Background: Prolapsed intervertebral disc is an important and common cause of low backache. MRI has now become universally accepted investigation for prolapsed intervertebral disc. We, however, regularly come across situations, when MRI shows diffuse disc bulges, even at multiple levels, which cannot be correlated clinically and when such cases are operated, no significant disc prolapse is found resulting in negative exploration.Objective: To evaluate the role of M.R.I. finding not only for diagnosis of disc herniation at lumbar region but also for localization the level of herniationMethods: A prospective study on seventy five symptomatic low backache and MRI confirmed prolapsed intervertebral disc patients at lumbo-sacral region were o

The m-consecutive-k-out-of-n: F linear and circular system consists of n sequentially connected components; the components are ordered on a line or a circle; it fails if there are at least m non-overlapping runs of consecutive-k failed components. This paper proposes the reliability and failure probability functions for both linearly and circularly m-consecutive-k-out-of-n: F systems. More precisely, the failure states of the system components are separated into two collections (the working and the failure collections); where each one is defined as a collection of finite mutual disjoint classes of the system states. Illustrative example is provided.

Deep drawing process to produce square cup is very complex process due to a lot of process parameters which control on this process, therefore associated with it many of defects such as earing, wrinkling and fracture. Study of the effect of some process parameters to determine the values of these parameters which give the best result, the distributions for the thickness and depths of the cup were used to estimate the effect of the parameters on the cup numerically, in addition to experimental verification just to the conditions which give the best numerical predictions in order to reduce the time, efforts and costs for producing square cup with less defects experimentally is the aim of this study. The numerical analysis is used to study

Surface drip irrigation is one of the most conservative irrigation techniques that help control providing water directly on the soil through the emitters. It can supply fertilizer and providing water directly to plant roots by drippers. One of the essential needs for trickle irrigation nowadays is to obtain more knowledge about the moisture pattern under the trickling source for various types of soil with various discharge levels with trickle irrigation. Simulation numerical using HYDRUS-2D software, version 2.04 was used to estimate an equation for the wetted area from a single surface drip irrigation in unsaturated soil is taking into account water uptake by roots. In this paper, using two soil types were used, namely

In this study, the induced splined shaft teeth contact and bending stresses have been investigated numerically using finite element method(Ansys package version 11.0) with changing the most effecting design parameter,(pressure angle, teeth number, fillet radius and normal module), for internal and external splined shaft. Experimental work has been achieved using two dimensional photoelastic techniques to get the contact and bending stresses; the used material is Bakelite sheet type “PSM-4”.
The results of numerical stress analysis indicate that, the increasing of the pressure angle and fillet radius decrease the bending stress and increase the contact stress for both internal and external spline shaft teeth while the increasing of

A novel concept of air heater using a heating element made from Aluminum metal porous disc surrounded by a DC resistive electrical heater inserted in the mid-plane of a copper tube of (52.8 mm) diameter and (480 mm) length is presented herein. Study of the developed heater is conducted; using different porous disc thicknesses of (20, 40, 60 mm), heater wall temperatures (106 °C and 119 °C), and flow rates rare varied from (100–300 L/min). Al-metal foam disc has been made using the metal powder technology. Different resistive electrical heaters according to the type of porous disc used have been manufactured. A 2-D computational model is developed, using continuity, momentum, and energy equations for turbulent forced flow in plain tube,

AIM: To determine the value of the combination of thin-section 3 mm ‎coronal and standard ‎axial DWI and their impact in facilitating the diagnosis of ‎‎acute brainstem infarction. METHODS: A cross-sectional study conducted from the 1st of April 2017 to the end of February 2018 on 100 consecutive patients (66% were male, and 34% were female) with isolated acute ischemic infarction in the ‎brainstem. The abnormal MRI findings concerning the ischemic lesions were interpreted on standard axial 5 mm and thin-section coronal 3mm DWI. RESULTS: The mean age of the studied group was 69.2 ± 4.3 for male and 72.3 ± 2.5 years. The standard axial DWI can diagnose 20%, 6.7% and 6.7% of the infarctions in midbrain, pons an

This study is to investigate the possibility of using activated carbon prepared from Iraqi date-pits (ADP) which are produced from palm trees (Phoenix dactylifera L.) as low-cost reactive material in the permeable reactive barrier (PRB) for treating lead (Pb⁺²) from the contaminated groundwater, and then compare the results experimentally with other common reactive materials such as commercial activated carbon (CAC), zeolite pellets (ZP). Factors influencing sorption such as contact time, initial pH of the solution, sorbent dosage, agitation speed, and initial lead concentration has been studied. Two isotherm models were used for the description of sorption data (Langmuir and Freundlich). The maximum lead sorp

Data-driven models perform poorly on part-of-speech tagging problems with the square Hmong language, a low-resource corpus. This paper designs a weight evaluation function to reduce the influence of unknown words. It proposes an improved harmony search algorithm utilizing the roulette and local evaluation strategies for handling the square Hmong part-of-speech tagging problem. The experiment shows that the average accuracy of the proposed model is 6%, 8% more than HMM and BiLSTM-CRF models, respectively. Meanwhile, the average F1 of the proposed model is also 6%, 3% more than HMM and BiLSTM-CRF models, respectively.

In this paper the use of a circular array antenna with adaptive system in conjunction with modified Linearly Constrained Minimum Variance Beam forming (LCMVB) algorithm is proposed to meet the requirement of Angle of Arrival (AOA) estimation in 2-D as well as the Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) of estimated sources (Three Dimensional 3-D estimation), rather than interference cancelation as it is used for. The proposed system was simulated, tested and compared with the modified Multiple Signal Classification (MUSIC) technique for 2-D estimation. The results show the system has exhibited astonishing results for simultaneously estimating 3-D parameters with accuracy approximately equivalent to the MUSIC technique (for estimating elevation and a