Cutaneous Leishmaniasis (CL) is an endemic disease and one of the major health problems in Iraq. Leishmania tropica is known as the causative agent of Cutaneous Leishmaniasis in Baghdad.The classical serological methods of diagnosing leishmaniasis is a poor sensitivity especially for the sub genus and time consuming Here we have investigated two primer pairs, one specific for Leishmania as genus and the primer specific for the species of L. tropica to be detected by polymerase chain reaction (PCR).Samples were collected from (AL-karama Teaching Hospital) and whole genomic DNA was extracted from axenic promastigotes.The extracted DNA was amplified by PCRwith two KDNA primer pairs, for genus specific (13A/13B) and (Lmj4/Uni21) to identify the specific species of cutaneous leishmaniasis. Amplified PCR products then run on gel electrophoresis and two visible bands of the two primers were seen, 120 and 800 bp, respectively. Our results indicate that the PCR technique is sensitive and specific for the detection and differentiation of cutaneous leishmaniasis agents and can be recommended to applied in hospitals and research centers.
Generally, radiologists analyse the Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) by visual inspection to detect and identify the presence of tumour or abnormal tissue in brain MR images. The huge number of such MR images makes this visual interpretation process, not only laborious and expensive but often erroneous. Furthermore, the human eye and brain sensitivity to elucidate such images gets reduced with the increase of number of cases, especially when only some slices contain information of the affected area. Therefore, an automated system for the analysis and classification of MR images is mandatory. In this paper, we propose a new method for abnormality detection from T1-Weighted MRI of human head scans using three planes, including axial plane, co
... Show MorePavement 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 MoreMagnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is one of the most important diagnostic tool. There are many methods to segment the
tumor of human brain. One of these, the conventional method that uses pure image processing techniques that are not preferred because they need human interaction for accurate segmentation. But unsupervised methods do not require any human interference and can segment the brain with high precision. In this project, the unsupervised classification methods have been used in order to detect the tumor disease from MRI images. These metho
... Show MoreVoice 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 MoreThe Normalization Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), for many years, was widely used in remote sensing for the detection of vegetation land cover. This index uses red channel radiances (i.e., 0.66 μm reflectance) and near-IR channel (i.e., 0.86 μm reflectance). In the heavy chlorophyll absorption area, the red channel is located, while in the high reflectance plateau of vegetation canopies, the Near-IR channel is situated. Senses of channels (Red & Near- IR) read variance depths over vegetation canopies. In the present study, a further index for vegetation identification is proposed. The normalized difference vegetation shortwave index (NDVSI) is defined as the difference between the cubic bands of Near- IR and Shortwave infrared
... Show MoreThe objective of this study was to compare the sensitivity and specificity of rK39,
ELISA and IFA tests for the diagnosis of visceral leishmaniasis using blood
samples. Samples were collected from 146 suspected patients and 30 healthy
individual as control. The results showed 52 (35.62%), 58 (39.73%) and 71
(48.64%) positive samples by rK39, ELISA and IFA , respectively. IFA test showed
a higher sensitivity (48.63%) than ELISA and rk39 dip stick (39.72%) and (35.61%)
respectively. The highest sensitivity of agreement (K: 0.912) was found between
rK39 dipstick and ELISA. Therefore, we suggest the application of rK39 dipstick
and ELISA methods in endemic areas of visceral leishmaniasis for early and
accurate diag
Polymorphisms in the genes of G-protein subunit beta 3 (GNB3); rs5443, tryptophan hydroxylase 1 (TPH1); rs211105 and rs4537731, tryptophan hydroxylase 2 (TPH2); rs4570625 and sodium voltage-gated channel alpha subunit 5 (SCN5A); rs1805124, have known to cause the abnormalities in the gastrointestinal tract that are implicated to irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) predisposition. Upfront genetic polymorphism genotyping in IBS-related gene polymorphisms will help to intervene and guide the decision-making in the management of IBS patients. This study aimed to develop a genotyping method to detect the respective polymorphisms using nested allele-specific multiplex polymerase chain reaction (NASM-PCR). A combi
... Show MoreIn this study, out of 50 isolates of some nosocomial infections from some Baghdad hospitals, only 13 (26%) were identified as Escherichia coli. Depending on selective media, morphological and biochemical tests the species was then confirmed by molecular methods. Later on antimicrobial resistance test was performed by the Kirby-Bauer method. The molecular characterization of blaTEM and blaCTX-M genes in different clinical isolates of E. coli was done through polymerase chain reaction (PCR) by utilizing special primers. These genes were positive to only 4 (30.7%) isolates. The sequence of nucleotides of positive genes was carried out for four isolates. The results showed that there was no vari
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