Prevalence of intestinal metaplasia and dysplasia in infectious and non-infectious chronic gastritis

Background: Objective of current study was to estimate the prevalence of intestinal metaplasia in dyspeptic patients in Duhok (Kurdistan region) and its association with H. pylori and dysplasia according to gender and age.Methods: This was a prospective observational study. Study was conducted from Jan 2012 to Jul 2014 at Azadi Teaching Hospital Duhok City. A total number of 205 antral gastric biopsies were collected in Azadi GIT-Centre and examined histologically to detect intestinal metaplasia. These biopsies were stained by Giemsa to detect H. pylori organisms.Results: H. pylori was found in 94 (46%) patients while intestinal metaplasia in general was found in 30 (15%) patients; (9.8% in association with H. pylori) and (4.7% without H. pylori). Among intestinal metaplasia 6 cases show dysplasia (6/205 = 3%).Conclusions: This study has documented mainly that the prevalence of intestinal metaplasia is significant among patients (In Duhok) with chronic gastritis and mainly in those patients who are positive for H. pylori with an active chronic gastritis. Intestinal metaplasia mostly affects patients above the age of 40 years with no significant gender difference

Evaluation of Semantic Search and its Role in Retrieved-Augmented-Generation (RAG) for Arabic Language

The latest advancements in machine learning and deep learning have brought forth the concept of semantic similarity, which has proven immensely beneficial in multiple applications and has largely replaced keyword search. However, evaluating semantic similarity and conducting searches for a specific query across various documents continue to be a complicated task. This complexity is due to the multifaceted nature of the task, the lack of standard benchmarks, whereas these challenges are further amplified for Arabic language. This paper endeavors to establish a straightforward yet potent benchmark for semantic search in Arabic. Moreover, to precisely evaluate the effectiveness of these metrics and the dataset, we conduct our assessment of semantic search within the framework of retrieval augmented generation (RAG)

Factors associated with continuing emergence of β-thalassemia major despite prenatal testing: a cross-sectional survey.

Purpose Health care initiatives focusing on prenatal testing and premarital genetic screening aiming to reduce the incidence of β-thalassemia have emerged during the last decade. In Palestine, 4% of the population are known thalassemia carriers with new cases continuing to appear despite the availability of prenatal testing. This study aims to identify factors that influence the decision to retain or abort fetuses affected by β-thalassemia in Palestine. Methods Convenience sampling was used to select 32 women (72 fetuses) who were at risk of having a baby with β-thalassemia. A questionnaire on prenatal testing, test results, pregnancy outcomes, and factors influencing the decision to terminate the pregnancy were used for this cross-sectional study. The data were analyzed using SPSS version 17. Results Among the fetuses screened, 36 (50%) were thalassemia carriers and 20 (28%) had β-thalassemia; 17 (85%) affected fetuses were aborted. Religious beliefs were the most cited reason for opposing abortion while prior experience with β-thalassemia patients and awareness programs promoted abortions. Mothers who opted to retain an affected fetus had modest educational attainment. Higher educational level was significantly associated with the decision to abort an affected fetus (p Conclusion A religious consensus is needed on the abortion of fetuses affected by β-thalassemia. Improving female education and increasing awareness on thalassemia could help reduce the incidence of β-thalassemia in Palestine and around the world

Factors associated with continuing emergence of β-thalassemia major despite prenatal testing: A cross-sectional survey

© 2017 Al Sabbah et al. Purpose: Health care initiatives focusing on prenatal testing and premarital genetic screening aiming to reduce the incidence of β-thalassemia have emerged during the last decade. In Palestine, 4% of the population are known thalassemia carriers with new cases continuing to appear despite the availability of prenatal testing. This study aims to identify factors that influence the decision to retain or abort fetuses affected by β-thalassemia in Palestine. Methods: Convenience sampling was used to select 32 women (72 fetuses) who were at risk of having a baby with β-thalassemia. A questionnaire on prenatal testing, test results, pregnancy outcomes, and factors influencing the decision to terminate the pregnancy were used for this cross-sectional study. The data were analyzed using SPSS version 17. Results: Among the fetuses screened, 36 (50%) were thalassemia carriers and 20 (28%) had β-thalassemia; 17 (85%) affected fetuses were aborted. Religious beliefs were the most cited reason for opposing abortion while prior experience with β-thalassemia patients and awareness programs promoted abortions. Mothers who opted to retain an affected fetus had modest educational attainment. Higher educational level was significantly associated with the decision to abort an affected fetus (p,0.05). Conclusion: A religious consensus is needed on the abortion of fetuses affected by β-thalassemia. Improving female education and increasing awareness on thalassemia could help reduce the incidence of β-thalassemia in Palestine and around the world

A New Benchmark for Evaluating Automatic Speech Recognition in the Arabic Call Domain

