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The practices of manufacturing organizations contribute massively to the increasing deterioration of the environment in developing countries. However, there is data paucity and limited studies on h...

Cerebral palsy was a primary neuromotor disorder that affects the development of movement, muscular tone and posture due to injury to the developing brain in prenatal, natal, or post-natal period. cp is non progressive disease but it is changeable features with period. The objective of this study is to identify clinical types of cerebral palsy and neuro-disabilities associated with cerebral palsy patient. Data (2019-2020) on 100 children of cerebral palsy in central teaching hospital in Baghdad analysis include clinical patterns of cerebral palsy and topographic classification of spastic cerebral palsy. also, the complication and neurological disabilities associated with cerebral palsy. In this analysis found most of cerebral palsy patients (84%) were spastic according to topographic classification, (47%) of spastic cerebral palsy was diplegic type. (29%) quadriplegic cerebral palsy and (8%) of hemiplegic cerebral palsy. About neurological complication and disabilities associated with cerebral palsy, (79%) of cerebral palsy patients had speech disturbance. (53%) had epilepsy, (43%) Micro acephaly, (32%) of patients had growth retardation, (29 %) had ocular problems, and (15%) of cerebral palsy patients had mental retardation. In conclusions; the most common type of cerebral palsy was spastic cerebral palsy & according to a topographic classification diplegic spastic cerebral palsy was the most common type of Spastic cerebral palsy. About neurodisabilities associated with cerebral palsy, the most common disabilities were speech disturbance and epilepsy.

Objectives: The aim of this study is to evaluate short-term results and efficacy of tricuspid valve annuloplasty by the modified De Vega technique. Study design: A prospective cohort study. Setting:Cardiothoracic Surgery Department in collaboration with general surgery department, Qena University Hospital, South Valley University, Qena, Egypt. Duration: FromOctober 2018 to January 2020. Subjects and Methods:25 patients underwent tricuspid valve annuloplasty for functional TR caused by Rt sided dilatation secondary to the left-sided valvular lesion. Informed consent was obtained from all patients in this study. Pts with mild TR, (organic) tricuspid regurgitation or TV endocarditis, and isolated TV lesions were excluded from the study. Result(s):Follow-up echocardiography after 6 months did not show any severe tricuspid regurgitation, but otherwise, most of the patients with mild tricuspid regurge 17 pts (68%) and 8 patients (32%) with moderate regurge, as regard ejection fraction and LV dimensions there were no difference, while there was a significant reduction in LA diameter, pulmonary artery pressure, and RV diameter with p value

Stopband split ring resonator (SSRR) is presented in this paper for measuring complex permittivity of liquid with different position of microfluidic channel operates at resonant frequency of 1 GHz. The sensor was fabricated and microfluidic channel is located in the gap groove with two different positions of the carrier where the electric field is as large as possible. The sensor has been tested with several solvents to verify its sensitivity where the electric field interacts with the liquid filled in a quartz tube and hence alter the SRR behavior. The electromagnetic properties (complex permittivity) of the solvent can be extracted from shift in the resonant frequency of the resonator due to perturbation phenomenon.

An intrusion detection system (IDS) is an active research topic and is regarded as one of the important applications of machine learning. An IDS is a classifier that predicts the class of input records associated with certain types of attacks. In this article, we present a review of IDSs from the perspective of machine learning. We present the three main challenges of an IDS, in general, and of an IDS for the Internet of Things (IoT), in particular, namely concept drift, high dimensionality, and computational complexity. Studies on solving each challenge and the direction of ongoing research are addressed. In addition, in this paper, we dedicate a separate section for presenting datasets of an IDS. In particular, three main datasets, namely KDD99, NSL, and Kyoto, are presented. This article concludes that three elements of concept drift, high-dimensional awareness, and computational awareness that are symmetric in their effect and need to be addressed in the neural network (NN)-based model for an IDS in the IoT.

