Background: During Ramadan, Muslims fast throughout daylight hours. There is a direct link between fasting and increasing incidence of infections. Antibiotic usage for treatment of infections should be based on accurate diagnosis, with the correct dose and dosing regimen for the shortest period to avoid bacterial resistance. This study aimed to evaluate the practices of physicians in prescribing suitable antibiotics for fasting patients and the compliance of the patients in using such antibiotics at regular intervals. Materials and methods: An observational study was carried out during the middle 10 days of Ramadan 2014 in two pharmacies at Baghdad. A total of 34 prescriptions (Rx) for adults who suffered from infections were examined. For each included Rx, the researchers documented the age and sex of the patient, the diagnosis of the case, and the name of the given antibiotic(s) with dose and frequency of usage. A direct interview with the patient was also done, at which each patient was asked about fasting and if he/she would like to continue fasting during the remaining period of Ramadan. The patient was also asked if the physician asked him/her about fasting before writing the Rx. Results: More than two-thirds of participating patients were fasting during Ramadan. Antibiotics were prescribed at a higher percentage by dentists and surgeons, for which a single antibiotic with a twice-daily regimen was the most commonly prescribed by physicians for patients during the Ramadan month. Conclusion: Physicians fail to take patient fasting status into consideration when prescribing antibiotics for their fasting patients. Antibiotics with a twice-daily regimen are not suitable and best to be avoided for fasting patients in Iraq during Ramadan – especially if it occurs during summer months – to avoid treatment failure and provoking bacterial resistance. Keywords: fasting, Ramadan, antibiotics, dosing regimen
The design of future will still be the most confusing and puzzling issue and misgivings that arouse worry and leading to the spirit of adventures to make progress and arrive at the ways of reviving, creativity and modernism. The idea of prevailing of a certain culture or certain product in design depends on the given and available techniques, due to the fact that the computer and their artistic techniques become very important and vital to reinforce the image in the design. Thus, it is very necessary to link between these techniques and suitable way to reform the mentality by which the design will be reformed, from what has been said, (there has no utilization for the whole modern and available graphic techniques in the design proce
... Show Morenumerical study is applied to the mercury-argon mixture by solving the boltzman transport equation for different mixture percentage.
This study investigated the ability of using crushed glass solid wastes in water filtration by using a pilot plant, constructed in Al-Wathba water treatment plant in Baghdad. Different depths and different grain sizes of crushed glass were used as mono and dual media with sand and porcelaniate in the filtration process. The mathematical model by Tufenkji and Elimelech was used to evaluate the initial collection efficiency η of these filters. The results indicated that the collection efficiency varied inversely with the filtration rate. For the mono media filters the theoretical ηth values were more than the practical values ηprac calculated from the experimental work. In the glass filter ηprac was obtained by multiplying ηth by a facto
... Show MoreEstimating multivariate location and scatter with both affine equivariance and positive break down has always been difficult. Awell-known estimator which satisfies both properties is the Minimum volume Ellipsoid Estimator (MVE) Computing the exact (MVE) is often not feasible, so one usually resorts to an approximate Algorithm. In the regression setup, algorithm for positive-break down estimators like Least Median of squares typically recomputed the intercept at each step, to improve the result. This approach is called intercept adjustment. In this paper we show that a similar technique, called location adjustment, Can be applied to the (MVE). For this purpose we use the Minimum Volume Ball (MVB). In order
... Show MoreThis study investigated the ability of using crushed glass solid wastes in water filtration by using a pilot plant, constructed in Al-Wathba water treatment plant in Baghdad. Different depths and different grain sizes of crushed glass were used as mono and dual media with sand and porcelaniate in the filtration process. The mathematical model by Tufenkji and Elimelech was used to evaluate the initial collection efficiency η of these filters. The results indicated that the collection efficiency varied inversely with the filtration rate. For the mono media filters the theoretical ηth values were more than the practical values ηprac calculated from
the experimental work. In the glass filter ηprac was obtained by multiplying ηth by a
With the continuous progress of image retrieval technology, the speed of searching for the required image from a large amount of image data has become an important issue. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been used in image retrieval. However, many image retrieval systems based on CNNs have poor ability to express image features. Content-based Image Retrieval (CBIR) is a method of finding desired images from image databases. However, CBIR suffers from lower accuracy in retrieving images from large-scale image databases. In this paper, the proposed system is an improvement of the convolutional neural network for greater accuracy and a machine learning tool that can be used for automatic image retrieval. It includes two phases
... Show MoreIn this paper, membrane-based computing image segmentation, both region-based and edge-based, is proposed for medical images that involve two types of neighborhood relations between pixels. These neighborhood relations—namely, 4-adjacency and 8-adjacency of a membrane computing approach—construct a family of tissue-like P systems for segmenting actual 2D medical images in a constant number of steps; the two types of adjacency were compared using different hardware platforms. The process involves the generation of membrane-based segmentation rules for 2D medical images. The rules are written in the P-Lingua format and appended to the input image for visualization. The findings show that the neighborhood relations between pixels o
... Show More