Research is a central component of neurosurgical training and practice and is increasingly viewed as a quintessential indicator of academic productivity. In this study, we focus on identifying the current status and challenges of neurosurgical research in Iraq.
An online PubMed Medline database search was conducted to identify all articles published by Iraq-based neurosurgeons between 2003 and 2020. Information was extracted in relation to the following parameters: authors, year of publication, author’s affiliation, author’s specialty, article type, article citation, journal name, journal
The futuristic age requires progress in handwork or even sub-machine dependency and Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) provides the necessary BCI procession. As the article suggests, it is a pathway between the signals created by a human brain thinking and the computer, which can translate the signal transmitted into action. BCI-processed brain activity is typically measured using EEG. Throughout this article, further intend to provide an available and up-to-date review of EEG-based BCI, concentrating on its technical aspects. In specific, we present several essential neuroscience backgrounds that describe well how to build an EEG-based BCI, including evaluating which signal processing, software, and hardware techniques to use. Individu
... Show MoreSilicon (Si)-based materials are sought in different engineering applications including Civil, Mechanical, Chemical, Materials, Energy and Minerals engineering. Silicon and Silicon dioxide are processed extensively in the industries in granular form, for example to develop durable concrete, shock and fracture resistant materials, biological, optical, mechanical and electronic devices which offer significant advantages over existing technologies. Here we focus on the constitutive behaviour of Si-based granular materials under mechanical shearing. In the recent times, it is widely recognised in the literature that the microscopic origin of shear strength in granular assemblies are associated with their
In this paper, a fast lossless image compression method is introduced for compressing medical images, it is based on splitting the image blocks according to its nature along with using the polynomial approximation to decompose image signal followed by applying run length coding on the residue part of the image, which represents the error caused by applying polynomial approximation. Then, Huffman coding is applied as a last stage to encode the polynomial coefficients and run length coding. The test results indicate that the suggested method can lead to promising performance.
Metaheuristics under the swarm intelligence (SI) class have proven to be efficient and have become popular methods for solving different optimization problems. Based on the usage of memory, metaheuristics can be classified into algorithms with memory and without memory (memory-less). The absence of memory in some metaheuristics will lead to the loss of the information gained in previous iterations. The metaheuristics tend to divert from promising areas of solutions search spaces which will lead to non-optimal solutions. This paper aims to review memory usage and its effect on the performance of the main SI-based metaheuristics. Investigation has been performed on SI metaheuristics, memory usage and memory-less metaheuristics, memory char
... Show MoreFeatures is the description of the image contents which could be corner, blob or edge. Corners are one of the most important feature to describe image, therefore there are many algorithms to detect corners such as Harris, FAST, SUSAN, etc. Harris is a method for corner detection and it is an efficient and accurate feature detection method. Harris corner detection is rotation invariant but it isn’t scale invariant. This paper presents an efficient harris corner detector invariant to scale, this improvement done by using gaussian function with different scales. The experimental results illustrate that it is very useful to use Gaussian linear equation to deal with harris weakness.
In this work, effects of using different evaporative cooling pads (ECPs) on the energetic and exergetic efficiency of a direct evaporative air cooler (DEAC) have been theoretically and experimentally investigated. Three types of ECPs were used, i.e., honeycomb cellulose cooler pad (HCCP), shading-cloth cooler pad (SCCP), and aspen wood wool cooler pad (AWWCP). For SCCP and AWWCP, a 3-cm pad thickness was used, while for the HCCP, three different values of pad thickness were used, i.e., 3, 5, and 7 cm. Tests were carried out using air velocities of 8, 14, and 19 m/s, measured at the DEAC outlet. Engineering equation solver (EES) used for performing the required calculations of the various parameters affecting the thermal performance of the D
... Show MoreThe steel jetty selected for strengthening is in Baghdad city, over Tigris River, consists of 55 short spans, each of approximately 4 meters and one naviga-tional opening of 12 m. The bridge is 224 meters length and 8 meters in width. The strengthening system was designed to remove overstresses that occurred when the bridge was subjected to abnormal loads of 380 tons. A strengthening system which installed in spring 2008 was used where the main concept is to depend on added side supporting elements which impose reversal forces on the bridge to counteract most of the loads expected from the abnormal heavy loads. The bridge was load tested before and after the strengthening system was activated. The load test results indicate that the strengt
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