The content-based image retrieval (CBIR) based on sparse visual features is a challenging research problem to categorize images into semantically meaningful classes. Different robust feature representation methods have been proposed to address the semantic gap issue of CBIR. In this article, we propose a novel robust image representation for CBIR, which is based on complementary visual words integration of speeded up robust features (SURF) and co-occurrence histograms of oriented gradients (CoHOG). The SURF is a local feature descriptor, while CoHOG is a global feature descriptor. The local features give better performance for images belonging to different semantic classes and having close visual appearance among their visual contents, while global features give better performance to retrieval images at large scale. To ensure image retrieval accuracy, the proposed method build two smaller size dictionaries, each containing visual words of SURF and CoHOG descriptors, which are assimilated to form one larger size dictionary. In the CBIR system, a dictionary of smaller size produces better sensitivity, while a dictionary of larger sizes produces better specificity. The dictionary of the larger sizes also yields an overfitting problem to affect CBIR performance, which is addressed by introducing a linear discriminant analysis (LDA) and relevance feedback with the proposed method. The comparative performance analysis of the proposed method is performed with the competitor CBIR methods (i.e., feature integration of SURF–CoHOG descriptors’ based on the bag-of-visual-words (BoVW), a single feature of SURF–BoVW and CoHOG–BoVW methods). The quantitative and qualitative analysis carried out on four standard image databases proves the robust performance of the proposed method as compared to its competitor and recent CBIR methods.

Objective: To evaluate the role of needle diameter in causing postdural puncture headache (PDPH) in patients undergoing elective caesarian section. Study Design: Comparative cross-sectional study. Place and Duration of Study: This study was conducted in Department of Anaesthesia and Intensive care PNS Shifa Karachi over duration of six months. Patients and Methods: It was a cross sectional study of 100 patients, which were divided into two separate groups. Group I and Group II were given spinal anaesthesia with 25 gauge and 27 gauge Quincke needles respectively. In both the groups the patients were randomly selected and were blind to size of the spinal needle used. Results: The data was analyzed using Chi-square test. A P value of

Recently, manufacturing firms faced pressure from stakeholders to adopt environmentally friendly business practices, as it became necessary to identify environmental practices that enhance sustainability performance.As growing amount of studies have focused on environmental logistic management (ELM) practices that incorporate ecological thinking, these practices are expected to affect environmental impact of organizations. The aim of this study is to review the various literatures on the relationship between ELM practices, stakeholders pressure and sustainability performance. Furthermore, this study aims to propose a reasonable conceptual model to clarify the relationship between these three variables in the context of the Palestinian manufacturing sector. The research findings will be specifically imperative for manufacturing organizations with the aim of improving their sustainability.

This study including collected 172 blood sample from AL-Kafeel University college, these samples including102 sample to male and 70 sample for female in which students samples were 53 for smoker and 119 nonsmoker , to evaluate some of parameters such as ABO , RH , blood pressure and clotting time .The results showed blood group A+ was more frequent which represent 33.7 % followed by O+ blood groupwhich represent 25.6% while B- was the last ,in other results displayed AB- and RH + was more frequent thanRH -. Systolic and diastolic pressure examined was demonstrated there were mild hypertension in bloodpressure between samples of studied, while result gloating time was exhibited range 30 sec to 3 minute .

Dexamethasone is one of the most widely used glucocorticoids which has a prominent glucocorticoid with slight mineralocorticoid property. This study was performed on twenty four adult Sprague Dawley rats to evaluate the proposed effects of dexamethasone offering as intraperitoneal injection. The animals were allocated randomly into three groups of eight rats to each. The protocol of experiment was: the control group; animals are injected intraperitoneally with 2ml of distilled water, the dexamethasone 1 group; animals are injected intraperitoneally with dexamethasone 2mg/kg, and the dexamethasone 2 group; animals are injected intraperitoneally with dexamethasone 4mg/kg. The injection period extended for one month. The results illustrate that dexamethasone cause significant declination in RBC, PCV, Hb, HDL, and neutrophils besides significant elevations in WBC, eosinophils, monocytes, LDL, TC, TG, VLDL, AST, ALT, and creatinine on a direct positive proportion with the increase in dexamethasone dose comparing with control group at (P?0.05).

