Clinical and haematological Findings in Sudanese patients With sickle cell disease Attending the hospitals in Elobeid, Kordofan

Objectives: This study aimed at assessing the clinical features and haematological parameters in sickler Sudanese patients attending El Obeid Hospitals in North Kordofan, Sudan. Materials and Methods: Eighty five patients with homozygous sickle cell (SS) disease, (both sexes) were included in this study. Their age ranged between 6 months to 42 years. Forty persons were used as control. Clinical manifestations were recorded at examination. Freshly obtained blood samples from patients and control were used to estimate haematological parameters which included: haemoglobin concentration (Hb), packed cell volume (PCV), red blood cell count (RBC), white blood cell count (WBC), mean corpuscular haemoglobin (MCH), mean corpuscular volume (MCV), and erythrocyte sedimentation rate (E.S.R).                Results: The clinical investigations revealed that all patients presented with painful crisis, 96.5% had chronic anemia, 84.7% had recurrent malaria and 81.2% had different infections (76% was chest infection). 32.9% of the sickle cell disease (SCD) patients had no blood transfusion, while the rest had blood transfused once to five times. Haematological measurement indicate that all SCD patients in this study were reported anaemic, and their Hb, PCV and RBC count were significantly lower (P<0.001) compared with the control group, while WBC count and MCV were significantly higher (P<0.001, P<0.01). In this study the prevalence of SCD in Misseria tribe (24.7%) was highest compared to other tribes. Conclusion: This study affirmed the problem of sickle cell disease in Kordofan state, which should draw attention toward the need of further studies

Comparison Between Gross Errors Detection Methods in Surveying Measurements

The least squares estimation method is commonly used to process measurements. In practice, redundant measurements are carried out to ensure quality control and to check for errors that could affect the results. Therefore, an insurance of the quality of these measurements is an important issue. Measurement errors of collected data have different levels of influence due to their number, measured accuracy and redundancy. The aim of this paper is to examine the detection of gross error capabilities in vertical control networks using three methods; Global Test, Data Snooping and Tau Test to compare the effectiveness of these three methods. With the least squares’ method, if there are gross errors in the observations, the sizes of the corresponding residuals may not always be larger than for other residuals that do not have gross errors. This makes it difficult to find (detect) it. Therefore, it is not certain that serious errors should be detected by just examining the magnitudes of the residuals alone. These methods are used in conjunction with developed programs to calculate critical values for the distributions (in real time) rather than look for these in statistical tables. The main conclusion reached is that the tau (τ) statistic is the most sensitive to the presence gross error detection; therefore, it is the one recommended to be used in gross error detection

Review: Recent Directions in ECG-FPGA Researches

لقد شهدت السنوات القليلة الماضية اهتماماً متزايداً نحو استخدام مصفوفة البوابات المنطقية القابلة للبرمجة FPGA في التطبيقات المختلفة. لقد أدى التقدم الحاصل في مرونة التعامل مع الموارد بالاضافة الى الزيادة في سرعة الاداء وانخفاض الثمن للـ FPGA وكذلك الاستهلاك القليل للطاقة الى هذا الاهتمام المتزايد بالـ FPGA. ان استخدام الـ FPGA في مجالات الطب والصحة يهدف بشكل عام الى استبدال اجهزة المراقبة الطبية كبيرة الحجم وغالية الثمن باخرى أصغر حجماً مع امكانية تصميمها لكي تكون اجهزة محمولة اعتماداً على مرونة التصميم التي يوفرها الـ FPGA. إنصب الاهتمام في العديد من البحوث الحالية على استخدام نظام FPGA لمعالجة الجوانب المتعلقة بإشارة تخطيط القلب وذلك لتوفير التحسينات في الاداء وزيادة السرعة بالاضافة الى أيجاد وإقتراح افكار جديدة لمثل هذه التطبيقات. ان هذا البحث يوفر نظرة عامة عن الاتجاهات الحالية في انظمة ECG-FPGA.The last few years witnessed an increased interest in utilizing field programmable gate array (FPGA) for a variety of applications. This utilizing derived mostly by the advances in the FPGA flexible resource configuration, increased speed, relatively low cost and low energy consumption. The introduction of FPGA in medicine and health care field aim generally to replace costly and usually bigger medical monitoring and diagnostic equipment with much smaller and possibly portable systems based on FPGA that make use of the design flexibility of FPGA. Many recent researches focus on FPGA systems to deal with the well-known yet very important electrocardiogram (ECG) signal aspects to provide acceleration and improvement in the performance as well as finding and proposing new ideas for such implementations. The recent directions in ECG-FPGA are introduced in this paper

