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
Gingival crevicular fluid (GCF) may reflect the events associated with orthodontic tooth movement. Attempts have been conducted to identify biomarkers reflecting optimum orthodontic force, unwanted sequallea (i.e. root resorption) and accelerated tooth movement. The aim of the present study is to find out a standardized GCF collection, storage and total protein extraction method from apparently healthy gingival sites with orthodontics that is compatible with further high-throughput proteomics. Eighteen patients who required extractions of both maxillary first premolars were recruited in this study. These teeth were randomly assigned to either heavy (225g) or light force (25g), and their site specific GCF was collected at baseline and aft
... 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
... 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 MoreOpportunistic fungal infections due to the immune- compromised status of renal transplant patients are related to high rates of morbidity and mortality regardless of their minor incidence. Delayed in identification of invasive fungal infections (IFIs), will lead to delayed treatment and results in high mortality in those populations. The study aimed to assess the frequency of invasive fungal infection in kidney transplant recipients by conventional and molecular methods. This study included 100 kidney transplant recipients (KTR) (75 males, and 25 females), collected from the Centre of Kidney Diseases and Transplantation in the Medical City of Baghdad. Blood samples were collected during the period from June 2018 to April 2019. Twent
... Show MoreA case-control study was designed to find out the association between rs2234671 polymorphism of cxcr1 and rUTI in a sample of Iraqi women by polymerase chain reaction- sequence-specific primer (PCR-SSP) method. The current findings revealed that the genotype GC (OR= 7.86, 95% CI = 2.82-21.87, P= 7.7 × 10-5) and the C allele (OR= 3.93, 95% CI = 1.97 - 7.83, P = 9.8×10-5) are significantly associated with rUTI. However, the genotype GG played as a protective factor (OR= 0.12, 95% CI = 10.05 - 0.34, P = 4.0 ×10-5). Depending on these findings, the genotype GC is significantly associated with rUTI.
The extracting of personal sprite from the whole image faced many problems in separating the sprite edge from the unneeded parts, some image software try to automate this process, but usually they couldn't find the edge or have false result. In this paper, the authors have made an enhancement on the use of Canny edge detection to locate the sprite from the whole image by adding some enhancement steps by using MATLAB. Moreover, remove all the non-relevant information from the image by selecting only the sprite and place it in a transparent background. The results of comparing the Canny edge detection with the proposed method shows improvement in the edge detection.