The study was directed to determine Single Nucleotide Polymorphism (rs6166 A>G) of follicle stimulating hormone receptor gene and their association as a risk factor with male infertility in Iraqi sterile patient. In the present study after seminal and serum analysis 50 patient (25 Azoospermia and 25 oligozoospermia) and 50 healthy fertile control were joined. The samples were collected from the Biotechnology Department/college of science/Baghdad university and Kamal Al-Samarie IVF Hospital, Baghdad, Iraq. through the period of two months from November 2018 to January 2019. The SNP (rs 6166) determination was carried out by using real-time polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) of blood samples. The difference in the mean of genotype showed a significantly different (p

Research developed system of transportation at the University of Baghdad campus, based on indicators, although main goal for a clean environment with economical returns, but it can be beneficial for environmental sustainability as well as economic profits. Consequently, there is a need to submit new proposals on sustainable transportation based on policies determined by research objective in reducing number of parking spaces and increasing clean transportation options in walking, biking and an electric train. Research problem is environmental pollution due to transportation system within the University of Baghdad and lack of equity in distribution of parking lots, and thus a difference in arrival time to buildings. First, it was touched upon sustainable transportation policies and features in high-frequency places of movement such as universities, and then analyzing general plan of the University of Baghdad and methods of movement and parking that were previously designed to determine whether it meets requirements of building users. Then assessing quality environment of master plan by modelling to find out the relationship between required road area and number parking lots, by a set of variables have an effect on realization sustainable transportation policies, as well as to estimate needs in relation to parking lots. The results concluded that the parking lot distribution is neither environmentally sustainable nor social justification, given clear difference in duration of arrival for students and staff on foot from parking to building and lack of equity in distribution. However, a group over 23% can contribute to sustainable transportation by walking. Therefore, research recommends preparing and implementing design for transportation programs, parking lots and biking paths according to the effects of variables in statistical model to reduce problems of planning, environmental, social and economic on campus.

Owing to their significant popularity, Facebook and other social network sites have gained considerable importance. The popularity of Facebook can be signified through more than 1.2 billion users, i.e. one in every five persons in the world is a Facebook user. It is being used for a variety of activities including sharing of opinions, announcing something or sending invites to parties and events, meeting new people, etc. This paper examines the legal aspects of resolving disputes, which occur in the world of social networking. The social matters are pertinent to the legal aspects. Thus, this article will focus on social science in most areas to present a more thorough approach. For example, the association between disclosure of private information and the friends list, the relation between disputes and social activities and the limitations on viewing others' private profiles will be reviewed.

As a widely used banking service and application, credit cards have gained popularity in the last few years. They have broadened in techniques, impressions on clients and consumer transactions. Owing to the fact that masses are utilizing this facility, credit cards have become more popular, especially in Jordan. The lawmakers of the country have not yet updated the legal system according to the ongoing advancements through special laws. Such an update would pave the way for legal protection. This is an ongoing process, and people are currently experiencing legal dilemmas owing to the unlawful use of credit cards.

The purpose of this paper is to present three novel methods of road traffic flow level of service on the basis of safety, prevention of accidents by available perception time and available stopping distance, and the risk of pedestrians sustaining severe injuries and risk of death. The risk of accidents and risk of sustaining severe injuries or death increase with the reduction of gap between the vehicle and the pedestrian casualty. Hence, the closest the pedestrian is from the vehicle the more likely he/she will sustain sever injuries or die. Researchers have assessed the impact of an accident by passenger cars and light goods vehicles on pedestrian, but they overlooked the impact of heavy goods vehicles. For roads with relatively high percentage of heavy goods vehicles in the traffic flow, an investigation of the risk of losing human lives and high expenses due to accidents is beneficial. Level of service methods that describe the risk of accidents in low quality operational conditions are necessary for accident prevention purposes.

In the era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, one of the key drivers of change is a sharing economy or so called 'uberization'. Uberization is especially rapidly developing in the service sector, in particular - when organizing individual passenger transportation by taxi services. Such taxi services as Uber and Gett, that use technological Internet platforms, allow faster and cheaper than traditional taxi companies to order the taxi. From the other point of view, they have the same disadvantage as the usage of individual transport is often associated with. It is the incomplete load of vehicles, which causes an additional negative impact on the environment as well as on the road network. This article presents a decision support system for taxi dispatch services based on the model of optimal route choice. Optimization is carried out with the help of multifactor analysis of transportation requirements and selection of the optimal route in accordance with given priorities. Such a system will reduce the cost of transportation and negative impact on the environment through the selection of fellow travelers by using a mobile application.

