The diagnosis of acute appendicitis (AA) sometimes is illusive and the accompanying clinical and laboratory manifestations cannot be used for definitive diagnosis. Objective: This study aimed to evaluate the diagnostic value of neutrophil/lymphocyte ratio (NLR) in detection of AA. Materials and Methods: This is a cross-sectional study that included a total of 80 adult patients with AA and 62 age- and gender-matched patients with abdominal pain due to causes other than AA. Three milliliter of peripheral blood were collected from each participant. The NLR was calculated by dividing the absolute neutrophil count by the absolute lymphocyte count. Receiver operating characteristic curve was used to assess the diagnostic value of NLR in detection of AA cases. Results: Mean NLR in AA patients was 7.18 ± 2.11 compared with 2.68 ± 1.08 in patients with abdominal pain due to causes other than AA with a highly significant difference. The area under the curve was 0.916 (95%confidence interval = 0.842–0.989), P < 0.001. The sensitivity and specificity of the test at NLR = 4.45 were 90% and 83%, respectively. Conclusions: NLR is an easy, inexpensive test that can be used for AA detection. This test is more sensitive and more specific than either total white blood cell or absolute neutrophil count
Background: Breast Cancer is the most common malignancy among the Iraqi population; the majority of cases are still diagnosed at advanced stages with poor prospects of cure. Early detection through promoting public awareness is one of the promising tools in its control. Objectives: To evaluate the baseline needs for breast cancer awareness in Iraq through exploring level of knowledge, beliefs and behavior towards the disease and highlighting barriers to screening among a sample of Iraqi women complaining of breast cancer. Methodology: Two-hundred samples were enrolled in this study; gathered from the National
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) have high performance in the fields of object recognition and classification. The strength of CNNs comes from the fact that they are able to extract information from raw-pixel content and learn features automatically. Feature extraction and classification algorithms can be either hand-crafted or Deep Learning (DL) based. DL detection approaches can be either two stages (region proposal approaches) detector or a single stage (non-region proposal approach) detector. Region proposal-based techniques include R-CNN, Fast RCNN, and Faster RCNN. Non-region proposal-based techniques include Single Shot Detector (SSD) and You Only Look Once (YOLO). We are going to compare the speed and accuracy of Faster RCNN,
... Show MoreThis study aims to analyze the spectral properties of plasma produced from rice husk(Rh) using the laser breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) method. The plasma generation process used the fundamental harmonic (1064 nm) of a Q-switched Nd:YAG laser. Yttrium aluminum garnet (YAG) is a man-made crystalline material. The laser fired pulses with a duration of 10 ns and a repetition rate of 6 Hz. Thus, the energy outputs achieved were 50–200 mJ at the wavelength of 1064 (nm). The silica content in the rice hulls was verified using an XRF measurement, which revealed the presence of silica in the rice hulls in a high percentage. Precise beam focusing was achieved by focusing the laser on the target material. This target material is placed with
... Show MoreThe increasing use of antiseptic compounds creates selective pressure cause emergence of antiseptic resistance among Staphylococcus aureus .Resistance mechanism of antiseptic is driven mainly by multi drug resistant (MDR) efflux protein.Sixty five isolates of S.aureuswere collected from different clinical sources and subjected to 11 antibiotics most of them are recognized by efflux systems as extruded substrates. Range of efflux activity was estimated using cartwheel method. Simultaneous discrimination of antiseptic coding genes (qacA/B, smr and norA)as well as nuc and mecA genes among multidrug resistantS.aureus(MRSA) isolates was preformed using multiplex PCR assay
... Show MoreShadow removal is crucial for robot and machine vision as the accuracy of object detection is greatly influenced by the uncertainty and ambiguity of the visual scene. In this paper, we introduce a new algorithm for shadow detection and removal based on different shapes, orientations, and spatial extents of Gaussian equations. Here, the contrast information of the visual scene is utilized for shadow detection and removal through five consecutive processing stages. In the first stage, contrast filtering is performed to obtain the contrast information of the image. The second stage involves a normalization process that suppresses noise and generates a balanced intensity at a specific position compared to the neighboring intensit
... Show MoreThis study successfully synthesized high-performance photodetectors based on Ag-WO3 core–shell heterostructures using a simple and economical two-step pulsed laser ablation in water method and has investigated the electrical characteristics of the Ag@WO3 nanocomposite heterojunction. The Hall effect tests indicate that the synthesized Ag@WO3 exhibits n-type conduction with a Hall mobility of 1.25 × 103 cm2V-1S-1. Dark current–voltage properties indicated that the created heterojunctions displayed rectification capabilities, with the highest rectification factor of around 1.71 seen at a 5 V bias. A photodetector’s responsivity reveals the existence of two response peaks, which are situated in the ultraviolet and visible region. The ph
... Show MoreAutomatic recognition of individuals is very important in modern eras. Biometric techniques have emerged as an answer to the matter of automatic individual recognition. This paper tends to give a technique to detect pupil which is a mixture of easy morphological operations and Hough Transform (HT) is presented in this paper. The circular area of the eye and pupil is divided by the morphological filter as well as the Hough Transform (HT) where the local Iris area has been converted into a rectangular block for the purpose of calculating inconsistencies in the image. This method is implemented and tested on the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CASIA V4) iris image database 249 person and the IIT Delhi (IITD) iris
... Show MoreMost intrusion detection systems are signature based that work similar to anti-virus but they are unable to detect the zero-day attacks. The importance of the anomaly based IDS has raised because of its ability to deal with the unknown attacks. However smart attacks are appeared to compromise the detection ability of the anomaly based IDS. By considering these weak points the proposed
system is developed to overcome them. The proposed system is a development to the well-known payload anomaly detector (PAYL). By
combining two stages with the PAYL detector, it gives good detection ability and acceptable ratio of false positive. The proposed system improve the models recognition ability in the PAYL detector, for a filtered unencrypt