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This article discusses the role of second trimester uterine artery Doppler (UtAd) in routine prenatal care in Switzerland. The study aimed to determine whether interpreting second trimester UtAd with the uterine artery score (UAS) is useful in an unselected Swiss population. The researchers retrospectively calculated the UAS in 503 singleton pregnancies and analyzed its relationship with perinatal outcomes. The results showed that a UAS >2 was associated with an increased risk of adverse outcomes such as hypertension/preeclampsia, small for gestational age (SGA), and preterm birth. The study concludes that routine second trimester UtAd is useful in all pregnancies, as it can identify additional patients without pre-existing risk factors who may develop SGA later. The UAS is an effective tool for interpreting UtAd, with a cut-off of 2. For UAS 3 or 4, a more intense surveillance program should be offered. [Extracted from the article] more...

Copyright of Iraqi Journal of Agricultural Sciences is the property of Republic of Iraq Ministry of Higher Education & Scientific Research (MOHESR) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.) more...

The pumpkins slices were dried in an infrared-hot air dryer (238 W, 65°C and 2 m/s flow rate) and dried samples were milled and passed through a 125 mesh sieve and used in sponge cake formulation. In this study, the physico-chemical, textural and sensory properties of sponge cake supplemented with five different levels of pumpkin powder (0, 5, 10, 15 and 20%) were evaluated. The β-carotene content of cake increased from 6.84 to 9.78 mgr/100gr with increasing pumpkin powder levels from 0 to 20%. Increasing the level of substitution from 0 to 20% pumpkin powder decreased the volume of cakes from 68.26 to 51.35 cm3. The density, ash, β-carotene and protein of baked cakes increased with increasing pumpkin powder levels, whereas the moisture content and volume of samples showed a reverse trend. Sensory evaluation results indicated that cake with 10% pumpkin powder was rated the most acceptable. The hardness, cohesiveness, gumminess and chewiness values were in the range of 603.79-864.54 g, 0.58-0.66, 359.87-521.16 g and 328.36-475.65 g, respectively. The sponge cake with 10% pumpkin exhibited a color, with L*, a* and b* equal to 81.37, 312 and 70.91, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] more...

First trimester screening for pre-eclampsia (PE) combining uterine artery Doppler (UtA-PI), mean arterial pressure (MAP) and placental growth factor (PlGF) with the background risk allows the best prediction of preterm PE (pPE). Only median PAPP-A-MoM measured significantly different by the two calculations with 1.12 [0.79-1.55] and 1.24 [0.83-1.69] respectively (p = 0.0045). Combining UtA-PI, MAP and PlGF on the online calculator 141/995 (14.2%) had a risk > 1:100 and at the SPR of 11% the cut-off is 1:68. [Extracted from the article] more...

The perinatal period is associated with high antibiotic exposure, which raises concerns about antimicrobial resistance (AMR) and future health impacts. The aim of this comprehensive systematic review, including publications from 2000 to 2022, is to describe the current evidence and state of antimicrobial stewardship (AMS) in the perinatal period and to identify gaps in knowledge for future research. The review included 36 studies from the Americas, Europe, Asia and Australia, involving a total of 64,798 pregnant women and 84,137 newborns. 33 out of 36 studies reported reduced antibiotic use, suggesting the potential to reduce antibiotic exposure. There is a lack of studies in the antepartum and intrapartum periods, of comprehensive AMS strategies across the entire perinatal period, and from low- and middle-income countries with a high burden of maternal and neonatal morbidity and mortality. Future research should include prospective, adequately powered studies including safety endpoints, clinical outcomes and AMR reports., Competing Interests: Competing interests: The authors declare no competing interests., (© 2025. The Author(s).) more...

Introduction: The Fetal Medicine Foundation (FMF) London developed a first trimester combined screening algorithm for preterm preeclampsia (pPE) that allows a significantly higher detection of pregnancies at risk compared to conventional screening by maternal risk factors only. The aim of this trial is to validate this screening model in the Swiss population in order to implement this screening into routine first trimester ultrasound and to prescribe low-dose aspirin 150 mg (LDA) in patients at risk for pPE. Therefore, a multicentre registry study collecting and screening pregnancy outcome data was initiated in 2020; these are the preliminary results., Methods: Between June 1, 2020, and May 31, 2021, we included all singleton pregnancies with pPE screening at the hospitals of Basel, Lucerne, and Bern. Multiple of medians of uterine artery pulsatility index (UtA-PI), mean arterial pressure (MAP), placental growth factor (PlGF), and pregnancy-associated plasma protein A (PAPP-A) as well as risks were analysed as calculated by each centre's software and recalculated on the FMF online calculator for comparative reasons. Statistical analyses were performed by GraphPad Version 9.1., Results: During the study period, 1,027 patients with singleton pregnancies were included. 174 (16.9%) had a risk >1:100 at first trimester combined screening. Combining the background risk, MAP, UtA-PI, and PlGF only, the cut-off to obtain a screen positive rate (SPR) of 11% is ≥1:75. Outcomes were available for 968/1,027 (94.3%) of all patients; 951 resulted in live birth. Fifteen (1.58%) developed classical preeclampsia (PE), 23 (2.42%) developed PE according to the International Society for the Study of Hypertension in Pregnancy (ISSHP) definition., Conclusion: First trimester combined screening for PE and prevention with LDA results in a low prevalence of PE. The screening algorithm performs according to expectations; however, the cut-off of >1:100 results in a SPR above the accepted range and a cut-off of ≥1:75 should be considered for screening. More data are needed to evaluate, if these results are representative for the general Swiss population., (© 2023 The Author(s). Published by S. Karger AG, Basel.) more...

