BACKGROUND: HLA-B27 can effect clinical presentation and course of ankylosing spondylitis. Different detection techniques of HLA-B27 are available with variable sensitivities and specificities. OBJECTIVE: To compare serologic and molecular diagnostic techniques of detecting HLA-B27 status and to correlate it with some clinical variables among ankylosing spondylitis patients. PATIENTS AND METHODS: A cross-sectional study was conducted on 83 Iraqi patients with ankylosing spondylitis. Clinical and laboratory evaluations were reported. HLA-B27 status was determined in all patients by real-time PCR using HLA-B27 RealFast™ kit; ELISA method was used as well to detect soluble serum HLA-B27 antigens using Human Leukocyte Antigen® kit. RESULTS: The mean age of patients ± SD was (38.4±9.8) years. Male to female ratio was 9:1. Disease onset occurred <30 years in 78% of cases. All (100%) cases had lower back pain, 44 (54%) patients had enthesitis, 14 (16.9%) had peripheral arthritis, 12 (14.5%) had eye involvement, whil
For several applications, it is very important to have an edge detection technique matching human visual contour perception and less sensitive to noise. The edge detection algorithm describes in this paper based on the results obtained by Maximum a posteriori (MAP) and Maximum Entropy (ME) deblurring algorithms. The technique makes a trade-off between sharpening and smoothing the noisy image. One of the advantages of the described algorithm is less sensitive to noise than that given by Marr and Geuen techniques that considered to be the best edge detection algorithms in terms of matching human visual contour perception.
Voice Activity Detection (VAD) is considered as an important pre-processing step in speech processing systems such as speech enhancement, speech recognition, gender and age identification. VAD helps in reducing the time required to process speech data and to improve final system accuracy by focusing the work on the voiced part of the speech. An automatic technique for VAD using Fuzzy-Neuro technique (FN-AVAD) is presented in this paper. The aim of this work is to alleviate the problem of choosing the best threshold value in traditional VAD methods and achieves automaticity by combining fuzzy clustering and machine learning techniques. Four features are extracted from each speech segment, which are short term energy, zero-crossing rate, auto
... Show MorePavement crack and pothole identification are important tasks in transportation maintenance and road safety. This study offers a novel technique for automatic asphalt pavement crack and pothole detection which is based on image processing. Different types of cracks (transverse, longitudinal, alligator-type, and potholes) can be identified with such techniques. The goal of this research is to evaluate road surface damage by extracting cracks and potholes, categorizing them from images and videos, and comparing the manual and the automated methods. The proposed method was tested on 50 images. The results obtained from image processing showed that the proposed method can detect cracks and potholes and identify their severity levels wit
... Show MoreGlaucoma is a visual disorder, which is one of the significant driving reason for visual impairment. Glaucoma leads to frustrate the visual information transmission to the brain. Dissimilar to other eye illness such as myopia and cataracts. The impact of glaucoma can’t be cured; The Disc Damage Likelihood Scale (DDLS) can be used to assess the Glaucoma. The proposed methodology suggested simple method to extract Neuroretinal rim (NRM) region then dividing the region into four sectors after that calculate the width for each sector and select the minimum value to use it in DDLS factor. The feature was fed to the SVM classification algorithm, the DDLS successfully classified Glaucoma d
HM Al-Dabbas, RA Azeez, AE Ali, Iraqi Journal of Science, 2023
Individuals across different industries, including but not limited to agriculture, drones, pharmaceuticals and manufacturing, are increasingly using thermal cameras to achieve various safety and security goals. This widespread adoption is made possible by advancements in thermal imaging sensor technology. The current literature provides an in-depth exploration of thermography camera applications for detecting faults in sectors such as fire protection, manufacturing, aerospace, automotive, non-destructive testing and structural material industries. The current discussion builds on previous studies, emphasising the effectiveness of thermography cameras in distinguishing undetectable defects by the human eye. Various methods for defect
... Show MoreG-system composed of three isolates G3 ( Bacillus),G12 ( Arthrobacter )and G27 ( Brevibacterium) was used to detect the mutagenicity of the anticancer drug, cyclophosphamide (CP) under conditions similar to that used for standard mutagen, Nitrosoguanidine (NTG). The CP effected the survival fraction of isolates after treatment for 15 mins using gradual increasing concentrations, but at less extent comparing to NTG. The mutagenic effect of CP was at higher level than that of NTG when using streptomycin as a genetic marker, but the situation was reversed when using rifampicin resistant as a report marker. The latter effect appeared upon recording the mutagen efficiency (ie., number of induced mutants/microgram of mutagen). Measuring the R
... Show MoreEpithelial ovarian cancer is the leading cause of cancer deaths in women. To date, an effective screening tool for ovarian cancer has not been identified Several clinical and biological factors including serum cancer antigen 125 (CA- 125) have been assessed for prognostic and predictive relevance CA-125 is an epithelial marker derived from coelomic epithelium. It is elevated in 90% of advanced ovarian cancers and in 50% of early ovarian cancers while 20% of ovarian cancers have low or no expression of CA- 125 CA-125 concentrations were measured by Mini Vidas test (VIDAS CA125 II / BIOMERIEUX / France). The median CA-125 levels were significantly higher in the sera of ovarian cancer patients than in those with benign tumors an
... Show MoreResearch aims to shed light on the concept of corporate failures , display and analysis the most distinctive models used to predicting corporate failure; with suggesting a model to reveal the probabilities of corporate failures which including internal and external financial and non-financial indicators, A tested is made for the research objectivity and its indicators weight and by a number of academics professionals experts, in addition to financial analysts and have concluded a set of conclusions , the most distinctive of them that failure is not considered a sudden phenomena for the company and its stakeholders , it is an Event passes through numerous stages; each have their symptoms that lead eve
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