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
Background: Transitional cell carcinoma of the urinary bladder is one of the important malignancies in both sex groups .It is considered as a heterogenous neoplasm with different
biological behavior, in which the majority are early non invasive with tendency for recurrence and some may progress to invasive tumor. An important clinicopathological features are ,the tumor stage and histological grade which are used as prognostic parameters of the tumor and play an important role in therapy. Due to the subjectivity of the histological grading , the reproducibility was low . Many studies showed the value of quantitative analysis of the tumor as an important method in determining the recurrence of the tumor and
The phagocytic activity of peritoneal and blood cells counts with neutrophils and monocytes were evaluated in albino mice treated wtth two antigen preparations (A and B) from group A streptococci (GAS). Antigen A included water bathed bacteria at 70 °C for 60 minutes, while in Antigen B the bacteria was autoclaved at 121° C for 15 minutes. The animals were treated with 12 intraperitoneal doses of the antigens with intervals of three days (36 days). The 12th dose was a challenge dose (live bacteria). The first three doses of Antigen A increased the phagocytic index (PI) to a range of 76.46-78.69%, then a gradual decreased percentage was observed, especially at the challenge dose (PI=6.42%). The count of neutrophils and monocytes fol
... Show MoreDirectional control valve is the main part in hydraulic system which has complex construction, such as moving spool to control the direction of actuator for required speed. Utilizing MR fluid properties, direct interface can be realized between magnetic field and fluid power without the need for moving parts like spool in directional control valves. This paper dedicates the experimental test of four ways, three position MR directional control valve. The experimental methods were done by connecting the MR directional control valve with hydraulic actuators. The experiment was conducted to show the principle work of the valve functionally and performance test for valve was done. The valve works proportionally to control the direction a
... 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 MoreClustering algorithms have recently gained attention in the related literature since
they can help current intrusion detection systems in several aspects. This paper
proposes genetic algorithm (GA) based clustering, serving to distinguish patterns
incoming from network traffic packets into normal and attack. Two GA based
clustering models for solving intrusion detection problem are introduced. The first
model coined as handles numeric features of the network packet, whereas
the second one coined as concerns all features of the network packet.
Moreover, a new mutation operator directed for binary and symbolic features is
proposed. The basic concept of proposed mutation operator depends on the most
frequent value
With 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 MoreThe 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.
Iris detection is considered as challenging image processing task. In this study efficient method was suggested to detect iris and recognition it. This method depending on seed filling algorithm and circular area detection, where the color image converted to gray image, and then the gray image is converted to binary image. The seed filling is applied of the binary image and the position of detected object binary region (ROI) is localized in term of it is center coordinates are radii (i.e., the inner and out radius). To find the localization efficiency of suggested method has been used the coefficient of variation (CV) for radius iris for evaluation. The test results indicated that is suggested method is good for the iris detection.