The last few years, more specifically since 1995, have seen very important developments in the networking and technology of electronic commerce. The e-signature is one of these technologies working toward electronic commerce. A major issue highlighted and appropriately discussed in this article is regarding the parameters identifying an e-signature and authenticating the same. The current form of the Electronic Transaction Law (ETL) provides for two different ways for verifying e-signatures, which at times creates ambiguity. With regard to the major defect that the provisions and rules of the ETL create, in respect of the validity of an e-signature and an authentic signature in proof, the authors see that the ETL should clearly provide that an e-signature shall have a validity in proof the same as the traditional signature, while an authentic e-signature shall have a validity in proof the same as a written signature.

Visible light communications (VLC) have been pro- posed as a means of moving part of the indoor traffic to the optical spectrum. The deployment of LED lights for data transmission forming attocells in the cellular networks known as Light-Fidelity (LiFi) interacts with other radiofrequency (RF) based networks such as WiFi or femtocells. Since LED lights illuminate a small confined area and interfere with other LED lights, the hybrid network composed of the LiFi and RF systems can be employed for resource management allocating each user to a specific network. In this work, we consider the use of a novel inference management scheme for LiFi known as Blind Interference Alignment (BIA) that avoids both the multi-user and the intercell interference. However, BIA schemes are limited by noise increase due to interference subtraction and the channel coherence block requirement, which increase with the number of user served by the LiFi network. It is shown that the hybrid LiFi/RF network allow to relax the requirements for BIA implementation and increase the sum- rate of the whole network.

Crimes targeting to damage the property of natural and legal individuals including states are in existence while the objective of people, groups and the entire organizations when committing crimes is illegal property gain in the structure of national, but also of global crime. However, they are insufficient hence they attempt to decriminalize money or other property earned in such manner, e.g. by inserting them into lawful operations and flows. Nonetheless, perpetrators of this kind of crime attempt to hide the right source of money or profit earned in such manner using all means possible. Banking secrecy is one of the main barriers that stand in front of anti-money laundering because it comprises of a barrier to access to bank deposits, and a protection for doubtful funds since it is one of the conventional rules pertinent to the work banks, where clients’ secrets and banking operations are saved by Bank’s commitment by law and custom unless there is provision in the law or in the agreement stating otherwise. This study is aimed at indicating the most significant stages and techniques of money laundering at banking institutions in Jordan and also discussing the function of the Jordanian banks in the light of the pertinent legislation.

Social networks are increasingly becoming important due to many aspects of everyday life supported and being facilitated through on-line activity. Billions of individuals are enjoying the use of social networks today and, therefore, they are becoming an important innovation in the modern world. However, due to disputes and concerns that are associated with such activities, the social networking world has yet to reach its full potential. When disputes occur in the on-line world, measures need be taken to settle those disputes in the same way that they were created. Through solving these disputes, the social networking world will be assisted in reaching full potential. One way of settling user disputes in the social networking world is the use of online arbitration. There are a number of advantages to using online arbitration as the parties involved will only communicate through the Internet and do not need to travel throughout the process. This helps in lowering the litigation costs to all parties involved. Considering the advantages online, arbitration has and the power that the social networking world bares, it is possible for users' disputes to be resolved and encourage communication between masses of users to build their confidence. With confidence that their disputes can be resolved easily, more users will be willing to publicise their profile for other users to view.

In process plants, alarms are configured to notify operators of any abnormalities or faults. However, in practice a majority of raised alarms are false or nuisance and create problems for operators as they face an increasing number of alarms to handle. Adding delay-timers is a simple technique that can reduce this problem and is widely exercised in industry. In this work we propose a generalized delay-timer framework where instead of consecutive n samples in the conventional case, n 1 out of n consecutive samples ( n 1 ≤ n ) are considered to raise an alarm. For the generalized delay-timer, three important performance indices, namely, the false alarm rate (FAR), the missed alarm rate (MAR) and the expected detection delay (EDD), are calculated using Markov processes. Moreover, the performance and sensitivity of generalized delay-timers are compared with conventional delay-timers.