Novel Antennas for UHF RFID Tags: Design and Miniaturization

This article focuses of study the nature and characteristics of the antenna, The collective electrical signals acquired from RFID antennas require advanced techniques for feeding, gains and radiation patterns. After an introduction to RFID technology itself (principle and characteristics of different RFID tags), the article offers some examples of applications of this technology in everyday life or in the industry. In order to use radio frequency identification (RFID) antenna for wireless communication and real world applications military and personal communication systems, mobile phones, personal digital assistant (PDA), blue-tooth systems, wireless local area networks (WLAN), road tolling systems, animal traceability etc, studying the nature and characteristics of the antenna is an important use. A novel printed antenna is proposed for Radio Frequency Identification. The antenna has a much wider bandwidth than known printed antenna, mostly planar antennas. The antenna geometry is much smaller than a printed dipole antenna at the same frequency band.DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.11591/ijece.v4i1.475

Big Data Processing in Cloud Computing Environments

Cloud computing is a powerful technology to perform massive-scale and complex computing. It eliminates the need to maintain expensive computing hardware, dedicated space, and software. Massive growth in the scale of data or big data generated through cloud computing has been observed. Addressing big data is a challenging and time-demanding task that requires a large computational infrastructure to ensure successful data processing and analysis. This paper introduces several Big Data processing techniques from system and application aspects. First, from the view of cloud data management and Big Data processing mechanisms, we present the key issues of Big Data. Following, we present the cloud computing for Big Data and related work. Furthermore, we also discuss, Big Data moving to the cloud. Finally, we present the conclusion and future work

Traumatic spinal injuries in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia: a study of associated injuries, management and mortality

Introduction: traumatic spinal fracture is a painful and disabling injury associated with poor long-term functional outcome. The objective of the present study was to assess the frequency of spinal fractures in road traffic accident (RTA) victims, their management, mortality rate and associated injuries. This study reveals and adds useful insights to the literature from Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) in terms of incidence of RTA-related spinal fractures, including their management and mortality rate. Methods: a cross-sectional study was conducted at King Khalid Hospital and Prince Sultan Center for Health Services (KKH & PSCHS) in AlKharj, KSA from September 2016 to June 2017. A total of 120 patients suffering from spinal/vertebral fractures due to RTAs were included in this study. The data was collected from patients' charts, including age, gender, region or distribution of the spinal fracture, associated fractures, number of fractures, degrees of shock, admission to intensive care unit (ICU), treatment modalities, along with the management of spinal fractures, days of hospital stay, referral and discharges or deaths. Results: the mean age of patients was 29.21. The most common anatomic region of the fracture was the cervical region (35%). Injuries associated with traumatic spinal fracture were predominated by clavicular fractures. More than half of the victims (58.30%) had a cervical brace applied before leaving the hospital. 29.20% patients required posterior stabilization with pedicle screws. Anterior corpectomy, grafting and plating was done to 4.30% patients. Conclusion: traumatic spinal fractures require prompt diagnosis and timely management in order to improve the outcome

Development of volume function for final felling of Pinus brutia Ten in Kurdistan Iraq

Planning for forest management depends upon the forest dynamics, which includes integration of all forest disciplines and understanding of forest resource characteristics including its growth dynamics. The forest growth and yield modelling can provide valuable information about forestry which can be used to determine harvest levels or allowable cut, and to analyze alternative stand treatments. Growth and yield models are generally used to predict the temporal development of forest stands. Knowledge of Diameter at Breast Height (DBH) and total tree height is fundamental to both developing and applying many growth and yield models [1]. Among the several available approaches in the yield prediction methodology, the multilevel model approach, which is a statistical technique, found to be commonly used in many fields of study for generating improvements in parameter estimation .A volume estimation of a forest stand is a good example. Volume estimation in the form of volume function and volume table has been widely used for many different purposes in forestry for more that hundred years including forest plantations and an inventory for timber harvesting. In view of the importance of these functions in forestry, this study was conducted with the main aim to develop a volume function for Pinus brutia Ten, which is a very common forest tree species planted in northern Iraq. The least squares method was used to fit eight unweighted volume equations including two logarithmic transformed equations and seven weighted forms of volume equations to volume data of a 25-30 years old Pinus brutia Ten plantation. The best fit equation was done using Furnival’s index

Fifth Generation (5G) New Radio (NR) Channel Codes Contenders Based on Field- Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA): A Review Paper

