Inflammatory bowel disease includes both Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, is a chronic, progressive relapsing disease of gastrointestinal tract that require long-term treatment or maintenance therapy. Taking patient’s beliefs about the prescribed medication in consideration had been shown to be an important factor that affects compliance of the patient in whom having positive beliefs is a prerequisite for better compliance. The aim of the current study was to investigate and assess beliefs about medicines among a sample of Iraqi patients with inflammatory bowel disease and to determine possible association between these beliefs and some patient-specific factors.

This study is a cross-sectional study carried out o

Dam and powerhouse operation sustainability is a major concern from the hydraulic engineering perspective. Powerhouse operation is one of the main sources of vibrations in the dam structure and hydropower plant; thus, the evaluation of turbine performance at different water pressures is important for determining the sustainability of the dam body. Draft tube turbines run under high pressure and suffer from connection problems, such as vibrations and pressure fluctuation. Reducing the pressure fluctuation and minimizing the principal stress caused by undesired components of water in the draft tube turbine are ongoing problems that must be resolved. Here, we conducted a comprehensive review of studies performed on dams, powerhouses, a

The gypseous soil may be one of the problems that face the engineers especially when it used as a foundation for hydraulic structures, roads, and other structures. Gypseous soil is strong soil and has good properties when it is dry, but the problem arises when building hydraulic installations or heavy buildings on this soil after wetting the water to the soil by raising the water table level from any source or from rainfall which leads to dissolve the gypsum content.

Cement-stabilized soil has been successfully used as a facing or lining for earth channel, highway embankments and drainage ditches to reduce the risk of erosion and collapsibility of soil. This study is deliberate the treatment of gypseous soil by u

The present study experimentally and numerically investigated the impact behavior of composite reinforced concrete (RC) beams with the pultruded I-GFRP and I-steel beams. Eight specimens of two groups were cast in different configurations. The first group consisted of four specimens and was tested under static load to provide reference results for the second group. The four specimens in the second group were tested first under impact loading and then static loading to determine the residual static strengths of the impacted specimens. The test variables considered the type of encased I-section (steel and GFRP), presence of shear connectors, and drop height during impact tests. A mass of 42.5 kg was dropped on the top surface at the m

Detection of early clinical keratoconus (KCN) is a challenging task, even for expert clinicians. In this study, we propose a deep learning (DL) model to address this challenge. We first used Xception and InceptionResNetV2 DL architectures to extract features from three different corneal maps collected from 1371 eyes examined in an eye clinic in Egypt. We then fused features using Xception and InceptionResNetV2 to detect subclinical forms of KCN more accurately and robustly. We obtained an area under the receiver operating characteristic curves (AUC) of 0.99 and an accuracy range of 97–100% to distinguish normal eyes from eyes with subclinical and established KCN. We further validated the model based on an independent dataset with

An encryption system needs unpredictability and randomness property to maintain information security during transmission and storage. Although chaotic maps have this property, they have limitations such as low Lyapunov exponents, low sensitivity and limited chaotic regions. The paper presents a new improved skewed tent map to address these problems. The improved skew tent map (ISTM) increases the sensitivity to initial conditions and control parameters. It has uniform distribution of output sequences. The programs for ISTM chaotic behavior were implemented in MATLAB R2023b. The novel ISTM produces a binary sequence, with high degree of complexity and good randomness properties. The performance of the ISTM generator shows effective s

     The paper shows how to estimate the three parameters of the generalized exponential Rayleigh distribution by utilizing the three estimation methods, namely, the moment employing estimation method (MEM), ordinary least squares estimation method (OLSEM),  and maximum entropy estimation method (MEEM). The simulation technique is used for all these estimation methods to find the parameters for the generalized exponential Rayleigh distribution. In order to find the best method, we use the mean squares error criterion. Finally, in order to extract the experimental results, one of object oriented programming languages visual basic. net was used

In this paper, a dynamic investigation is done for strip, rectangular and square machine foundation at the top surface of two-layer dry sand with various states (i.e., loose on medium sand and dense on medium sand). The dynamic investigation is performed numerically using finite element programming, PLAXIS 3D. The soil is expected as a versatile totally plastic material that complies with the Mohr-Coulomb yield criterion. A harmonic load is applied at the base with an amplitude of 6 kPa at a frequency of (2 and 6) Hz, and seismic is applied with acceleration – time input of earthquake hit Halabjah city north of Iraq. A parametric study is done to evaluate the influence of changing L/B ratio (Length=12,6,3 m and width=3 m), type of sand

The study explored applications of artificial intelligence and its dialectical relationship with international human rights law of individuals, which requires assessing the effects of this technology on human rights and freedoms. The problem of privacy of humanity, as AI technologies can control human rights and freedoms, while monitoring potential violations in this context. The study use of documentary research and qualitative lens to analyze the data. In conclusion, unawareness of the use of AI may impose significant hurdles on future generations and may infringe on human rights across all sectors of society. The government should mandate obligations for artificial intelligence businesses concerning education, health, human right