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.
Although text document images authentication is difficult due to the binary nature and clear separation between the background and foreground but it is getting higher demand for many applications. Most previous researches in this field depend on insertion watermark in the document, the drawback in these techniques lie in the fact that changing pixel values in a binary document could introduce irregularities that are very visually noticeable. In this paper, a new method is proposed for object-based text document authentication, in which I propose a different approach where a text document is signed by shifting individual words slightly left or right from their original positions to make the center of gravity for each line fall in with the m
... Show MorePeriodontitis is a chronic inflammatory disease resulted from aggravated immune response to a dysbiotic subgingival microbiota of a susceptible host. Consequences of periodontitis are not only limited to the devastating effect on the oral cavity but extends to affect general health of the individual and also exerts economic burdens on the health systems worldwide. Despite these serious outcomes of periodontitis; however, they are avoidable by early diagnosis with proper preventive measures or non-invasive interventions at earlier stages of the disease. Clinically, diagnosis of periodontitis could be overlooked due to certain limitations of the conventional diagnostic methods such as periodontal charting and radiographs. Utilization of re
... Show MoreInflammatory bowel disease includes both Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, is a chronic, progressive relapsing disease of gastrointestinal tract that require long-term treatment or maintenance therapy. Taking patient’s beliefs about the prescribed medication in consideration had been shown to be an important factor that affects compliance of the patient in whom having positive beliefs is a prerequisite for better compliance. The aim of the current study was to investigate and assess beliefs about medicines among a sample of Iraqi patients with inflammatory bowel disease and to determine possible association between these beliefs and some patient-specific factors.
This study is a cross-sectional study carried out o
... Show MoreThis study includes replication and attenuation of foot and mouth disease virus type O which isolated from infected calves. Many passages for the virus in chick-Embryo were established as a substitute method to the tissue culture which is highly caustic in contrast to the chick embryo. The virus passed ten consequent passages which lead to the reduce of the titer of the virus from 106.53 TCID50/ 0.1 ml in cattle testis tissue culture to 103 TCID50/ 0.1 ml. the pathogenecity of attenuated FMD virus were also studied in both chick-embryo and guinea pigs. Using agar gel diffusion test precipitation antibodies was detected in guinea pig serum after 14 and 21 days post exposure to the attenuated virus. The inoculated guine
... Show MoreThe present research was conducted to synthesis Y-Zeolite by sol-gel technique using MWCNT (multiwalled carbon nanotubes) as crystallization medium to get a narrow range of particle size distribution with small average size compared with ordinary methods. The phase pattern, chemical structure, particle size, and surface area were detected by XRD, FTIR, BET and AFM, respectively. Results shown that the average size of Zeolite with and without using MWCNT were (92.39) nm and (55.17) nm respectively .Particle size range reduced from (150-55) nm to (130-30) nm. The surface area enhanced to be (558) m2/g with slightly large pore volume (0.231) km3/g was obtained. Meanwhile, degree of crystallization decrease
... Show MoreThis study aimed to identidy the role of a professional social worker practice specialist in the field of social care for Corona patients, in light of some demographic variables such as (gender, marital status, economic status,), through a field study at the Iraqi Ministry of Social Affairs. A random sample of (50) social workers in the Iraqi Ministry of Social Affairs in various places affiliated with the ministry was chosen. a questionnaire developed by the researcher about the role of the social worker in the field of social care for Corona patients was administered to the study sample to collect the needed data. The results showed that there is a positive statistically significant correlation relationship at the level (0.01) between
... Show MoreThe research tagged with the controversy of aesthetic interpretation between the sculptures and their titles in contemporary Iraqi sculpture, “Exhibition of Experiments in Contemporary Iraqi Sculpture as a Model”, and it is one of the new research that contributes to strengthening the critical path in the Iraqi fine movement, as the first chapter dealt with the research problem stemming from the question: What is the impact of the aesthetic hermeneutic controversy between the title and the title in contemporary Iraqi sculpture?, and do the titles of the sculptural works help to understand or enhance their contents?, The research objective included: To identify the controversy of the aesthetic interpretation of sculptures and their ti
... Show MoreIn this search, a new pyrophosphate technique was proved. The technique was employed to single- nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), which diagnosis using a one-base extension reaction. Three Mycobacterium tuberculosis genes were chosen (Rpob, InhA, KatG) genes. Fifty-four specimens were used in this study fifty-three proved as drug-resistant specimens by The Iraqi Institute of Chest and Respiratory Diseases in Baghdad.; also one specimen was used as a negative control. The steps of this technique were by used a specific primer within each aliquot that has a short 3-OH end of the base of the target gene that was hybridized to the single-stranded DNA template. Then, the Taq polymerase enzyme and one of either α-thio-dATP, dTTP, dGTP, or dCTP
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