It is widely accepted that early diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease (AD) makes it possible for patients to gain access to appropriate health care services and would facilitate the development of new therapies. AD starts many years before its clinical manifestations and a biomarker that provides a measure of changes in the brain in this period would be useful for early diagnosis of AD. Given the rapid increase in the number of older people suffering from AD, there is a need for an accurate, low-cost and easy to use biomarkers that could be used to detect AD in its early stages. Potentially, the electroencephalogram (EEG) can play a vital role in this but at present, no reliable EEG biomarker exists for early diagnosis of AD. The gradual slowing of brain activity caused by AD starts from the back of the brain and spreads out towards other parts. Consequently, determining the brain regions that are first affected by AD may be useful in its early diagnosis. Higuchi fractal dimension (HFD) has characteristics which make it suited to capturing region-specific neural changes due to AD. The aim of this study is to investigate the potential of HFD of the EEG as a biomarker which is associated with the brain region first affected by AD. Mean HFD value was calculated for all channels of EEG signals recorded from 52 subjects (20-AD and 32-normal). Then, p-values were calculated between the two groups (AD and normal) to detect EEG channels that have a significant association with AD. k-nearest neighbor (KNN) algorithm was used to compute the distance between AD patients and normal subjects in the classification. Our results show that AD patients have significantly lower HFD values in the parietal areas. HFD values for channels in these areas were used to discriminate between AD and normal subjects with a sensitivity and specificity values of 100% and 80%, respectively.
Voice Activity Detection (VAD) is considered as an important pre-processing step in speech processing systems such as speech enhancement, speech recognition, gender and age identification. VAD helps in reducing the time required to process speech data and to improve final system accuracy by focusing the work on the voiced part of the speech. An automatic technique for VAD using Fuzzy-Neuro technique (FN-AVAD) is presented in this paper. The aim of this work is to alleviate the problem of choosing the best threshold value in traditional VAD methods and achieves automaticity by combining fuzzy clustering and machine learning techniques. Four features are extracted from each speech segment, which are short term energy, zero-crossing rate, auto
... Show MoreFor several applications, it is very important to have an edge detection technique matching human visual contour perception and less sensitive to noise. The edge detection algorithm describes in this paper based on the results obtained by Maximum a posteriori (MAP) and Maximum Entropy (ME) deblurring algorithms. The technique makes a trade-off between sharpening and smoothing the noisy image. One of the advantages of the described algorithm is less sensitive to noise than that given by Marr and Geuen techniques that considered to be the best edge detection algorithms in terms of matching human visual contour perception.
Pavement crack and pothole identification are important tasks in transportation maintenance and road safety. This study offers a novel technique for automatic asphalt pavement crack and pothole detection which is based on image processing. Different types of cracks (transverse, longitudinal, alligator-type, and potholes) can be identified with such techniques. The goal of this research is to evaluate road surface damage by extracting cracks and potholes, categorizing them from images and videos, and comparing the manual and the automated methods. The proposed method was tested on 50 images. The results obtained from image processing showed that the proposed method can detect cracks and potholes and identify their severity levels wit
... Show MoreThe study aims to use the European Excellence Model (EFQM) in assessing the institutional performance of the National Center for Administrative Development and Information Technology in order to determine the gap between the actual reality of the performance of the Center and the standards adopted in the model, in order to know the extent to which the Center seeks to achieve excellence in performance to improve the level of services provided and the adoption of methods Modern and contemporary management in the evaluation of its institutional performance.
The problem of the study was the absence of an institutional performance evaluation system at the centre whereby weaknesses (areas of improvement) and st
... Show MoreBackground: Antimicrobial prescribing patterns have an important role in the emergence of resistance, and community pharmacists have a substantial influence on this issue. Objective: To assess community pharmacists' behaviors and attitudes toward antimicrobial dispensing, determine their proportions and categories, and examine the underlying rationales for this practice. Methods: A descriptive cross-sectional survey of community pharmacists in Iraq was conducted from June to August 2023, using a self-administered validated questionnaire. The attitudes, practices, and motivations driving the distribution of antimicrobials without a prescription (AWP) were explored in three areas. Results: A sizable proportion (61.6%) of respondents rejected
... Show MoreBackground Numerous studies indicated that workers in the health sector suffer from work stress, hassles, and mental health problems associated with COVID-19, which negatively affect the completion of their job tasks. These studies pointed out the need to search for mechanisms that enable workers to cope with job stress effectively. Objectives This study investigated psychological flow, mental immunity, and job performance levels among the mental health workforce in Saudi Arabia. It also tried to reveal the psychological flow (PF) and mental immunity (MI) predictability of job performance (JP). Method A correlational survey design was employed. The study sample consisted of 120 mental health care practitioners (therapists, psychologists, co
... Show Moreوفقأ للدراسات السابقة تم تحضير ليكاند آزو جديد (ن-(3-اسيتايل-2-هيدروكسي-5-مثيل-فنيل)ن-(4-كاربوكسي-سايكلوهكسيل مثيل)-ملح الدايازونيوم) وبعد التحقق من الصيغة المقترحة وفق نتائج التحاليل وبعد استخدام الليكاند لتحضير سلسلة ن المعقدات باستخدام نسب مولية متساوية (1:1) من الليكاند وتفاعلها مع كل من املاح المنغنيز والكوبلت والنيكل والنحاس والخارصين وبعد التحقق وفق تقنيات التحاليل الطيفية والتشخيصية(الاشعة فوق البنف
... Show MoreMetronidazole-MIPs were prepared by using (MDZ) as the template as well as allylchloride (AYC) or allylbromide (AYB) as monomer, used (TMPTA) tri-methylol propane tri-acrylate or ethylene glycol di-methyl acrylate (EGDMA) as cross-linker and initiator used (BP) benzyl peroxide. By using different plasticizers (di butyl Phthalate (DBPH), Nitrobenzene (NB), oleic acid (OA) and paraffin) for MDZ-MIP1 and (Di-butyl sebecate (DBS), Di-methyl acrylate (DMA), Tributylphosphate(TBP) and Tris(ethylhexyl phosphate (TEHP) ) for MDZ-MIP2. Membranes of MIPs were prepared in PVC matrix. The characterizations of each electrode were determined The Slope range from (55.083 - 43.711) mV/decade, Limit of Detection (8 X 10 -4- 2 X 10-6) and Linearity
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