Background: Legionella pneumophila (L. pneumophila) is gram-negative bacterium, which causes Legionnaires’ disease as well as Pontiac fever. Objective: To determine the frequency of Legionella pneumophila in pneumonic patients, to determine the clinical utility of diagnosing Legionella pneumonia by urinary antigen testing (LPUAT) in terms of sensitivity and specificity, to compares the results obtained from patients by urinary antigen test with q Real Time PCR (RT PCR) using serum samples and to determine the frequency of serogroup 1 and other serogroups of L. pneumophila. Methods: A total of 100 pneumonic patients (community acquired pneumonia) were enrolled in this study during a period between October 2016 to April 2017; 92 samples were collected from patients attended and admitted to Al-Imamein Al-Kadhimein Medical City and 8 samples from those in the (Center of Kidney Diseases and Transplantation) in the Medical City of Baghdad. All patients were under therapy with antibiotics. Serum and urine specimens were obtained from all patients; urine samples were processed for urinary antigen test (rapid test). Serum samples were collected and submitted to DNA extraction for detection of L. pneumophila mip gene by q RT PCR assay. Results: The percentage of L. pneumophila in two hospitals in Bagdad was 30%. Of these 26% was serogroup 1 detected by urinary antigen testing (UAT). In the other hand, 23% of samples were positive by q RT PCR based mip gene, of these 19 % were serogroup 1 and 4% were another serogroup. The sensitivity of UAT is high (P value < 0.001), which means statistically highly significance than q RT PCR. Conclusion: LPUAT is a rapid tool for early diagnosis of Legionella infection, which highlights the need of using this test in hospitals and health institutions and there is a high prevalence of L. pneumophila in Iraq that refer to the necessity of considering this microorganism point of view in future studies for detection and treatment in pneumonic patients. Keywords: L. pneumophila, mip gene, quantitative real time PCR, urinary antigen. Citation: Gauad SA, Abdulrahman TR, Muhamad AK, Jawad AA, Hassan JS. Clinical utility of urinary antigen test and molecular method for detection of Legionella pneumophila. Iraqi JMS. 2018; 16(2): 207-215. doi: 10.22578/IJMS.16.2.13
Most of the medical datasets suffer from missing data, due to the expense of some tests or human faults while recording these tests. This issue affects the performance of the machine learning models because the values of some features will be missing. Therefore, there is a need for a specific type of methods for imputing these missing data. In this research, the salp swarm algorithm (SSA) is used for generating and imputing the missing values in the pain in my ass (also known Pima) Indian diabetes disease (PIDD) dataset, the proposed algorithm is called (ISSA). The obtained results showed that the classification performance of three different classifiers which are support vector machine (SVM), K-nearest neighbour (KNN), and Naïve B
... Show MoreThis paper presents a new algorithm in an important research field which is the semantic word similarity estimation. A new feature-based algorithm is proposed for measuring the word semantic similarity for the Arabic language. It is a highly systematic language where its words exhibit elegant and rigorous logic. The score of sematic similarity between two Arabic words is calculated as a function of their common and total taxonomical features. An Arabic knowledge source is employed for extracting the taxonomical features as a set of all concepts that subsumed the concepts containing the compared words. The previously developed Arabic word benchmark datasets are used for optimizing and evaluating the proposed algorithm. In this paper,
... Show MoreIn this paper, the goal of proposed method is to protect data against different types of attacks by unauthorized parties. The basic idea of proposed method is generating a private key from a specific features of digital color image such as color (Red, Green and Blue); the generating process of private key from colors of digital color image performed via the computing process of color frequencies for blue color of an image then computing the maximum frequency of blue color, multiplying it by its number and adding process will performed to produce a generated key. After that the private key is generated, must be converting it into the binary representation form. The generated key is extracted from blue color of keyed image then we selects a c
... Show MoreThis paper focuses on developing a self-starting numerical approach that can be used for direct integration of higher-order initial value problems of Ordinary Differential Equations. The method is derived from power series approximation with the resulting equations discretized at the selected grid and off-grid points. The method is applied in a block-by-block approach as a numerical integrator of higher-order initial value problems. The basic properties of the block method are investigated to authenticate its performance and then implemented with some tested experiments to validate the accuracy and convergence of the method.
This paper aims to propose a hybrid approach of two powerful methods, namely the differential transform and finite difference methods, to obtain the solution of the coupled Whitham-Broer-Kaup-Like equations which arises in shallow-water wave theory. The capability of the method to such problems is verified by taking different parameters and initial conditions. The numerical simulations are depicted in 2D and 3D graphs. It is shown that the used approach returns accurate solutions for this type of problems in comparison with the analytic ones.
Background: Antibacterial action of root canal filling is an important factor for successful root canal treatment, so the aim of the study was to identify and to compare the antimicrobial effect of new sealer (GuttaFlow) to commonly used endodontic sealers (AH Plus, Apexit and EndoFill) against four endodontic microbes. Materials and methods: Twenty patients aged (30-40) years with infected root canals were selected. Four types of microorganisms were isolated from root canals (E faecalis, Staphylococcus aureus, E coli and Candida albicans) and cultured on Mueller Hinton agar Petri-dishes. After identification and isolation of bacterial species, agar diffusion method was used to assess the antibacterial action of four contemporary endodontic
... Show MoreA novel series of mixed-ligand complexes of the type, [ML 1 (L 2 ) 3 ]Cl x [M = Cr(III), Fe(III), Co(II),Ni(II), Cu(II), Cd(II) and Hg(II), n = 2, 3], was synthesized using Schiffbase (HL 1 ) as main ligand, nicotinamide (L 2 ) as secondary ligand, and the corresponding metal ions in 1:3:1 molar ratio. The main ligand, HL 1 was prepared by the interaction of ampicillin drug and 4-chlorobenzophenone. The synthesized mixed ligand complexes were characterized by elemental analysis, UV-Vis, FT-IR, 1 H-NMR, 13 C-NMR and TG/DTG studies. In the mixed-ligand complexes, the Schiffbase ligand, HL 1 showed coordination to the central metal ion in tridentate manner via azomethine nitrogen, β-lactam ring oxygen and deprotonated carboxylic oxy- gen atom
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