This study aimed to compare the safety and efficacy of laser lithotripsy and pneumatic lithotripsy, the two most commonly used transurethral lithotripsy methods for treating bladder stones in children in Iraq. Between January 2013 and December 2016, 64 children with bladder stones were included in this prospective randomized study, after ethical committee approval and written consent from the children’s parents or caregivers were obtained. Patients were assigned randomly by computer software to two groups treated with either pneumatic cystolithotripsy or laser lithotripsy. A 9 Fr. semirigid ureteroscope was used to pass the lithotripter through and fragment the stone. A catheter of 8–12 Fr. was then introduced and kept in place for 24 h. All children were hospitalized for 24 h, and the catheter was removed the next morning. Outpatient follow-up was maintained for 6–12 months. In terms of operation outcomes and complications, the laser lithotripsy group had a significantly longer duration of operation (74.5 ± 26.6 min vs. 51.5 ± 17.2 min, p = 0.001), whereas the number of patients requiring an extended hospital stay was significantly higher in the pneumatic lithotripsy group (48.5% vs. 16.1%, p = 0.006). Moreover, pneumatic lithotripsy was associated with a significantly greater risk of having at least one adverse effect (64% greater than that in the laser group). Stone clearance rates did not significantly differ between treatment groups. In conclusion, both pneumatic and laser lithotripters can be used to treat children with bladder stones with high efficacy and safety.
This study focused on spectral clustering (SC) and three-constraint affinity matrix spectral clustering (3CAM-SC) to determine the number of clusters and the membership of the clusters of the COST 2100 channel model (C2CM) multipath dataset simultaneously. Various multipath clustering approaches solve only the number of clusters without taking into consideration the membership of clusters. The problem of giving only the number of clusters is that there is no assurance that the membership of the multipath clusters is accurate even though the number of clusters is correct. SC and 3CAM-SC aimed to solve this problem by determining the membership of the clusters. The cluster and the cluster count were then computed through the cluster-wise J
... Show MoreThe idea of Science and Technology Parks (STP) emerged in the 1950s. The Parks have accumulated several architectural functions, including research centers, scientific exhibitions and innovator residence, etc. As these Parks gradually spread, some of them were linked to university complexes, while others had independent sites. The STP have been linked to the prosperity of society by providing an environment that fosters a culture of innovation and transforming research and ideas based on innovation into a commercially marketed product. However, the functional architectural concept of the STP remained unclear. The objective of this paper is to clarifying the stages of development of Pa
Several studies have claimed that AgNPs’ safety is not completely verified. The current work studied the CNS and renal genetic abnormalities (as manifested by modifications in NF-κB transcription) in mice treated with diverse AgNP concentrations. The findings revealed that as the amount of AgNPs was elevated, NF-κB production increased considerably.
The fiscal position of governments in rentier economies depends heavily on oil revenues. The relationship between oil prices and the budget surplus or deficit is often nonlinear and characterized by complex temporal dependencies, which may limit the predictive capability of conventional econometric models. Accordingly, this study aims to forecast the Iraqi budget surplus and deficit and compare the predictive performance of the ARDL, NARDL, LSTM, 1D-CNN, and hybrid 1D-CNN-LSTM models using oil prices as the primary predictive variable. The hybrid model integrates the feature-extraction capability of One-Dimensional Convolutional Neural Networks (1D-CNN) with the ability of Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks to capture long-term
... Show MoreIn architectural learning, it is difficult to stimulate cultural awareness through the traditional education approaches, which results in historic places being neglected as knowledge sources. This research explores the premise that sketch-based visual storytelling may act as a generative approach to connect cognition, emotion, and behavior in historical contexts. The study adopts a qualitative methodology to explore a learning experience comprising two phases: the first is a formal educational setting, and the second is a historical and cultural context, aiming to investigate the role of sketch-based storytelling in enhancing cultural awareness. MAXQDA was employed to code the students’ storyboards on three levels of cultural awareness, m
... Show MoreSoftware-defined networking (SDN) is an innovative network paradigm, offering substantial control of network operation through a network’s architecture. SDN is an ideal platform for implementing projects involving distributed applications, security solutions, and decentralized network administration in a multitenant data center environment due to its programmability. As its usage rapidly expands, network security threats are becoming more frequent, leading SDN security to be of significant concern. Machine-learning (ML) techniques for intrusion detection of DDoS attacks in SDN networks utilize standard datasets and fail to cover all classification aspects, resulting in under-coverage of attack diversity. This paper proposes a hybr
... Show MoreThis research aims to know the essence of the correlative relationship between tactical thinking and solving mathematical problems. The researchers followed the descriptive research method to analyze relations, as all students from the mathematics department in the morning study were part of the research group. The research sample of (100) male and female students has been chosen based on the arbitrators' views. The tools for studying the sample of research composed of (12) items of the multiple-choice test in its final form to measure tactical thinking and require establish-ing a test of (6) test-type paragraphs to solve mathematical problems. The findings showed that sample students' tactical thinking and their capacity to overcome mathem
... Show MoreThe automatic estimation of speaker characteristics, such as height, age, and gender, has various applications in forensics, surveillance, customer service, and many human-robot interaction applications. These applications are often required to produce a response promptly. This work proposes a novel approach to speaker profiling by combining filter bank initializations, such as continuous wavelets and gammatone filter banks, with one-dimensional (1D) convolutional neural networks (CNN) and residual blocks. The proposed end-to-end model goes from the raw waveform to an estimated height, age, and gender of the speaker by learning speaker representation directly from the audio signal without relying on handcrafted and pre-computed acou
... Show MoreIntroduction: The introduction of analytics tools in sports indicates that artificial neural networks can be one of the intelligent approaches to process complex data and identify patterns that help players move according to their most suitable positions. Objective: The purpose of this research is to investigate the possibility of using artificial neural networks to determine the physical and motor abilities of football players and determine their suitable playing positions based on exact quantitative indicators. Method: The study sample consists of 45 youth players aged (15–16) years from the Espanyol Football Academy in Baghdad. The results are analyzed using a multilayer perceptron (MLP) artificial neural network model to ident
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