Objective: To study the effect of epidural spinal injection over one year in case of spinal stenosis. Methodology: This prospective study included 566 patients with spinal stenosis seen at Al-Kindy Teaching and Al-Sader, Hospitals who were treated by local epidural steroid injection. They were followed up for at least five subsequent visits after seven days, one month, three months, six months, and one year to assess efficacy. Result: Mean age of patients was 49.5 years, with a predominance of females (65%). L4/L5 was the most involved level in the spinal stenosis (70%). Grade II stenosis accounted for (45.4%) of cases. The pairwise comparison revealed that there was significant decrease in proportions of patients with pain in day

Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MaMi) systems have attracted much research attention during the last few years. This is because MaMi systems are able to achieve a remarkable improvement in data rate and thus meet the immensely ongoing traffic demands required by the future wireless networks. To date, the downlink training sequence (DTS) for the frequency division duplex (FDD) MaMi communications systems have been designed based on the idealistic assumption of white noise environments. However, it is essential and more practical to consider the colored noise environments when designing an efficient DTS for channel estimation. To this end, this paper proposes a new DTS design by exploring the joint use of spatial channel and n

      In this work, the circular patch antenna was fabricated and analyzed. Microwave Studio (version 2019) computer simulation technology (CST) was used to design the circular patch antenna. The material FR-4 was used to build this antenna, using the computer numerical control (CNC) method to implement this work. For the purpose of accomplishing this design, the values ​​of the resonant frequency, dielectric constant and dielectric thickness of the material used as in 4.424, 2.4 GHz and 0.159 cm respectively were used as inputs to the CST program to get the said program outputs for the required antenna radius with the logarithmic function (F) of the circular patch antenna 1.6909 cm and 1.7415 cm respectively. Practically, the b

     This paper focuses on choosing a spatial mixture model with implicitly includes the time to represent the relative risks of COVID-19 pandemic using an appropriate model selection criterion. For this purpose, a more recent criterion so-called the widely Akaike information criterion (WAIC) is used which we believe that its use so limitedly in the context of relative risk modelling. In addition, a graphical method is adopted that is based on a spatial-temporal predictive posterior distribution to select the best model yielding the best predictive accuracy. By applying this model selection criterion, we seek to identify the levels of relative risk, which implicitly represents the determination of the number of the model components o

     In this research, we propose to use two local search methods (LSM's); Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and the Bees Algorithm (BA) to solve Multi-Criteria Travelling Salesman Problem (MCTSP) to obtain the best efficient solutions. The generating process of the population of the proposed LSM's may be randomly obtained or by adding some initial solutions obtained from some efficient heuristic methods. The obtained solutions of the PSO and BA are compared with the solutions of the exact methods (complete enumeration and branch and bound methods) and some heuristic methods. The results proved the efficiency of PSO and BA methods for a large number of nodes ( ). The proposed LSM's give the best efficient solutions for the MCTSP for

Portland Cement is manufactured by adding 3% gypsum to clinker which is produced by grinding, pulverizing, mixing, and then burning a raw mix of silica, and calcium carbonate. Limestone is the main source of carbonates, while clay collected from arable land is the main source of silica. The marl in the Euphrates Formation was studied as an alternative to arable lands. Nine boreholes drilled and penetrated the marl layer in selected locations at the Kufa cement quarry. Forty-one samples of marl from boreholes and four samples of limestone from the closed area were collected. The chemical content of the major oxides and the hardness of the marl layer was very encouraging as a raw material for Portland Cement as they are SiO2 (17.60),