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.
Abstract:
The aim of the research is to verify the role of organizational trust as an “administrative” dimension of objective importance in the relationships adopted by the Iraqi General Insurance Company with customers, as it is one of the basic pillars in building and succeeding companies, which allows the provision of services with high confidence through the customer relationship management system in order to achieve The company's goal is to gain new customers, retain current customers, increase work in insurance companies, and develop the national economy by increasing the company's sales and profitability. The research
... Show MoreFlexible 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 MoreBackground: Postoperative pain is one of the main complications following impacted mandibular third molar (IMTM) surgery. Objectives: The aim of this study was to assess the effect of the local application of bupivacaine on reducing early postoperative pain following IMTM surgery. Material and methods: A prospective, single-blinded, randomized controlled study was conducted on 40 patients who had undergone the surgical removal of an IMTM under local anesthesia. In the study group (n = 20), absorbable gelatin sponge (AGS) soaked in 3 mL of 0.5% plain bupivacaine hydrochloride was locally applied in the post-extraction socket. In the control group (n = 20), AGS soaked in 3 mL of normal saline was used. Pain intensity was assessed using a pa
... Show MoreThe diabetic foot is considered one of the long term diabetes complications caused by a defect in blood vessel and nerve system. This requires dealing with diabetic foot with professional medical care, so as to prevent its development in advanced stages which could end to gangrene and amputation of the foot. This study has been initiated through follow-up of twelve patients with diabetes and the presence various occlusions in lower limb artery. One patient from them was chosen for investigation, this patient has stenosis in popliteal artery and presence multiple stenosis in superficial femoral artery. This study based on analysis present case of patient and prediction for progress stenosis in superficial femoral artery till arrive semi t
... Show MoreThe potential application of granules of brick waste (GBW) as a low-cost sorbent for removal of Ni+2ions from aqueous solutions has been studied. The properties of GBW were determined through several tests such as X-Ray diffraction (XRD), Energy dispersive X-ray (EDX), Scanning electron microscopy (SEM), and BET surface area. In batch tests, the influence of several operating parameters including contact time, initial concentration, agitation speed, and the dose of GBW was investigated. The best values of these parameters that provided maximum removal efficiency of nickel (39.4%) were 1.5 hr, 50 mg/L, 250 rpm, and 1.8 g/100mL, respectively. The adsorption data obtained by batch experiments subjected to the Three i
... Show MoreHuman skin detection, which usually performed before image processing, is the method of discovering skin-colored pixels and regions that may be of human faces or limbs in videos or photos. Many computer vision approaches have been developed for skin detection. A skin detector usually transforms a given pixel into a suitable color space and then uses a skin classifier to mark the pixel as a skin or a non-skin pixel. A skin classifier explains the decision boundary of the class of a skin color in the color space based on skin-colored pixels. The purpose of this research is to build a skin detection system that will distinguish between skin and non-skin pixels in colored still pictures. This performed by introducing a metric that measu
... Show MoreIn this study an experimental work was done to study the possibility of using aluminum rubbish material as a coagulant to remove the colloidal particles from oily wastewater by dissolving this rubbish in sodium hydroxide solution. The experiments were carried out on simulated oily wastewater that was prepared at different oil concentrations and hardness levels (50, 250, 500, and 1000) ppm oil for (2000, 2500, 3000, and 3500) ppm CaCo3 respectively. The initial turbidity values were (203, 290, 770, and 1306) NTU, while the minimum values of turbidity that have been gained from the experiments in NTU units were (1.67, 1.95, 2.10, and 4.01) at best sodium aluminate dosages in milliliters (12, 20, 24, and 28) for
... Show MoreBackground: In the past, an association between Tuberculosis (TB) and Diabetes Mellitus (DM) was widely accepted, today the potential public health and clinical importance of this relationship seems to be largely ignored. The national clinical and policy guidance in the UK on the central of TB, for example, does not consider the relationship with DM.Objectives: To determine the risk of association between diabetes mellitus and pulmonary TB.Methods: A retrospective study conducted in Ibn Zuhr hospital for chest diseases from Jan 2008 – sep 2010 , included in the study 402 patients with TB divided into diabetic & non diabetic, 96 (23.8%) were diabetic while other 306 were TB not diabetic.Results: Risk of TB among DM patients were cle
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