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.
The problem of frequency estimation of a single sinusoid observed in colored noise is addressed. Our estimator is based on the operation of the sinusoidal digital phase-locked loop (SDPLL) which carries the frequency information in its phase error after the noisy sinusoid has been acquired by the SDPLL. We show by computer simulations that this frequency estimator beats the Cramer-Rao bound (CRB) on the frequency error variance for moderate and high SNRs when the colored noise has a general low-pass filtered (LPF) characteristic, thereby outperforming, in terms of frequency error variance, several existing techniques some of which are, in addition, computationally demanding. Moreover, the present approach generalizes on existing work tha
... Show MoreNanocrystalline ZnO/Zeolite type A composite was prepared by simple method of operation by . the precipitation of zinc oxide and loading on zeolite 5A in one step. Characterization was made by X-ray diffraction (XRD), X-ray fluorescence(XRF), N2 adsorption- desorption for BET surface area, and Atomic force microscopy (AFM). Results showed that zinc oxide was loaded on zeolite as noticed by the characteristic peaks and was of nano scale having an average diameter of 88.57nm. The percentage loading of ZnO on zeolite A was 28.37% and the surface area was 222m2/g. The activity of the prepared catalyst was examined in the desulfurization of double hydrogenated diesel fuel. The process was investigated in a
... Show MoreFluorescence excitation by Nd:YAG pumped dye laser and single vibrational level fluorescence
spectra of 1,3 benzodioxole in a supersonic jet have been obtained and interpreted. The previous assignment of
the 0 0
0 band was incorrect. In addition, many other bands involving n20 and n19 vibrations of a2 symmetry were
confirmed. As far as a1 totally symmetric vibration is concerned. The n14 was assigned to be located in the fivemembered
ring whereas n13 seem to be located in the benzene ring as a result of the electronic transition in the
benzene ring which affects n13 and not n14 wavenumber.
An automatic text summarization system mimics how humans summarize by picking the most significant sentences in a source text. However, the complexities of the Arabic language have become challenging to obtain information quickly and effectively. The main disadvantage of the traditional approaches is that they are strictly constrained (especially for the Arabic language) by the accuracy of sentence feature functions, weighting schemes, and similarity calculations. On the other hand, the meta-heuristic search approaches have a feature tha
... Show MoreBackground: The risk of antibiotics resistance (AR) increases due to excessive of antibiotics either by health care provider or by the patients.
Objective: The assessment of the self-medication Practice of over the counter drugs and other prescription drugs and its associated risk factor.
Subjects and Methods: Study design: A descriptive study was conducted from “20th December 2019 to 08th January 2021”. A pre validated and structured questionnaire in English and Urdu language was created to avoid language barrier including personal detail, reasons and source and knowledge about over the counter drugs and Antibiotics. Sample of the study was randomly selected.
... Show MoreTo assess cultural competence among nursing students from nine countries to provide an international perspective on cultural competence.
A descriptive, cross‐sectional design.
A convenience sample of 2,163 nursing students from nine countries was surveyed using the Cultural Capacity Scale from April to November 2016.
The study found a moderate range of cultural competence among the students. The ability to teach and guide other nursing colleagues to displ
Soils that cause effective damages to engineer structures (such as pavement and foundation) are called problematic or difficult soils (include collapsible soil, expansive soil, etc.). These damages occur due to poor or unfavorited engineering properties, such as low shear strength, high compressibility, high volume changes, etc. In the case of expansive soil, the problem of the shrink-swell phenomenon, when the soil reacts with water, is more pronounced. To overcome such problems, soils can be treated or stabilized with many stabilization ways (mechanical, chemical, etc.). Such ways can amend the unfavorited soil properties. In this review, the pozzolanic materials have been selected to be presented and discussed as chem
... Show MoreWater saturation is the most significant characteristic for reservoir characterization in order to assess oil reserves; this paper reviewed the concepts and applications of both classic and new approaches to determine water saturation. so, this work guides the reader to realize and distinguish between various strategies to obtain an appropriate water saturation value from electrical logging in both resistivity and dielectric has been studied, and the most well-known models in clean and shaly formation have been demonstrated. The Nuclear Magnetic Resonance in conventional and nonconventional reservoirs has been reviewed and understood as the major feature of this approach to estimate Water Saturation based on T2 distribution. Artific
... Show MoreRecent years have seen an explosion in graph data from a variety of scientific, social and technological fields. From these fields, emotion recognition is an interesting research area because it finds many applications in real life such as in effective social robotics to increase the interactivity of the robot with human, driver safety during driving, pain monitoring during surgery etc. A novel facial emotion recognition based on graph mining has been proposed in this paper to make a paradigm shift in the way of representing the face region, where the face region is represented as a graph of nodes and edges and the gSpan frequent sub-graphs mining algorithm is used to find the frequent sub-structures in the graph database of each emotion. T
... Show More Aluminum alloys widely use in production of the automobile and the aerospace because
they have low density, attractive mechanical properties with respect to their weight, better
corrosion and wear resistance, low thermal coefficient of expansion comparison with traditional
metals and alloys. Recently, researchers have shifted from single material to composite materials
to reduce weight and cost, improve quality, and high performance in structural materials.
Friction stir processing (FSP) has been successfully researched for manufacturing of metal
matrix composites (MMCs) and functional graded materials (FGMs), find out new possibilities
to chemically change the surfaces. It is shown th