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
Flexible molecular docking is a computational method of structure-based drug design to evaluate binding interactions between receptor and ligand and identify the ligand conformation within the receptor pocket. Currently, various molecular docking programs are extensively applied; therefore, realizing accuracy and performance of the various docking programs could have a significant value. In this comparative study, the performance and accuracy of three widely used non-commercial docking software (AutoDock Vina, 1-Click Docking, and UCSF DOCK) was evaluated through investigations of the predicted binding affinity and binding conformation of the same set of small molecules (HIV-1 protease inhibitors) and a protein target HIV-1 protease enzy
... Show MoreThis study concluded detection of Toxoplasma gondii in milk, immunologically by using Elisa and nested PCR)nPCR (based on B1 gene, also to investigate the effect of toxoplasmosis, parity, breed and flock on some milk composition in the Iraqi local and Shami goats in the middle of Iraq. A total of 80 milk samples of the lactating goats were collected. Results of this study showed the prevalence of Toxoplasmosis was 21.25% and 28.75% by Elisa and nPCR respectively without significant differences. The sensitivity of Elisa was a low (30.43%) whereas the specificity was a high (82.45%). The degree of agreement estimated by Kappa coefficient revealed a slight agreement (0.14) between two methods. The results indicated that goats infected
... Show MoreResearchers employ behavior based malware detection models that depend on API tracking and analyzing features to identify suspected PE applications. Those malware behavior models become more efficient than the signature based malware detection systems for detecting unknown malwares. This is because a simple polymorphic or metamorphic malware can defeat signature based detection systems easily. The growing number of computer malwares and the detection of malware have been the concern for security researchers for a large period of time. The use of logic formulae to model the malware behaviors is one of the most encouraging recent developments in malware research, which provides alternatives to classic virus detection methods. To address the l
... Show MoreMany carbonate reservoirs in the world show a tilted in originally oil-water contact (OOWC) which requires a special consideration in the selection of the capillary pressure curves and an understanding of reservoir fluids distribution while initializing the reservoir simulation models.
An analytical model for predicting the capillary pressure across the interface that separates two immiscible fluids was derived from reservoir pressure transient analysis. The model reflected the entire interaction between the reservoir-aquifer fluids and rock properties measured under downhole reservoir conditions.
This model retained the natural coupling of oil reservoirs with the aquifer zone and treated them as an explicit-region composite system
Geotechnical engineering like any other engineering field has to develop and cope with new technologies. This article intends to investigate the spatial relationships between soil’s liquid limit (LL), plasticity index (PI) and Liquidity index (LI) for particular zones of Sulaymaniyah City. The main objective is to study the ability to produce digital soil maps for the study area and determine regions of high expansive soil. Inverse Distance Weighting (IDW) interpolation tool within the GIS (Geographic Information System) program was used to produce the maps. Data from 592 boreholes for LL and PI and 245 boreholes for LI were used for this study. Layers were allocated into three depth ranges (1 to 2, 2 to 4 and 4 to 6)
... Show MoreIn this paper, new brain tumour detection method is discovered whereby the normal slices are disassembled from the abnormal ones. Three main phases are deployed including the extraction of the cerebral tissue, the detection of abnormal block and the mechanism of fine-tuning and finally the detection of abnormal slice according to the detected abnormal blocks. Through experimental tests, progress made by the suggested means is assessed and verified. As a result, in terms of qualitative assessment, it is found that the performance of proposed method is satisfactory and may contribute to the development of reliable MRI brain tumour diagnosis and treatments.
An intrusion detection system (IDS) is key to having a comprehensive cybersecurity solution against any attack, and artificial intelligence techniques have been combined with all the features of the IoT to improve security. In response to this, in this research, an IDS technique driven by a modified random forest algorithm has been formulated to improve the system for IoT. To this end, the target is made as one-hot encoding, bootstrapping with less redundancy, adding a hybrid features selection method into the random forest algorithm, and modifying the ranking stage in the random forest algorithm. Furthermore, three datasets have been used in this research, IoTID20, UNSW-NB15, and IoT-23. The results are compared with the three datasets men
... Show MoreTested effective Alttafaria some materials used for different purposes, system a bacterial mutagenesis component of three bacterial isolates belonging to different races and materials tested included drug Briaktin
Spraying pesticides is one of the most common procedures that is conducted to control pests. However, excessive use of these chemicals inversely affects the surrounding environments including the soil, plants, animals, and the operator itself. Therefore, researchers have been encouraged to...