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
It has been a well-known practice to use seeds and the essential oil of Carum copticum as a strongly antiseptic , antispasmodic , aromatic , bitter , diaphoretic , digestive , diuretic , expectorant and tonic. Also used for cure influenza, asthma, and rheumatoid arthritis. To our knowledge it will be the first time to use the seeds of this herb as a urinary tract stone lithotripsy.This research aimed to the use of these seeds as a lithotripsian against different types of urinary stones and determine the efficiency of these preparation against which types of stone.A liquid solution was prepared from dissolving the seeds powder in cow milk and then concentration this prep
... Show MoreWith the growth of mobile phones, short message service (SMS) became an essential text communication service. However, the low cost and ease use of SMS led to an increase in SMS Spam. In this paper, the characteristics of SMS spam has studied and a set of features has introduced to get rid of SMS spam. In addition, the problem of SMS spam detection was addressed as a clustering analysis that requires a metaheuristic algorithm to find the clustering structures. Three differential evolution variants viz DE/rand/1, jDE/rand/1, jDE/best/1, are adopted for solving the SMS spam problem. Experimental results illustrate that the jDE/best/1 produces best results over other variants in terms of accuracy, false-positive rate and false-negative
... Show MoreDeepfake is a type of artificial intelligence used to create convincing images, audio, and video hoaxes and it concerns celebrities and everyone because they are easy to manufacture. Deepfake are hard to recognize by people and current approaches, especially high-quality ones. As a defense against Deepfake techniques, various methods to detect Deepfake in images have been suggested. Most of them had limitations, like only working with one face in an image. The face has to be facing forward, with both eyes and the mouth open, depending on what part of the face they worked on. Other than that, a few focus on the impact of pre-processing steps on the detection accuracy of the models. This paper introduces a framework design focused on this asp
... Show MoreBackground and Objectives: Urinary tract infections (UTIs), among a wide range of microbial infections, are of a double-edged worry with health-care and economic implications. They are serious diseases that can influence various parts of the urinary tract. The aim of this study was characterization of the enteric bacteria isolated from urine of human UTIs and studying their antimicrobial sensitivity. Materials and methods: A total of 50 urine samples were collected from patients with UTIs of both genders. The isolates identification was done using routine diagnostic methods and confirmed by Vitek2. Antimicrobial susceptibility was done against 10 antimicrobials. Results: Both genders of human were found to suffer from urinary tract problems
... Show MoreThe control of water represents the safe key for fair and optimal use to protect water resources due to human activities, including untreated wastewater, which is considered a carrier of a large number of antibiotic-resistant bacterial species. This study aimed to investigate the prevalence of antibiotic-resistance to E. coli in Tigris River by the presence of resistance genes for aminoglycoside(qepA( ,quinolone (gyrA), and sulfa drugs( dfr1 ,dfr17) due to the frequent use of antibiotics and their release into wastewater of hospitals. Samples were collected from three sites on Tigris River: S1( station wastewater in Adhamiya), S2 (station wastewater in Baghdad Medical city hospital), S3 (station wastew
... Show MoreThe aim of the present study was to distinguish between healthy children and those with epilepsy by electroencephalography (EEG). Two biomarkers including Hurst exponents (H) and Tsallis entropy (TE) were used to investigate the background activity of EEG of 10 healthy children and 10 with epilepsy. EEG artifacts were removed using Savitzky-Golay (SG) filter. As it hypothesize, there was a significant changes in irregularity and complexity in epileptic EEG in comparison with healthy control subjects using t-test (p< 0.05). The increasing in complexity changes were observed in H and TE results of epileptic subjects make them suggested EEG biomarker associated with epilepsy and a reliable tool for detection and identification of this di
... Show MoreThe recent emergence of sophisticated Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT-4, Bard, and Bing has revolutionized the domain of scientific inquiry, particularly in the realm of large pre-trained vision-language models. This pivotal transformation is driving new frontiers in various fields, including image processing and digital media verification. In the heart of this evolution, our research focuses on the rapidly growing area of image authenticity verification, a field gaining immense relevance in the digital era. The study is specifically geared towards addressing the emerging challenge of distinguishing between authentic images and deep fakes – a task that has become critically important in a world increasingly reliant on digital med
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