The virtual social networking world, otherwise known as VSW, is described as an electronic world in which one can live in each and every single day. In this world the people who live in it are known as “netisens” as referred to by R. Johnson. These are the citizens of this new virtual world. It is a requirement that netisens should be empowered against the online “wisards” and other “online overloads” that dominate the online and virtual worlds. It is important that the virtual world be neatly integrated with the social world so as to create proper structures. This is to ensure that appropriate resolution systems are established for the social network users in order to shift power and create a balance of power between the owners and the users of this social world. An example of this for instance may be having a democratically elected parliament for Facebook.

By definition, the soul of software ecosystems is synergistic cooperation. As the oil and gas industry is perceived to be closed and conservative, this makes the software ecosystems in the industry unique and the main motivation for this paper. The literature currently available on software ecosystems does not cover the oil and gas exploration & production (E&P) industry and there has been limited research in this field. This paper investigates the most critical factors that make a software ecosystem successful in the E&P industry. The research was conducted on software ecosystems in the E&P industry. The sample of the research consisted of the platform providers, third-party developers and E&P companies. Through a literature review, a comprehensive software ecosystem strategy assessment model was identified and the factors from that model were evaluated. These factors are analyzed and discussed in the paper and presented from the perspective of various players of the ecosystem. Based on the results from the interviews, discussions and data analysis, a new Critical Success Factors model is designed. This model identifies the influencing factors (that affect the critical success factors) and the resulting factors (that exist because of the critical success factors).

Summary Directional steered attributes are often used to delineate features that extend in a certain direction and to minimize the amount of noise captured. We present a new method that applies directional filters to several angles with a small increment on separate cubes. After which, the sum of these individual cubes is used which builds on the principle of superposition. If a feature is present in more than one direction, it will be further highlighted, and features such as noise, which are usually present only in a certain direction at time, are suppressed. The objective of this study was to create a method that gives a more complete model of the faults networks, and as such, involved a Sobel based edge detection algorithm for delineating amplitude discontinuities. Though, we also included a gradient decent dip estimation to capture the phase changing faults.

Abstract In this work, we suggest an improved method of traversing post-stack seismic data with an adaptive operator size for detecting edges. Attributes, in the coherence family, used for edge detection usually have a static operator size (Marfurt and Chopra, Seismic attributes for prospect identification and reservoir characterization, 2007). This can prove to be limiting in that one would under or over sample in regions of higher or lower frequencies respectively. By looking at the nature of seismic data, which commonly changes from short wavelength to longer wavelength signals in depth/time, an adaptive approach is more suitable for detection of features. By adjusting the operator size in relation to the depth/time, we are better following the frequencies of the data as we filter them. To increase the accuracy and resolution of our filtering we have chosen to interpolate between adjacent seismic traces. However, seismic data is not that simple in structure such that one can only vary in depth/time. Geological features such as dipping, salt and gas result in chaotic and varying frequencies regardless of when they occur. This is why we have introduced a textural analysis to account for this change and adapt our filtering to it. We have chosen to use chaos (Iske and Randen, 2005) as our seismic texture change indicator, as we are looking for changes to higher frequencies that usually results in chaotic textures. The attribute we have chosen to implement is a 3D Sobel based edge detector, namely amplitude contrast (Aqrawi & Boe, 2011). In essence, the textural analysis in this case will decide the outcome of two things. One, the choice of preconditioning prior to filtering, and the second is the normalization method used. While, when implementing the operator size of our edge filter, relative depth/time is used to adjust it adaptively. As such, the algorithm operator size is time variant and accounts for seismic texture by varying the selected algorithm to filter with and the appropriate operator size to do so. To test our algorithm, a heavily faulted seismic dataset from the Norwegian North Sea has been used to test the methodology of the adaptive calculations. Our results indicate that the adaptive edge method ensures a higher level of detail, and highlights the smaller amplitude discontinuities better than a static operator size approach. It also proves to increase continuity and reduces the detection of noise, which overall gives a more accurate edge detection of the seismic data. Adapting Attribute Calculations to the Nature of Seismic Data Seismic data is highly varying in nature given the way it is acquired. There is more detail in the seismic image in the overburden where one has higher frequency information. As we propagate along time, we see that the loss of higher frequency signal gives longer wavelength information and hence is not as rich in detail. As such, similar geological features will look and respond differently depending on when they are captured. As an example, a fault is often seen as an amplitude discontinuity in higher frequency information, but a change in phase in lower frequency signals. In this example, we are looking at the same fault feature, but its representation in the seismc data has changed (see Figure 1). Not only do we see a variation in the seismic signal in time, but also in seismic texture given changes in geological features captured (see Figure 1). For example, a chaotic texture for a geological feature such as salt will result in a nosier signal and hence capture higher frequency information than the surrounding signal data. This means that seismic data varies in time, but also along the lateral directions at the same time as we have variations in seismic texture. This is why it is more accurate to have a changing operator size that accounts for both variations along the vertical axis of the seismic data, as well as seismic texture. This basically means if one has high frequency information, using a smaller operator size will account for all the detailed features. While in low frequency regions, one uses a larger operator to avoid the detection of noise together with features.

