed to illustrate the correlation between intellectual capital and innovation performance, as well as the role of dynamic capabilities in moderating the relationship between these constructs. Accordingly, we presented an extensive
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The presence of alkaloids in Crassula ovata is a topic that is still unexplored, as there are no published studies on the matter. This study demonstrates the presence of an alkaloid compound (and its class) for the first time in Crassula ovata. The plant material was defatted with n-hexane, and a Soxhlet apparatus was used for the extraction process, while the acid-base method was used for the isolation of alkaloids from the chloroform fractions. The quaternary alkaloid was precipitated from the aqueous layer spontaneously, in high quantity. By using standard spectroscopic methods (including liquid chromatography - mass spectroscopy) we were able to clarify the structure of the precipi¬tated compound as a tetrahydroprotoberberine a
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