It is widely accepted that early diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease (AD) makes it possible for patients to gain access to appropriate health care services and would facilitate the development of new therapies. AD starts many years before its clinical manifestations and a biomarker that provides a measure of changes in the brain in this period would be useful for early diagnosis of AD. Given the rapid increase in the number of older people suffering from AD, there is a need for an accurate, low-cost and easy to use biomarkers that could be used to detect AD in its early stages. Potentially, the electroencephalogram (EEG) can play a vital role in this but at present, no reliable EEG biomarker exists for early diagnosis of AD. The gradual slowing of brain activity caused by AD starts from the back of the brain and spreads out towards other parts. Consequently, determining the brain regions that are first affected by AD may be useful in its early diagnosis. Higuchi fractal dimension (HFD) has characteristics which make it suited to capturing region-specific neural changes due to AD. The aim of this study is to investigate the potential of HFD of the EEG as a biomarker which is associated with the brain region first affected by AD. Mean HFD value was calculated for all channels of EEG signals recorded from 52 subjects (20-AD and 32-normal). Then, p-values were calculated between the two groups (AD and normal) to detect EEG channels that have a significant association with AD. k-nearest neighbor (KNN) algorithm was used to compute the distance between AD patients and normal subjects in the classification. Our results show that AD patients have significantly lower HFD values in the parietal areas. HFD values for channels in these areas were used to discriminate between AD and normal subjects with a sensitivity and specificity values of 100% and 80%, respectively.
This study is carried out to investigate the prevalence of Coxiella burnetii (C. burnetii) infections in cattle using an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) and polymerase chain reaction (PCR) assay targeting IS1111A transposase gene. A total of 130 lactating cows were randomly selected from different areas in Wasit province, Iraq and subjected to blood and milk sampling during the period extended between November 2018 and May 2019. ELISA and PCR tests revealed that 16.15% and 10% of the animals studied were respectively positive. Significant correlations (P<0.05) were detected between the positive results and clinical data. Two positive PCR products were analyzed phylogenetically, named as C. burnetii IQ-No.5 and C. burnet
... Show MoreThe main problem of this research is the delay of implementation of the investment plan projects for the period (2013-2016) and the weakness of the staff ability in the ministries and they don’t have the sufficient experience to carry out the implementation process.
Therefore, the research aims to evaluate the implementation of programs and projects of the investment plan in a manner consistent with the objectives set for them without any wasteful of efforts, time and money. And then identify the problems and obstacles to determine the deviations of the implementation of the specific for each sector according to the criteria of evaluation and the form of cost, quality, time and implementation.<
... Show MoreIn the present study, five derivatives have been designed to be synthesized as possible mutual prodrugs for 5-Fluorouracil (5-FU) and non steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) to selectively deliver the drugs into the cancer cells. The synthesis of the target compounds were accomplished following multistep reaction procedures, the chemical reaction followed up and the purity of the products were checked by TLC. The structure of the final compounds and their intermediates were confirmed by their melting points, infrared spectroscopy and elemental microanalysis, the hydrolysis of compound III was studied using HPLC technique. According to the results mentioned above, compounds (I−V) can be good candidates as possible mutual prod
... Show MoreThe research discusses with organizational spirituality and its implications on the organizational performance in the General Company for Food Industries in Abu Ghraib (Baghdad). The aim of the research was to determine the contribution of organizational spirituality in the organizational performance of the surveyed company. In order to achieve the objectives of the research، two main hypotheses were adopted. Several sub-hypotheses centered on the relationship between organizational spirituality and organizational performance in terms of its dimensions (Meaning work، self-esteem، community affiliation،
... Show MoreIn this paper, a compact genetic algorithm (CGA) is enhanced by integrating its selection strategy with a steepest descent algorithm (SDA) as a local search method to give I-CGA-SDA. This system is an attempt to avoid the large CPU time and computational complexity of the standard genetic algorithm. Here, CGA dramatically reduces the number of bits required to store the population and has a faster convergence. Consequently, this integrated system is used to optimize the maximum likelihood function lnL(φ1, θ1) of the mixed model. Simulation results based on MSE were compared with those obtained from the SDA and showed that the hybrid genetic algorithm (HGA) and I-CGA-SDA can give a good estimator of (φ1, θ1) for the ARMA(1,1) model. Anot
... Show MoreBack ground: During acrylic resin processing, the mold must be separated from the surface of the gypsum to prevent liquid resin from penetrating into the gypsum, and water from the gypsum seeping into the acrylic resin. For many years, tin foil was the most acceptable separating medium, and because it's difficult to apply, a tin-foil substitute is used. In this study, olive oil is used as an alternative to tin foil separating medium for first time, so the aim of the study was to evaluate its effect as a separating medium on some physical properties such as (surface roughness, water sorption and solubility) of acrylic resins denture base comparing it with those processed using tin-foil and tin foil substitute such as (cold mold seal) separat
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