Uropathogenic E. coli (UPEC) is problematic and still the leading cause of urinary tract infections worldwide. It is developed resistance against most antibiotics. The investigation, surveillance system, and efficient strategy will facilitate selecting an appropriate treatment that could control the bacterial distribution. The present study aims to investigate the epidemiology and associated risk factors of uropathogenic E. coli and to study their antibiotic resistance patterns. 1585 midstream urine specimens were collected from symptomatic urinary tract infections (UTI) patients (225 males and 1360 females) admitted to Zakho emergency hospital, Zakho, Kurdistan Region, Iraq from January 2016 until the end of December 2018. Specimens were inoculated on blood and MacConkey plates and incubated at 37оC for 24 hours. Uropathogenic E. coli was diagnosed based on gram staining, colony characteristics, and standard biochemical tests in accordance with local standards and guidelines. All isolates were screened for their antibiogram pattern using the disk diffusion method based on the Clinical and Laboratory Standards Institute guidelines. The results showed that out of 1585 urine specimens, 1026 (64.7%) were UTIs positive with a statistically higher rate in 2016 (83.6%) (P< 0.0001). The UTIs frequency in females was significantly higher than males (P< 0.0001). Generally, the uropathogenic E. coli represented 21.1% with the highest level in 2016 (22.9%). The uropathogenic E. coli rate was higher, statistically not significant, in females (21.4%) than males (18.5%) (P=0.4946). Additionally, through the three years of study, uropathogenic E. coli (UPEC) was in high frequency in February and May 2016. The female’s age group from 20 to 39 years was the most vulnerable (46%) form total infected females, while those from 70-74 years (1%) were the least susceptible in males and females. A high percentage (80.56 %) of multidrug resistance E. coli isolates was observed with high resistance against -lactamase and macrolides antibiotics. However, higher sensitivity was towards imipenem and meropenem. In conclusion, the wrong and overuse of antibiotics will increase the resistance rate of E. coli. For this reason, proper use of available antibiotics is necessary. Also, the educational programs and periodic monitoring of antimicrobial susceptibility are essential for reducing the antibiotic resistance rate.
Innovative laboratory research and fluid breakthroughs have improved carbonate matrix stimulation technology in the recent decade. Since oil and gas wells are stimulated often to increase output and maximum recovery, this has resulted in matrix acidizing is a less costly alternative to hydraulic fracturing; therefore, it is widely employed because of its low cost and the fact that it may restore damaged wells to their previous productivity and give extra production capacity. Limestone acidizing in the Mishrif reservoir has never been investigated; hence research revealed fresh insights into this process. Many reports have stated that the Ahdeb oil field's Mishrif reservoir has been unable to be stimulated due to high inj
... Show MoreAerial Robot Arms (ARAs) enable aerial drones to interact and influence objects in various environments. Traditional ARA controllers need the availability of a high-precision model to avoid high control chattering. Furthermore, in practical applications of aerial object manipulation, the payloads that ARAs can handle vary, depending on the nature of the task. The high uncertainties due to modeling errors and an unknown payload are inversely proportional to the stability of ARAs. To address the issue of stability, a new adaptive robust controller, based on the Radial Basis Function (RBF) neural network, is proposed. A three-tier approach is also followed. Firstly, a detailed new model for the ARA is derived using the Lagrange–d’A
... Show MoreAspect categorisation and its utmost importance in the eld of Aspectbased Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) has encouraged researchers to improve topic model performance for modelling the aspects into categories. In general, a majority of its current methods implement parametric models requiring a pre-determined number of topics beforehand. However, this is not e ciently undertaken with unannotated text data as they lack any class label. Therefore, the current work presented a novel non-parametric model drawing a number of topics based on the semantic association present between opinion-targets (i.e., aspects) and their respective expressed sentiments. The model incorporated the Semantic Association Rules (SAR) into the Hierarchical Dirichlet Proce
... Show MoreThe virtual decomposition control (VDC) is an efficient tool suitable to deal with the full-dynamics-based control problem of complex robots. However, the regressor-based adaptive control used by VDC to control every subsystem and to estimate the unknown parameters demands specific knowledge about the system physics. Therefore, in this paper, we focus on reorganizing the equation of the VDC for a serial chain manipulator using the adaptive function approximation technique (FAT) without needing specific system physics. The dynamic matrices of the dynamic equation of every subsystem (e.g. link and joint) are approximated by orthogonal functions due to the minimum approximation errors produced. The contr
Blockchain represents a new promising technology with a huge economic impact resulting from its uses in various fields such as digital currency and banking; malware represents a serious threat to users, and there are many differences in the effectiveness of antivirus software used to deal with the problem of malware. This chapter has developed a coefficient for measuring the effectiveness of antivirus software. This chapter evaluates the effectiveness of antivirus software by conducting tests on a group of protection programs using a folder containing an amount of data. These programs are applied to combat viruses contained in this folder. The study revealed that the effectiveness of antivirus software is as follows: AVG scored 0%,
... Show MoreThis article presents a new cascaded extended state observer (CESO)-based sliding-mode control (SMC) for an underactuated flexible joint robot (FJR). The control of the FJR has many challenges, including coupling, underactuation, nonlinearity, uncertainties and external disturbances, and the noise amplification especially in the high-order systems. The proposed control integrates the CESO and SMC, in which the CESO estimates the states and disturbances, and the SMC provides the system robustness to the uncertainty and disturbance estimation errors. First, a dynamic model of the FJR is derived and converted from an underactuated form to a canonical form via the Olfati transformation and a flatness approach, which reduces the complexity of th
... Show MoreThe choice of binary Pseudonoise (PN) sequences with specific properties, having long period high complexity, randomness, minimum cross and auto- correlation which are essential for some communication systems. In this research a nonlinear PN generator is introduced . It consists of a combination of basic components like Linear Feedback Shift Register (LFSR), ?-element which is a type of RxR crossbar switches. The period and complexity of a sequence which are generated by the proposed generator are computed and the randomness properties of these sequences are measured by well-known randomness tests.
The aim of human lower limb rehabilitation robot is to regain the ability of motion and to strengthen the weak muscles. This paper proposes the design of a force-position control for a four Degree Of Freedom (4-DOF) lower limb wearable rehabilitation robot. This robot consists of a hip, knee and ankle joints to enable the patient for motion and turn in both directions. The joints are actuated by Pneumatic Muscles Actuators (PMAs). The PMAs have very great potential in medical applications because the similarity to biological muscles. Force-Position control incorporating a Takagi-Sugeno-Kang- three- Proportional-Derivative like Fuzzy Logic (TSK-3-PD) Controllers for position control and three-Proportional (3-P) controllers for force contr
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