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: Thyroid surgery is most common endocrine surgery in general surgical practice. Objectives: the aim of this work is to evaluate the feasibility, benefits and outcomes of open mini-incision thyroidectomy and compared the results with that of conventional thyroidectomy. The comparison between the two groups was in term of incision length, amount of blood loss, time of operation, postoperative pain, hospital stay and the cosmetic outcomes.Type of the study: this is a single-blinded randomized controlled studyMethods: This study compared the advantages and outcomes of 22 patients subjected to mini-incision thyroidectomy (Group A) with the equal numbers of patients subjected to conventional thyroidectomy (Group B).Results: the oper
... Show MoreSome of the main challenges in developing an effective network-based intrusion detection system (IDS) include analyzing large network traffic volumes and realizing the decision boundaries between normal and abnormal behaviors. Deploying feature selection together with efficient classifiers in the detection system can overcome these problems. Feature selection finds the most relevant features, thus reduces the dimensionality and complexity to analyze the network traffic. Moreover, using the most relevant features to build the predictive model, reduces the complexity of the developed model, thus reducing the building classifier model time and consequently improves the detection performance. In this study, two different sets of select
... Show MoreThis study was aimed to use plant tissue culture technique to induce callus formation of Aloe vera on MS. Medium supplied with 10 mg/l NAA and 5 mg/l BA that exhibit the best results even with subculturing. As the method of [1] 1g. dru weight of callus induced from A. vera crown and in vivo crown were extracted then injected in HPLC using the standards of Ascorbic acid (vit. C), Salysilic acid and Nicotenic acid (vit. B5) to compare with the plant extracts. Results showed high potential of increasing some secondary products using the crown callus culture of A. vera as compared with in vivo crown, Ascorbic acid was 1.829 ?g/l in in vivo crown and increased to 3.905 ?g/l crown callus culture . Salysilic acid raised from 3.54 ?g/l in in vivo c
... Show MoreWith the proliferation of both Internet access and data traffic, recent breaches have brought into sharp focus the need for Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDS) to protect networks from more complex cyberattacks. To differentiate between normal network processes and possible attacks, Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) often employ pattern recognition and data mining techniques. Network and host system intrusions, assaults, and policy violations can be automatically detected and classified by an Intrusion Detection System (IDS). Using Python Scikit-Learn the results of this study show that Machine Learning (ML) techniques like Decision Tree (DT), Naïve Bayes (NB), and K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) can enhance the effectiveness of an Intrusi
... Show MoreContracaecum rudolphii Hartwich, 1964 is a nematode which causes major concerns to human and wildlife animal’s health. However, the population genetics of C. rudolphii has been poorly studied in Iraq. In order to gain a deeper understanding in the outline of the genetic diversity of the nematode C. rudolphii that were isolated from its host cormorant Phalacrocorax carbo (Linnaeus, 1758), in the middle areas of Iraq, twenty specimens of C. rudolphii adults were isolated from nine individuals of P. carbo. The first (ITS-1) internal transcribed spacers (ITS) of ribosomal DNA (rDNA) of C. rudolphii were amplified using conventional polymerase chain reaction (PCR); then, the amplicons were subjected to sequencing. Concatenation of ITS-1 (rD
... Show MoreImage pattern classification is considered a significant step for image and video processing.Although various image pattern algorithms have been proposed so far that achieved adequate classification,achieving higher accuracy while reducing the computation time remains challenging to date. A robust imagepattern classification method is essential to obtain the desired accuracy. This method can be accuratelyclassify image blocks into plain, edge, and texture (PET) using an efficient feature extraction mechanism.Moreover, to date, most of the existing studies are focused on evaluating their methods based on specificorthogonal moments, which limits the understanding of their potential application to various DiscreteOrthogonal Moments (DOMs). The
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