To assess performance of a plant's alarm system, it is necessary to evaluate various performances indices. False alarm rates, missed alarm rates and detection delays are considered as important performance measures for univariate alarm design. To reduce false and nuisance alarms, filtering is widely used in industries. However there has been very limited study on performance specifications of various filtering methods, and the quantitative relation between filter properties and these performance indices are not well known. In this paper we investigate the effect of filtering on detection delay as an important alarm performance index.

For a more accurate geological model, it is crucial to have accurate segmentation and delineation of salt structures. These are known to be difficult to segment given their chaotic nature. However, there are attributes that isolate the salt boundaries well. These attributes usually are a good indication of the flanks of the salt structure but struggle in segmenting the salt body as a whole. In our work, we propose an automated seeded growing method that will segment the salt bodies from the other structures in post-stack seismic data. Here, edge volumes are used as inputs to give a good indication of the flanks and borders of our salt structures. We based our method upon the conventional seeded growing approach, and extended this with a novel hybrid smoothing technique and boundary termination detection. the hybrid smoothing technique uses the textural attribute of chaos as the alternating criteria between the mean, gausian and median noise reduction attributes. Finally we detect discontinuous boundaries, as this can sometimes be the case, by evaluating the growing directions of our seed points and terminate based on unbalanced growing behavior.

Space research organizations, hospitals and military air surveillance activities, among others, produce a huge amount of data in the form of images hence a large storage space is required to record this information. In hospitals, data produced during medical examination is in the form of a sequence of images and are very much correlated; because these images have great importance, some kind of lossless image compression technique is needed. Moreover, these images are often required to be transmitted over the network. Since the availability of storage and bandwidth is limited, a compression technique is required to reduce the number of bits to store these images and take less time to transmit them over the network. For this purpose, there are many state-of the-art lossless image compression algorithms like CALIC, LOCO-I, JPEG-LS, JPEG20000; Nevertheless, these compression algorithms take only a single file to compress and cannot exploit the correlation among the sequence frames of MRI or CE images. To exploit the correlation, a new algorithm is proposed in this paper. The primary goals of the proposed compression method are to minimize the memory resource during storage of compressed data as well as minimize the bandwidth requirement during transmission of compressed data. For achieving these goals, the proposed compression method combines the single image compression technique called super spatial structure prediction with inter-frame coding to acquire grater compression ratio. An efficient compression method requires elimination of redundancy of data during compression; therefore, for elimination of redundancy of data, initially, the super spatial structure prediction algorithm is applied with the fast block matching approach and later Huffman coding is applied for reducing the number of bits required for transmitting and storing single pixel value. Also, to speed up the block-matching process during motion estimation, the proposed method compares those blocks that have identical sum and leave the others; therefore, the time taken by the block-matching process is reduced by minimizing the unnecessary overhead during the blockmatching process. Thus, in the proposed fast lossless compression method for medical image sequences, the twostage redundant data elimination process ultimately reduces the memory resource required for storing and transmission. The method is tested on the sequences of MRI and CE images and produces an improved compression rate.

