Background: Legionella pneumophila (L. pneumophila) is gram-negative bacterium, which causes Legionnaires’ disease as well as Pontiac fever. Objective: To determine the frequency of Legionella pneumophila in pneumonic patients, to determine the clinical utility of diagnosing Legionella pneumonia by urinary antigen testing (LPUAT) in terms of sensitivity and specificity, to compares the results obtained from patients by urinary antigen test with q Real Time PCR (RT PCR) using serum samples and to determine the frequency of serogroup 1 and other serogroups of L. pneumophila. Methods: A total of 100 pneumonic patients (community acquired pneumonia) were enrolled in this study during a period between October 2016 to April 2017; 92 samples were collected from patients attended and admitted to Al-Imamein Al-Kadhimein Medical City and 8 samples from those in the (Center of Kidney Diseases and Transplantation) in the Medical City of Baghdad. All patients were under therapy with antibiotics. Serum and urine specimens were obtained from all patients; urine samples were processed for urinary antigen test (rapid test). Serum samples were collected and submitted to DNA extraction for detection of L. pneumophila mip gene by q RT PCR assay. Results: The percentage of L. pneumophila in two hospitals in Bagdad was 30%. Of these 26% was serogroup 1 detected by urinary antigen testing (UAT). In the other hand, 23% of samples were positive by q RT PCR based mip gene, of these 19 % were serogroup 1 and 4% were another serogroup. The sensitivity of UAT is high (P value < 0.001), which means statistically highly significance than q RT PCR. Conclusion: LPUAT is a rapid tool for early diagnosis of Legionella infection, which highlights the need of using this test in hospitals and health institutions and there is a high prevalence of L. pneumophila in Iraq that refer to the necessity of considering this microorganism point of view in future studies for detection and treatment in pneumonic patients. Keywords: L. pneumophila, mip gene, quantitative real time PCR, urinary antigen. Citation: Gauad SA, Abdulrahman TR, Muhamad AK, Jawad AA, Hassan JS. Clinical utility of urinary antigen test and molecular method for detection of Legionella pneumophila. Iraqi JMS. 2018; 16(2): 207-215. doi: 10.22578/IJMS.16.2.13
BACKGROUND: Hepatocyte growth factor (HGF) is a proangiogenic factor that exerts different effects over stem cell survival growth, apoptosis, and adhesion. Its impact on leukemogenesis has been established by many studies. AIM: This study aimed to determine the effect of plasma HGF activity on acute myeloid leukemia (AML) patients at presentation and after remission. PATIENTS AND METHODS: This was a cross-sectional prospective study of 30 newly-diagnosed, adult, and AML patients. All patients received the 7+3 treatment protocol. Patients’ clinical data were taken at presentation, and patients were followed up for 6 months to evaluate the clinical status. Plasma HGF levels were estimated by ELISA based methods in the pa
... Show MoreThe clinical spectrum of cutaneous leishmaniasis (CL), an intracellular parasitic pathogen, ranges from a single sore healing to chronic crusty lesions with a manifestation of treatment resistance. The complicated interaction between Leishmania bodies and the early immune response, including innate and adaptive mechanisms, determines the evolution of nodules. This study examined the levels of the chemoattractant interleukin 8 (IL-8), pro-inflammatory nitric oxide (NO), and immunoregulatory macrophage inhibitory factor (MIF) in the serum of subjects recently diagnosed with cutaneous leishmaniasis, in parallel with patients being monitored during consecutive sodium stibogluconate (Pentostam) treatment. A total of 161 serum samples of newly di
... Show MoreThe recurrent somatic variations in
The aim of the study was to detect the frequency of R132 mutations in the
In recent years, there has been expanding development in the vehicular part and the number of vehicles moving on the roads in all the sections of the country. Arabic vehicle number plate identification based on image processing is a dynamic area of this work; this technique is used for security purposes such as tracking of stolen cars and access control to restricted areas. The License Plate Recognition System (LPRS) exploits a digital camera to capture vehicle plate numbers is used as input to the proposed recognition system. Basically, the proposed system consists of three phases, vehicle license plate localization, character segmentation, and character recognition, the
... Show MoreNowadays, internet security is a critical concern; the One of the most difficult study issues in network security is "intrusion detection". Fight against external threats. Intrusion detection is a novel method of securing computers and data networks that are already in use. To boost the efficacy of intrusion detection systems, machine learning and deep learning are widely deployed. While work on intrusion detection systems is already underway, based on data mining and machine learning is effective, it requires to detect intrusions by training static batch classifiers regardless considering the time-varying features of a regular data stream. Real-world problems, on the other hand, rarely fit into models that have such constraints. Furthermor
... Show MoreIn recent years, there has been expanding development in the vehicular part and the number of vehicles moving on the roads in all the sections of the country. Arabic vehicle number plate identification based on image processing is a dynamic area of this work; this technique is used for security purposes such as tracking of stolen cars and access control to restricted areas. The License Plate Recognition System (LPRS) exploits a digital camera to capture vehicle plate numbers is used as input to the proposed recognition system. Basically, the proposed system consists of three phases, vehicle license plate localization, character segmentation, and character recognition, the License Plate (LP) detection is presented using canny edge detection
... Show MoreThe Internet of Things (IoT) has significantly transformed modern systems through extensive connectivity but has also concurrently introduced considerable cybersecurity risks. Traditional rule-based methods are becoming increasingly insufficient in the face of evolving cyber threats. This study proposes an enhanced methodology utilizing a hybrid machine-learning framework for IoT cyber-attack detection. The framework integrates a Grey Wolf Optimizer (GWO) for optimal feature selection, a customized synthetic minority oversampling technique (SMOTE) for data balancing, and a systematic approach to hyperparameter tuning of ensemble algorithms: Random Forest (RF), XGBoost, and CatBoost. Evaluations on the RT-IoT2022 dataset demonstrat
... Show MoreA coin has two sides. Steganography although conceals the existence of a message but is not completely secure. It is not meant to supersede cryptography but to supplement it. The main goal of this method is to minimize the number of LSBs that are changed when substituting them with the bits of characters in the secret message. This will lead to decrease the distortion (noise) that is occurred in the pixels of the stego-image and as a result increase the immunity of the stego-image against the visual attack. The experiment shows that the proposed method gives good enhancement to the steganoraphy technique and there is no difference between the cover-image and the stego-image that can be seen by the human vision system (HVS), so this method c
... Show MoreIn this paper, a subspace identification method for bilinear systems is used . Wherein a " three-block " and " four-block " subspace algorithms are used. In this algorithms the input signal to the system does not have to be white . Simulation of these algorithms shows that the " four-block " gives fast convergence and the dimensions of the matrices involved are significantly smaller so that the computational complexity is lower as a comparison with " three-block " algorithm .
Interval methods for verified integration of initial value problems (IVPs) for ODEs have been used for more than 40 years. For many classes of IVPs, these methods have the ability to compute guaranteed error bounds for the flow of an ODE, where traditional methods provide only approximations to a solution. Overestimation, however, is a potential drawback of verified methods. For some problems, the computed error bounds become overly pessimistic, or integration even breaks down. The dependency problem and the wrapping effect are particular sources of overestimations in interval computations. Berz (see [1]) and his co-workers have developed Taylor model methods, which extend interval arithmetic with symbolic computations. The latter is an ef
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