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 sam

This work presents a canned-food defect-detection method using the EfficientDet model with four backbones (MobileNet, EfficientNet, Swin-T, and ConvNeXt). The dataset included 8046 images with a resolution of 512 × 512 pixels. The performance criteria in this study accuracy “mAP”, computational cost “FLOPs”, and Frames Per Second “FPS”. The lightweight backbone with EfficientDet achieves a mean Average Precision (mAP) of 90% with MobileNet, while EfficientNet achieves mAP accuracy of 92% and 94%. The heavy backbone for EfficientDet (Swin-T, and ConvNeXt) achieves mAP accuracy of 96% and 98%. The main contribution of this study is to optimize the speed of conveyor belts in industrial production lines to considers the

Terahertz (THz) technology, which uses radiation lying between microwave and infrared in the electromagnetic spectrum, could revolutionize digital agriculture through terahertz’s ability to assess agricultural materials accurately and non-destructively. The review discusses notable developments in THz applications to digital agriculture: real-time crop monitoring, nutrient and disease detection, soil moisture and contaminant analysis, and supply chain traceability. The developments have emerged from studies in time-domain spectroscopy, imaging, machine learning (ML), and blockchain integration. Despite the promising advances in THz agricultural applications, limitations remain, such as limited penetration depth, high system costs, and ope

Finding communities of connected individuals in complex networks is challenging, yet crucial for understanding different real-world societies and their interactions. Recently attention has turned to discover the dynamics of such communities. However, detecting accurate community structures that evolve over time adds additional challenges. Almost all the state-of-the-art algorithms are designed based on seemingly the same principle while treating the problem as a coupled optimization model to simultaneously identify community structures and their evolution over time. Unlike all these studies, the current work aims to individually consider this three measures, i.e. intra-community score, inter-community score, and evolution of community over

In the knowledge society, artificial intelligence (AI) forms a cornerstone of global education. This quasi-experimental study examines the impact of an Intelligent Adaptive Learning Strategy (IALS) on flexible thinking (FT) and academic achievement among 60 3rd-year undergraduate students at the College of Education/University of Baghdad (experimental n = 30; control n = 30). The IALS was implemented via an AI-supported educational platform, while the control group received conventional instruction. Post-test intervention assessments included an FT test (10 items, content validity = 0.89, Cronbach’s α = 0.87) and an achievement test (10 objective items, α = 0.85). Results revealed statistically significant superiority of the exp

Maintaining the quality of apricot fruits during storage is not an easy task due to the changes in their physical and chemical properties, so it is necessary to use less expensive, easy to apply, environmentally friendly, and safer preservatives to maintain the nutritional value of apricot. The damage to some fruits during storage can be a source of infection, which leads to the damage of healthy fruits more quickly, which requires building an intelligent model to detect damaged fruits. The aim of the research is to study the effect of immersing apricots in lemon juice once and sugar-water solution again on the quality properties of apricots, including sweetness, color, hardness, and water content. On the other hand, the YOLOv7 algorithm wa

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) have high performance in the fields of object recognition and classification. The strength of CNNs comes from the fact that they are able to extract information from raw-pixel content and learn features automatically. Feature extraction and classification algorithms can be either hand-crafted or Deep Learning (DL) based. DL detection approaches can be either two stages (region proposal approaches) detector or a single stage (non-region proposal approach) detector. Region proposal-based techniques include R-CNN, Fast RCNN, and Faster RCNN. Non-region proposal-based techniques include Single Shot Detector (SSD) and You Only Look Once (YOLO). We are going to compare the speed and accuracy of Faster RCNN,

Malaria is a curative disease, with therapeutics available for patients, such as drugs that can prevent future malaria infections in countries vulnerable to malaria. Though, there is no effective malaria vaccine until now, although it is an interesting research area in medicine. Local descriptors of blood smear image are exploited in this paper to solve parasitized malaria infection detection problem. Swarm intelligence is used to separate the red blood cells from the background of the blood slide image in adaptive manner. After that, the effective corner points are detected and localized using Harris corner detection method. Two types of local descriptors are generated from the local regions of the effective corners which are Gabor based f