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
Introduction: Nitrofurantoin (NFT) is abroad spectrum bactericidal antibiotic. The bioavailability of NFT is affected by many factors. Samafurantin® tablets containing 50 mg NFT were manufactured by Samarra drug industry. Urinary excretion studies were employed since; the urinary tract is the main site of NFT action and excretion. Objective: The objective of the study was to investigate the effect of Uricol® and food on secondary pharmacokinetic parameters of Samafurantin® tablets with different doses by applying urinary data. Methods: Twelve healthy male volunteers participated in this study. Urine samples were collected from each volunteer after overnight fasting at a specified time intervals which considered as a blank sample for meas
... Show MoreThe most common nosocomial fungal infection in hospitals is urinary tract candidiasis. Candida albicans is the most prevalent cause of nosocomial fungal urinary tract infections, however Candida species distribution is changing rapidly. At the same time, the rise in urinary tract candidiasis has resulted in the emergence of antifungal-resistant Candida species. This study aimed to diagnose Candida Spp. In women with UTI and reveal the nucleotides sequences of CA-INT-L Gene to look for mutation within the gene. This study included 100 women patients suffering from urinary tract infections and vaginal swabs samples from those individuals were taken to identify the presence of Candida. They were between the ages of 22 and 67. Candida i
... Show MoreIntrusion detection systems detect attacks inside computers and networks, where the detection of the attacks must be in fast time and high rate. Various methods proposed achieved high detection rate, this was done either by improving the algorithm or hybridizing with another algorithm. However, they are suffering from the time, especially after the improvement of the algorithm and dealing with large traffic data. On the other hand, past researches have been successfully applied to the DNA sequences detection approaches for intrusion detection system; the achieved detection rate results were very low, on other hand, the processing time was fast. Also, feature selection used to reduce the computation and complexity lead to speed up the system
... Show MoreThis paper proposes a new method Object Detection in Skin Cancer Image, the minimum
spanning tree Detection descriptor (MST). This ObjectDetection descriptor builds on the
structure of the minimum spanning tree constructed on the targettraining set of Skin Cancer
Images only. The Skin Cancer Image Detection of test objects relies on their distances to the
closest edge of thattree. Our experimentsshow that the Minimum Spanning Tree (MST) performs
especially well in case of Fogginessimage problems and in highNoisespaces for Skin Cancer
Image.
The proposed method of Object Detection Skin Cancer Image wasimplemented and tested on
different Skin Cancer Images. We obtained very good results . The experiment showed that
Malaria is a curative disease, with therapeutics available for patients, such as drugs that can prevent future malaria infections in countries vulnerable to malaria. Though, there is no effective malaria vaccine until now, although it is an interesting research area in medicine. Local descriptors of blood smear image are exploited in this paper to solve parasitized malaria infection detection problem. Swarm intelligence is used to separate the red blood cells from the background of the blood slide image in adaptive manner. After that, the effective corner points are detected and localized using Harris corner detection method. Two types of local descriptors are generated from the local regions of the effective corners which are Gabor based f
... Show MorePhotoacoustic is a unique imaging method that combines the absorption contrast of light or radio frequency waves with ultrasound resolution. When the deposition of this energy is sufficiently short, a thermo-elastic expansion takes place whereby acoustic waves are generated. These waves can be recorded and stored to construct an image. This work presents experimental procedure of laser photoacoustic two dimensional imaging to detect tumor embedded within normal tissue. The experimental work is accomplished using phantoms that are sandwiched from fish heart or blood sac (simulating a tumor) 1-14mm mean diameter embedded within chicken breast to simulate a real tissue. Nd: YAG laser of 1.064μm and 532nm wavelengths, 10ns pulse duration, 4
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