This work is an attempt to introduce a comprehensive benchmark for Arabic speech recognition, specifically tailored to address the challenges of telephone conversations in Arabic language. Arabic, characterized by its rich dialectal diversity and phonetic complexity, presents a number of unique challenges for automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. These challenges are further amplified in the domain of telephone calls, where audio quality, background noise, and conversational speech styles negatively affect recognition accuracy. Our work aims to establish a robust benchmark that not only encompasses the broad spectrum of Arabic dialects but also emulates the real-world conditions of call-based communications. By incorporating diverse dialectical expressions and accounting for the variable quality of call recordings, this benchmark seeks to provide a rigorous testing ground for the development and evaluation of ASR systems capable of navigating the complexities of Arabic speech in telephonic contexts. This work also attempts to establish a baseline performance evaluation using state-of-the-art ASR technologies

A Proposed Educational Model for the Implementation of Electronic Management by Public School Principals in the Capital (Amman)

The study aims to present a proposed educational model for implementing electronic management by the principals of public schools in the capital governorate, Amman. The study sample consists of 316 principals (both males and females) selected using the stratified random sampling method from the study population. The descriptive-analytical approach is utilized. The results of the study show that the level of principals\u27 implementation of electronic management in public schools, in the current situation, is at a medium level, with an arithmetic mean of 2.81. However, statistically significant differences are attributed to the effect of gender, favoring females, educational qualification, favoring those with higher education, experience, favoring those with 15 years or more, and the educational phase, favoring the primary phase. On the other hand, for the desired situation in general, the level of principals\u27 implementation of electronic management in public schools is at a medium level, with an arithmetic mean of 3.63. The study recommends placing a strong emphasis on issuing government legislation for implementing electronic management in all public schools. Considering the results, the study presents a set of recommendations, most notably the use of the educational model of electronic management by the principals of public schools in the capital in school management, and the need to provide schools with modern computer equipment with high specifications, which would facilitate electronic management

Developing a simulated intelligent instrument to measure user behavior toward cybersecurity policies

Institutions struggle to protect themselves from threats and cybercrime. Therefore, they devote much attention to improving information security infrastructures. Users’ behaviors were explored via a traditional questionnaire research instrument in a data collocate process. The questionnaire explores users’ behaviors theoretically, so the respondents’ answers to the questionnaire are insufficiently reliable, and the responses might not reflect actual behavior based on the human bias when facing theoretical problems. This study aims to solve unreliable responses to the questionnaire by developing a simulated intelligent instrument to measure users’ behaviors toward cybersecurity policies in an experimental study using gamification

An Ensemble Learning Approach for Glaucoma Detection in Retinal Images

To stop vision loss from glaucoma, early identification and regular screening are crucial. Convolutional neural networks (CNN) have been effectively used in recent years to diagnose glaucoma automatically from color fundus pictures. CNNs can extract distinctive characteristics directly from the fundus pictures, as opposed to the current automatic screening techniques. In this study, a CNN-based deep learning architecture is created for the categorization of normal and glaucomatous fundus pictures. In this paper, we propose a deep learning-based framework for the detection of glaucoma based on retinal images. Our proposed approach utilizes the two CNN-based models, namely Inception and DenseNet, in order to classify the input images. We also show the impact of transfer learning on the training and the validation processes and put forward an effective pipeline with lower trainable parameters for the target task. Our experiments on a collected dataset demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed model by achieving an accuracy of 93.84%, a precision of 92.83%, and a recall of 95.00%

Implementation of a long range-based monitoring system for environmental remote safety schemes

The effects of poor air quality on people are profound. Air pollution and health issues are linked to millions of deaths. The World Health Organization (WHO)and the environmental protection agency (EPA)have produced several regulations and guidelines to control and enhanceair quality. Several authors have recently suggested low-cost tools for instantly assessing air quality. the abundance of inexpensive ways to assess air quality and collect sensor data. The design and employment of remote safety monitoring for humidity, temperature, and carbon monoxide has been merged into a single tool in this work. The results findings can be observed on the actual measured instrument’s organic light-emitting diode (OLED)show and the liquid crystal display (LCD)remote monitoring system. This device uses ESP32 microcontroller with long range (LoRa)wireless communication technology.The DHT22 sensor is used to detect humidity and temperature, while the MQ-7 sensor is used to monitor carbon monoxide levels. Testing measurements are calibrated using instruments that meet industrial standards (AS8700A CO meter and 4,000 NV weather tracker) used in environmental station. If the abnormalities in the recorded parameters are detected, then alert will be triggered. This instrument can help patients and workers to check their surroundings and provide remote monitoring to health service providers

Appling tracking game system to measure user behavior toward cybersecurity policies

Institutions wrestle to protect their information from threats and cybercrime. Therefore, it is dedicating a great deal of their concern to improving the information security infrastructure. Users’ behaviors were explored by applying traditional questionnaire as a research instrument in data collocate process. But researchers usually suffer from a lack of respondents' credibility when asking someone to fill out a questionnaire, and the credibility may decline further if the research topic relates to aspects of the use and implementation of information security policies. Therefore, there is insufficient reliability of the respondent's answers to the questionnaire’s questions, and the responses might not reflect the actual behavior based on the human bias when facing the problems theoretically. The current study creates a new idea to track and study the behavior of the respondents by building a tracking game system aligned with the questionnaire whose results are required to be known. The system will allow the respondent to answer the survey questions related to the compliance with the information security policies by tracking their behavior while using the system