This paper builds upon the earlier research which proposed the use of satellite communication media to achieve improved performance of the Loss-Of-Mains (LOM) protection by eliminating nuisance tripping and ensuring reliable islanding detection. The focus of this paper is the practical development of the laboratory based trial of the satellite based LOM protection and the experimental assessment of the performance of such protection scheme.

A technique for fabrication of nanosized metal and anodic oxide films with improved optical features for displays and photonic devices is discussed. We have found that for dielectric substrates like glasses the special method of current control should be applied during anodizing a metal film. This method can change the porous oxide structure at the final stage and prevent formation of metal islands. To transform the residual metal into oxide, special fading process similar to anode bonding can be used.

Delineating salt is an inherently difficult problem. Currently, there are several methods to detecting salt bodies in seismic. However, the result and volumes are often noisy, and are therefore hard to use for voxel based segmentation interpretation. We present a new method of using a 3D Sobel edge detector in combination with dip guiding to generate clearer images. We also introduce elements of weighting and normalization to achieve our results.

Background Researchers in the medical sciences prefer employing Cox model for survival analysis. In some cases, however, parametric methods can provide more accurate estimates. In this study, we used Weibull model to analyze the prognostic factors in patients with gastric cancer and compared with Cox. Methods We retrospectively studied 1715 patients with gastric cancer. Age at diagnosis, gender, family history, past medical history, tumor location, tumor size, eradicative degree of surgery, depth of tumor invasion, combined evisceration, pathologic stage, histologic grade and lymph node status were chosen as potential prognostic factors. Weibull and Cox model were performed with hazard rate and Akaike Information Criterion (AIC) to compare the efficiency of models. Results The results from both Weibull and Cox indicated that patients with the past history of having gastric cancer had the risk of death increased significantly followed by poorly differentiated or moderately differentiated in histologic grade. Eradicative degree of surgery, pathologic stage, depth of tumor invasion and tumor location were also identified as independent prognostic factors found significant. Age was significant only in Weibull model. Conclusion From the results of multivariate analysis, the data strongly supported the Weibull can elicit more precise results as an alternative to Cox based on AIC.

Automatic fault detection and extraction is still considered to be a major challenge in the industry. Faults are usually detected with the use of edge detection attributes like variance, coherence, chaos, and semblance. This abstract presents the results of a modification of a classical edge detector, namely Sobel. The detector is modified with weighting, normalization and dip guiding to achieve the presented results.

In this work, friction stir spot welding (FSSW) was performed for dissimilar aluminum alloys (AA2024-T3 and AA5754-H114) sheets of 2 mm thick at different tool rotational speeds (800, 1000 and 1250 rpm), plunging times (30, 60 and 90 s) and tool pin profile or geometry (threaded cylindrical with flute, tapered cylindrical and straight cylindrical). Process parameters were optimized by using Taguchi technique and depending on design of experiment (DOE), and data analysis based on the Taguchi method is performed by utilizing the Minitab 17 to estimate the significant factors of the FSSW and main effects using few experimental tests only. It was found that maximum shear force was (2860 N) obtained at best welding process parameters: 800 rpm of rotation speed, 60 s of plunging time and taper cylindrical pin which are obtained from the DOE. Pareto chart of the standardized effects of tensile shear results showed that the pin profile was the most effective parameter than other welding parameters (rotation speed and plunging time). Also it was found that the contribution percentage was 61.5% for pin profile followed by tool rotation speed 20.1% and plunging time 18.4%.

In process plants, alarms are configured to notify operators of any abnormalities or faults. However, in practice a majority of raised alarms are false or nuisance and create problems for operators as they face an increasing number of alarms to handle. Adding delay-timers is a simple technique that can reduce this problem and is widely exercised in industry. In this work we propose a generalized delay-timer framework where instead of consecutive n samples in the conventional case, n 1 out of n consecutive samples (n 1 ≤ n) are considered to raise an alarm. For the generalized delay-timer, two important performance indices, namely, the false alarm rate (FAR) and the missed alarm rate (MAR) are calculated using Markov processes. Also the performance of generalized delay-timers is compared with conventional delay-timers.