Background:-The Modified Alvarado Scoring System (MASS) has been reported to be a cheap and quick diagnostic tool in patients with acute appendicitis. However, differences in diagnostic accuracy have been observed if the scores were applied to various populations and clinical settings.
Objectives:- The purpose of this study was to evaluate the diagnostic value of Modified Alvarado Scoring System in patients with acute appendicitis in our setting.
Methods:-one hundre twenty eight patients ,were included in this study, admitted to Al-Kindy teaching hospital from June 2009 to June 2010. Patients’ age ranged from 8 to 56 years (21±10) they were divided into three groups; paediatrics, child bearing age females & adult males,. MASS was calculated for each patient included as the diagnosis & treatment were done on the bases of surgeon's clinical decision,confirmation was done by histopathological examination. Finally statistics done included negative appendectomy rate, sensitivity,specificity,positive predictive value,negative predictive value & accuracy.
Results:- Our negative appendectomy rate was 19.5% (22.22% for paediatrics 40.9% for females 4.2% for males). MASS showed sensitivity of 61%(92.8% for paediatrics 38% for females & 58% for males), specificity 80% (75% for paediatrics 88% for females & 50% for males), positive predictive value 92%(92.8% for paediatrics 83% for females 50% for males), negative predictive value 33% ( 75%for paediatrics 50% for females 5% for males) & accuracy 65% ( 88.9% for paediatrics 59% for females 58% for males).
Conclusion:- MASS was of limited help to junior doctors in our setting,clinical assessment & experience are still the gold standard for acute appendicitis.
Nowadays, the robotic arm is fast becoming the most popular robotic form used in the industry among others. Therefore, the issues regarding remote monitoring and controlling system are very important, which measures different environmental parameters at a distance away from the room and sets various condition for a desired environment through a wireless communication system operated from a central room. Thus, it is crucial to create a programming system which can control the movement of each part of the industrial robot in order to ensure it functions properly. EDARM ED-7100 is one of the simplest models of the robotic arm, which has a manual controller to control the movement of the robotic arm. In order to improve this control s
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This paper deals with load-deflection behavior the jointed plain concrete pavement system using steel dowel bars as a mechanism to transmit load across the expansion joints. Experimentally, four models of the jointed plain concrete pavement system were made, each model consists of two slabs of plain concrete that connected together across expansion by two dowel bars and the concrete slab were supported by the subgrade soil. Two variables were dealt with, the first is diameter of dowel bar (12, 16 and 20 mm) and the second is type of the subgrade soil, two types of soil were used which classified according to the (AASHTO): Type I (A-6) and type II (A-7-6). Experimental results showed that increasing dowel bar diameter from 12 mm to 20 mm
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This investigation proposed an identification system of offline signature by utilizing rotation compensation depending on the features that were saved in the database. The proposed system contains five principle stages, they are: (1) data acquisition, (2) signature data file loading, (3) signature preprocessing, (4) feature extraction, and (5) feature matching. The feature extraction includes determination of the center point coordinates, and the angle for rotation compensation (θ), implementation of rotation compensation, determination of discriminating features and statistical condition. During this work seven essential collections of features are utilized to acquire the characteristics: (i) density (D), (ii) average (A), (iii) s
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Products’ quality inspection is an important stage in every production route, in which the quality of the produced goods is estimated and compared with the desired specifications. With traditional inspection, the process rely on manual methods that generates various costs and large time consumption. On the contrary, today’s inspection systems that use modern techniques like computer vision, are more accurate and efficient. However, the amount of work needed to build a computer vision system based on classic techniques is relatively large, due to the issue of manually selecting and extracting features from digital images, which also produces labor costs for the system engineers.
 
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Lowering the emission, fuel economy and torque management are the essential
requirements in the recent development in the automobile industry. The main engine control
input that satisfies the above requirements is the throttling angle which adjusts the air mass
flow rate to the engine port. Due to the uncertainty and the presence of the nonlinear
components in its dynamical model, the sliding mode control theory is utilized in this work
for the throttle valve angle control system to design a robust controller for this system in the
presence of a nonlinear spring and Coulomb friction. A continuous sliding mode control law
which consists of a saturation function, instead of a signum function, and the integral of
ano
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Static Synchronous Series Compensator (SSSC) is a well known device for effectively regulating the active power flow in a power system. In this paper, the SSSC linearized power flow equations are incorporated into Newton-Raphson algorithm in a MATLAB written program to investigate the control of active poweer flow and the transient stability of a five bus and a thirty bus IEEE test systems, during abnormal conduction (three phase fault near buses). A comparison of the results obtained for the base case without SSSC and with it to investigate the effectiveness of the device on both of the active power flow and the transient stability.
The performance grading system (superpave) has provided means to incorporate binder characteristics with
pavement failure types. It’s a comprehensive system that relates climate, traffic conditions and aging with
critical pavement distress. The objective of this paper is to develop an improved asphalt binder grading
system for Iraq based on the principal of superpave. The country was divided into different zones according
to the highest and lowest temperature ranges and traffic loading. The Performance graded binder proposed
for each zone was compared with some States of USA that have same hot weather of Iraq by using Long
Term Pavement Performance (LTPP v3.1) software. Iraqi asphalt samples were tested using the Supe
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