Background:-The Modified Alvarado Scoring System (MASS) has been reported to be a cheap and quick diagnostic tool in patients with acute appendicitis. However, differences in diagnostic accuracy have been observed if the scores were applied to various populations and clinical settings.
Objectives:- The purpose of this study was to evaluate the diagnostic value of Modified Alvarado Scoring System in patients with acute appendicitis in our setting.
Methods:-one hundre twenty eight patients ,were included in this study, admitted to Al-Kindy teaching hospital from June 2009 to June 2010. Patients’ age ranged from 8 to 56 years (21±10) they were divided into three groups; paediatrics, child bearing age females & adult males,. MASS was calculated for each patient included as the diagnosis & treatment were done on the bases of surgeon's clinical decision,confirmation was done by histopathological examination. Finally statistics done included negative appendectomy rate, sensitivity,specificity,positive predictive value,negative predictive value & accuracy.
Results:- Our negative appendectomy rate was 19.5% (22.22% for paediatrics 40.9% for females 4.2% for males). MASS showed sensitivity of 61%(92.8% for paediatrics 38% for females & 58% for males), specificity 80% (75% for paediatrics 88% for females & 50% for males), positive predictive value 92%(92.8% for paediatrics 83% for females 50% for males), negative predictive value 33% ( 75%for paediatrics 50% for females 5% for males) & accuracy 65% ( 88.9% for paediatrics 59% for females 58% for males).
Conclusion:- MASS was of limited help to junior doctors in our setting,clinical assessment & experience are still the gold standard for acute appendicitis.
In this research the results of applying Artificial Neural Networks with modified activation function to
perform the online and offline identification of four Degrees of Freedom (4-DOF) Selective Compliance
Assembly Robot Arm (SCARA) manipulator robot will be described. The proposed model of
identification strategy consists of a feed-forward neural network with a modified activation function that
operates in parallel with the SCARA robot model. Feed-Forward Neural Networks (FFNN) which have
been trained online and offline have been used, without requiring any previous knowledge about the
system to be identified. The activation function that is used in the hidden layer in FFNN is a modified
version of the wavelet func
In this research the results of applying Artificial Neural Networks with modified activation function to perform the online and offline identification of four Degrees of Freedom (4-DOF) Selective Compliance Assembly Robot Arm (SCARA) manipulator robot will be described. The proposed model of identification strategy consists of a feed-forward neural network with a modified activation function that operates in parallel with the SCARA robot model. Feed-Forward Neural Networks (FFNN) which have been trained online and offline have been used, without requiring any previous knowledge about the system to be identified. The activation function that is used in the hidden layer in FFNN is a modified version of the wavelet function. This approach ha
... Show MoreThe direct electron transfer behavior of hemoglobin that is immobilized onto screen-printed carbon electrode (SPCE) modified with silver nanoparticles (AgNPs) and chitosan (CS) was studied in this work. Cyclic voltametry and spectrophotometry were used to characterize the hemoglobin (Hb) bioconjunction with AgNPs and CS. Results of the modified electrode showed quasi-reversible redox peaks with a formal potential of (-0.245 V) versus Ag/AgCl in 0.1 M phosphate buffer solution (PBS), pH7, at a scan rate of 0.1 Vs-1. The charge transfer coefficient (α) was 0.48 and the apparent electron transfer rate constant (Ks) was 0.47 s-1. The electrode was used as a hydrogen peroxide biosensor with a linear response over 3 to 240 µM and a detection li
... Show MoreAbstract
Much attention has been paid for the use of robot arm in various applications. Therefore, the optimal path finding has a significant role to upgrade and guide the arm movement. The essential function of path planning is to create a path that satisfies the aims of motion including, averting obstacles collision, reducing time interval, decreasing the path traveling cost and satisfying the kinematics constraints. In this paper, the free Cartesian space map of 2-DOF arm is constructed to attain the joints variable at each point without collision. The D*algorithm and Euclidean distance are applied to obtain the exact and estimated distances to the goal respectively. The modified Particle Swarm Optimization al
... Show MoreA new modified differential evolution algorithm DE-BEA, is proposed to improve the reliability of the standard DE/current-to-rand/1/bin by implementing a new mutation scheme inspired by the bacterial evolutionary algorithm (BEA). The crossover and the selection schemes of the DE method are also modified to fit the new DE-BEA mechanism. The new scheme diversifies the population by applying to all the individuals a segment based scheme that generates multiple copies (clones) from each individual one-by-one and applies the BEA segment-wise mechanism. These new steps are embedded in the DE/current-to-rand/bin scheme. The performance of the new algorithm has been compared with several DE variants over eighteen benchmark functions including sever
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