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
The goal of this paper is to expose a new numerical method for solving initial value time-lag of delay differential equations by employing a high order improving formula of Euler method known as third order Euler method. Stability condition is discussed in detail for the proposed technique. Finally some examples are illustrated to verify the validity, efficiency and accuracy of the method.
Coronavirus disease (COVID-19), which is caused by SARS-CoV-2, has been announced as a global pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO), which results in the collapsing of the healthcare systems in several countries around the globe. Machine learning (ML) methods are one of the most utilized approaches in artificial intelligence (AI) to classify COVID-19 images. However, there are many machine-learning methods used to classify COVID-19. The question is: which machine learning method is best over multi-criteria evaluation? Therefore, this research presents benchmarking of COVID-19 machine learning methods, which is recognized as a multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) problem. In the recent century, the trend of developing
... Show MoreHydrogen sulfide removal catalyst was prepared chemically by precipitation of zinc bicarbonate at a controlled pH. The physical and chemical catalyst characterization properties were investigated. The catalyst was tested for its activity in adsorption of H2S using a plant that generates the H2S from naphtha hydrodesulphurization and a unit for the adsorption of H2S. The results comparison between the prepared and commercial catalysts revealed that the chemical method can be used to prepare the catalyst with a very good activity.
It has observed that the hydrogen sulfide removal over zinc oxide catalyst follows first order reaction kinetics with activation energy of 19.26 kJ/mole and enthalpy and e
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Regression testing is a crucial phase in the software development lifecycle that makes sure that new changes/updates in the software system don’t introduce defects or don’t affect adversely the existing functionalities. However, as the software systems grow in complexity, the number of test cases in regression suite can become large which results into more testing time and resource consumption. In addition, the presence of redundant and faulty test cases may affect the efficiency of the regression testing process. Therefore, this paper presents a new Hybrid Framework to Exclude Similar & Faulty Test Cases in Regression Testing (ETCPM) that utilizes automated code analysis techniques and historical test execution data to
... Show MoreThis paper is concerned with preliminary test single stage shrinkage estimators for the mean (q) of normal distribution with known variance s2 when a prior estimate (q0) of the actule value (q) is available, using specifying shrinkage weight factor y( ) as well as pre-test region (R). Expressions for the Bias, Mean Squared Error [MSE( )] and Relative Efficiency [R.Eff.( )] of proposed estimators are derived. Numerical results and conclusions are drawn about selection different constants including in these expressions. Comparisons between suggested estimators with respect to usual estimators in the sense of Relative Efficiency are given. Furthermore, comparisons with the earlier existi
... Show MoreBackground: Identification the relationship of pepsinogen test (pepsinogenI and I /pepsinogen II ratio) and gastric cancer patients make the gastric cancer early diagnosed and prolong the life surviving rate.
Patients and Methods: Serum pepsinogen I and pepsinogen II (PG I and PG I / PG II ratio) measured in 50 patients with gastric cancer ,30 gastritis patients diagnosed , and 16 healthy control by using enzyme immunoassay in those study groups, and the results of PG I and PG I / PG II ratio were comparing to 50 gastric cancer patients whom diagnosed histopathologically according the stomach regions, while the gastritis patients diagnosed endoscopically.
Results: This study showed that the age of pati
In this study, the modified size-strain plot (SSP) method was used to analyze the x-ray diffraction lines pattern of diffraction lines (1 0 1), (1 2 1), (2 0 2), (0 4 2), (2 4 2) for the calcium titanate(CaTiO3) nanoparticles, and to calculate lattice strain, crystallite size, stress, and energy density, using three models: uniform (USDM). With a lattice strain of (2.147201889), a stress of (0.267452615X10), and an energy density of (2.900651X10-3 KJ/m3), the crystallite was 32.29477611 nm in size, and to calculate lattice strain of Scherrer (4.1644598X10−3), and (1.509066023X10−6 KJ/m3), a stress of(6.403949183X10−4MPa) and (26.019894 nm).
This study was designed to highlight the role of Epstein Barr viruses (EBV) as a possible causative effect in multiple sclerosis (MS) through testing the viral load along with both biochemical and immunological parameters in female MS patients. We also aimed at finding the effects of different types of treatment line on the various study aspects. The results of the enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) revealed first an increased level of EBV EBNA1IgG IL-17A (96.13±27.60 pg/ml) in sera of female MS patients (0.05±0.01 U/ml, n=50) compared with the control group (n=40). We confirmed this result using real-time polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) which also showed a significantly higher EBV load in MS patients (22.61±12.72 copi
... Show MoreIn the present article, we implement the new iterative method proposed by Daftardar-Gejji and Jafari (NIM) [V. Daftardar-Gejji, H. Jafari, An iterative method for solving nonlinear functional equations, J. Math. Anal. Appl. 316 (2006) 753-763] to solve two problems; the first one is the problem of spread of a non-fatal disease in a population which is assumed to have constant size over the period of the epidemic, and the other one is the problem of the prey and predator. The results demonstrate that the method has many merits such as being derivative-free, overcome the difficulty arising in calculating Adomian polynomials to handle the nonlinear terms in Adomian Decomposition Method (ADM), does not require to calculate Lagrange multiplier a
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