Background: Studies discussing the correlation between biochemical markers of bone turnover and the diagnosis of osteoporosis in postmenopausal Iraqi women are rare. This study is devoted to find out the significance of serum osteocalcin (OC) and osteopontin (OPN) levels with the incidence of osteoporosis and its major complication (fracture).Objectives: to investigate the significance of bone turnover biochemical markers; serum osteocalcin and serum osteopontin in evaluating osteoporosis for postmenopausal Iraqi women with and without history of vertebral fracture, as well as to explore the relationship of these markers with bone mineral density (BMD).Methods: Fifty seven postmenopausal women whose ages are fifty years old and over, cat

Invasomes are newly developed types of nanovesicles. A vesicular drug delivery system is considered one of the approaches for transdermal delivery to enhance permeation and improve drug bioavailability. Ondansetron is a serotonin receptor antagonist used for treating vomiting associated with different clinical cases. The study aimed to prepare invasomal dispersions for improving permeation of ondansetron across the skin with a controlled release pattern. Twenty-seven formulas of ondansetron-loaded invasomes were prepared by a modified mechanical dispersion method. These formulas were optimized by studying the effect of variables on entrapment efficiency. Vesicle size, polydispersity, zeta potential, in-vitro release and ex-vivo perm

The evacuated tube solar collector ETC is studied intensively and extensively by experimental and
theoretical works, in order to investigate its performance and enhancement of heat transfer, for Baghdad climate
from April 2011 till the end of March 2012. Experimental work is carried out on a well instrumented collector
consists of 16 evacuated tubes of aspect ratio 38.6 and thermally insulated tank of volume 112L. The relation
between convective heat transfer and natural circulation inside the tube is estimated, collector efficiency, effect of
tube tilt angles, incidence angle modifier, The solar heating system is investigated under different loads pattern (i.e
closed and open flow) to evaluate the heat loss coefficient

Generally, direct measurement of soil compression index (Cc) is expensive and time-consuming. To save time and effort, indirect methods to obtain Cc may be an inexpensive option. Usually, the indirect methods are based on a correlation between some easier measuring descriptive variables such as liquid limit, soil density, and natural water content. This study used the ANFIS and regression methods to obtain Cc indirectly. To achieve the aim of this investigation, 177 undisturbed samples were collected from the cohesive soil in Sulaymaniyah Governorate in Iraq. Results of this study indicated that ANFIS models over-performed the Regression method in estimating Cc with R² of 0.66 and 0.48 for both ANFIS and Regre

A hand gesture recognition system provides a robust and innovative solution to nonverbal communication through human–computer interaction. Deep learning models have excellent potential for usage in recognition applications. To overcome related issues, most previous studies have proposed new model architectures or have fine-tuned pre-trained models. Furthermore, these studies relied on one standard dataset for both training and testing. Thus, the accuracy of these studies is reasonable. Unlike these works, the current study investigates two deep learning models with intermediate layers to recognize static hand gesture images. Both models were tested on different datasets, adjusted to suit the dataset, and then trained under different m

Variable selection is an essential and necessary task in the statistical modeling field. Several studies have triedto develop and standardize the process of variable selection, but it isdifficultto do so. The first question a researcher needs to ask himself/herself what are the most significant variables that should be used to describe a given dataset’s response. In thispaper, a new method for variable selection using Gibbs sampler techniqueshas beendeveloped.First, the model is defined, and the posterior distributions for all the parameters are derived.The new variable selection methodis tested usingfour simulation datasets. The new approachiscompared with some existingtechniques: Ordinary Least Squared (OLS), Least Absolute Shrinkage

As a result of the significance of image compression in reducing the volume of data, the requirement for this compression permanently necessary; therefore, will be transferred more quickly using the communication channels and kept in less space in memory. In this study, an efficient compression system is suggested; it depends on using transform coding (Discrete Cosine Transform or bi-orthogonal (tap-9/7) wavelet transform) and LZW compression technique. The suggested scheme was applied to color and gray models then the transform coding is applied to decompose each color and gray sub-band individually. The quantization process is performed followed by LZW coding to compress the images. The suggested system was applied on a set of seven stand

Cost estimation is considered one of the important tasks in the construction projects management. The precise estimation of the construction cost affect on the success and quality of a construction project. Elemental estimation is considered a very important stage to the project team because it represents one of the key project elements. It helps in formulating the basis to strategies and execution plans for construction and engineering.  Elemental estimation, which in the early stage, estimates the construction costs depending on  . minimum details of the project so that it gives an indication for the initial design stage of a project. This paper studies the factors that affect the elemental cost estimation as well as the rela