ان الحاجة المتزايدة على الجودة، مثل السرعة العالية والتاخير المنخفض والتغطية الواسعة واستهلاك الطاقة والتكلفة والاتصالات الموثوقة في خدمات الهاتف المحمول والوسائط المتعددة ونقل البيانات تفرض استخدام المتطلبات التقنية المتقدمة في الجيل الخامس (5G) الإذاعة الجديدة (NR). واحدة من أهم الأجزاء في الطبقة المادية للجيل الجديد هي تقنية الترميز لتصحيح الأخطاء. هنالك ثلاثة اشكال مقترحة لتقنيات الترميز المخصصة لقنوات نقل البيانات وقنوات التحكم هي  الترميز التوربيني وفحص التكافؤ المنخفض الكثافة (LDPC) والرموز القطبية. يتم تقييم المنافسة بين هذه الانواع من حيث القدرة على تصحيح الأخطاء والتعقيد الحسابي والمرونة. التوازي والمرونة وسرعة المعالجة العالية لمصفوفة البوابة القابلة للبرمجة الميدانية (FPGA) تجعلها أفضل في النماذج الأولية وتنفيذ الرموز المختلفة. تقدم هذه الورقة دراسة استقصائية للبحوث الحالية التي تتعامل مع تصميم وحدة فك الترميز المستندة إلى FPGA المرتبطة برموز القناة المذكورة سابقًا.The increased demands for quality, like high throughput, low-latency, wide coverage, energy consumption, cost and reliable connections in mobile services, multimedia and data transmission impose the use of advance technical requirements for the next fifth-generation (5G) new radio (NR). One of the most crucial parts in the physical layer of the new generation is the error correction coding technique. Three schemes, namely; Turbo, low density parity check (LDPC), and polar codes are potentially ‎considered as the candidate codes for both data and control channels. The competition is evaluated in terms of error correction capability, computational complexity, and flexibility. The parallelism, flexibility and high processing speed of Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) make it preferable in prototyping and implementation of different codes. This paper presents a survey on the current literatures that deals with FPGA-based decoder design associated with the previously mentioned channel codes

Association between blood lead levels and environmental exposure among Saudi schoolchildren in certain districts of Al-Madinah

Mohammed Adnan Zolaly1, Manal Ibrahim Hanafi2,3, Nashaat Shawky4, Khalid el-Harbi1, Ahmed M Mohamadin5,61Pediatric Department, 2Family and Community Medicine Department, Medical College, Taibah University, Al-Madinah Al-Munawwarah, Saudi Arabia; 3Community Medicine Department, Faculty of Medicine, Alexandria University, Alexandria, Egypt; 4Ophthalmology Department, Medical College, 5Chemistry for Health Sciences Department, Deanery of Academic Services, Taibah University, Al-Madinah Al-Munawwarah, Saudi Arabia; 6Biochemistry Department, Faculty of Pharmacy, Al-Azhar University, Cairo, EgyptIntroduction: Both occupational and environmental exposures to lead remain a serious problem in many developing and industrializing countries. When humans are exposed to high levels of lead, there is damage to almost all organs and organ systems (most importantly, the central nervous system, kidneys, and blood), which often culminates in death.Objective: To estimate the prevalence of blood lead levels (BLLs) and to identify the sources of environmental exposure and potential risk factors for elevated BLLs among Saudi schoolchildren.Methods: A cross-sectional survey was conducted from March to May 2010. The study population included 557 Saudi school students of both sexes. A multistage random sampling technique was used. Information about socioeconomic status, house and school construction, and parents' education and employment was collected using questionnaires. Lead was analyzed in a blood sample using an atomic absorption technique and hemoglobin was measured using a Sysmex hematological analyzer.Results: The mean BLL was 4.94 ± 3.38 µg/dL (range 0.45–26.3 µg/dL). A total of 19% had BLLs <1.0 µg/dL, 16% had BLLs <2.5 µg/dL, 15% had BLLs <5.0 µg/dL, 20% had BLLs <7.5 µg/dL, 25% had BLLs <10.0 µg/dL, and about 6% had BLLs >10.0 µg/dL. Analysis of odds by controlling all risk factors (adjusted odds ratio [OR]) that affect BLLs (≥10 µg/dL) indicated that using cosmetics (OR = 18.5, confidence interval [CI] = 14.4–19.8), putting colored toys in mouth (OR = 15.7, CI = 3.6–16.2), eating canned food (OR = 9.8, CI = 7.0–10.1), and using newspaper during food preparation (OR = 7.6, CI = 6.3–8.2) are risk factors. There were significant correlations between BLLs and family habits (r = 0.225, P = 0.000), personal habits (r = 0.321, P = 0.000), eating habits (r = 0.128, P = 0.002) and school building characteristics (r = 0.469, P = 0.000). There was a significant correlation between BLLs and anemia in age group 6 < 12 years (P = 0.000) and age group 12 to less than 18 years, among males (P = 0.000) and females (P = 0.041).Conclusion: The BLLs of children are affected by multiple factors. Female students have higher BLLs and lower hemoglobin concentration than males. The possible sources of lead exposure were use of toothpaste, use of kohl, putting colored toys in the mouth, use of both canned food and canned juice, use of lip gloss in females, and different methods of handling newspaper while preparing food.Keywords: blood, lead, exposure, cosmetics, schoolchildren, anemi