The main aim of the study is to investigate the growth of oyster mushrooms in two substrates, namely straw and wheat straw. In the following, the study moves towards modeling and optimization of the production yield by considering the energy consumption, water consumption, total income and environmental impacts as the dependent variables. Accordingly, life cycle assessment (LCA) platform was developed for achieving the environmental impacts of the studied scenarios. The next step developed an ANN-based model for the prediction of dependent variables. Finally, optimization was performed using response surface methodology (RSM) by fitting quadratic equations for generating the required factors. According to the results, the optimum condition for the production of OM from waste paper can be found in the paper portion range of 20% and the wheat straw range of 80% with a production yield of about 4.5 kg and a higher net income of 16.54 $ in the presence of the lower energy and water consumption by about 361.5 kWh and 29.53 kg, respectively. The optimum condition delivers lower environmental impacts on Human Health, Ecosystem Quality, Climate change, and Resources by about 5.64 DALY, 8.18 PDF*m2*yr, 89.77 g CO 2 eq and 1707.05 kJ, respectively. It can be concluded that, sustainable production of OM can be achieved in line with the policy used to produce alternative food source from waste management techniques. more...

Early diagnosis, prioritization, screening, clustering, and tracking of patients with COVID-19, and production of drugs and vaccines are some of the applications that have made it necessary to use a new style of technology to involve, manage, and deal with this epidemic. Strategies backed by artificial intelligence (A.I.) and the Internet of Things (IoT) have been undeniably effective to understand how the virus works and prevent it from spreading. Accordingly, the main aim of this survey is to critically review the ML, IoT, and the integration of IoT and ML-based techniques in the applications related to COVID-19, from the diagnosis of the disease to the prediction of its outbreak. According to the main findings, IoT provided a prompt and efficient approach to tracking the disease spread. On the other hand, most of the studies developed by ML-based techniques aimed at the detection and handling of challenges associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. Among different approaches, Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), Support Vector Machine, Genetic CNN, and pre-trained CNN, followed by ResNet have demonstrated the best performances compared to other methods., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2022 Band, Ardabili, Yarahmadi, Pahlevanzadeh, Kiani, Beheshti, Alinejad-Rokny, Dehzangi, Chang, Mosavi and Moslehpour.) more...

Competing Interests: Competing interests: None declared.

Infection with Toxoplasma gondii is usually an asymptomatic or oligosymptomatic, self-limiting disease in immunocompetent individuals. However, during the pregnancy, primary infection can lead to transplacental vertical transmission resulting in congenital toxoplasmosis with possible severe sequelae. The efficacy of systematic screening remains controversial and the effect of antibiotic treatment is unclear. Although main side effects of antibiotic drugs used for toxoplasmosis are well known, mostly from malaria treatment, there is a lack of information about occurrence in pregnant woman treated for toxoplasmosis. We report a case of a healthy pregnant woman with primary toxoplasmosis infection in the second trimester, who developed a severe adverse reaction in form of hypersensitivity pneumonia after antibiotic treatment with pyrimethamine and sulfadiazine and discuss the literature., Competing Interests: Competing interests: None declared., (© BMJ Publishing Group Limited 2021. No commercial re-use. See rights and permissions. Published by BMJ.) more...

Predicting stock market (SM) trends is an issue of great interest among researchers, investors and traders since the successful prediction of SMs' direction may promise various benefits. Because of the fairly nonlinear nature of the historical data, accurate estimation of the SM direction is a rather challenging issue. The aim of this study is to present a novel machine learning (ML) model to forecast the movement of the Borsa Istanbul (BIST) 100 index. Modeling was performed by multilayer perceptron-genetic algorithms (MLP-GA) and multilayer perceptron-particle swarm optimization (MLP-PSO) in two scenarios considering Tanh (x) and the default Gaussian function as the output function. The historical financial time series data utilized in this research is from 1996 to 2020, consisting of nine technical indicators. Results are assessed using Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) and correlation coefficient values to compare the accuracy and performance of the developed models. Based on the results, the involvement of the Tanh (x) as the output function, improved the accuracy of models compared with the default Gaussian function, significantly. MLP-PSO with population size 125, followed by MLP-GA with population size 50, provided higher accuracy for testing, reporting RMSE of 0.732583 and 0.733063, MAPE of 28.16%, 29.09% and correlation coefficient of 0.694 and 0.695, respectively. According to the results, using the hybrid ML method could successfully improve the prediction accuracy. more...

The accurate prediction of the solar diffuse fraction (DF), sometimes called the diffuse ratio, is an important topic for solar energy research. In the present study, the current state of Diffuse irradiance research is discussed and then three robust, machine learning (ML) models are examined using a large dataset (almost eight years) of hourly readings from Almeria, Spain. The ML models used herein, are a hybrid adaptive network-based fuzzy inference system (ANFIS), a single multi-layer perceptron (MLP) and a hybrid multi-layer perceptron grey wolf optimizer (MLP-GWO). These models were evaluated for their predictive precision, using various solar and DF irradiance data, from Spain. The results were then evaluated using frequently used evaluation criteria, the mean absolute error (MAE), mean error (ME) and the root mean square error (RMSE). The results showed that the MLP-GWO model, followed by the ANFIS model, provided a higher performance in both the training and the testing procedures. more...

The midaortic syndrome (MAS) is a rare anomaly, characterised by narrowing of the distal aorta and its major branches. The most common symptom is severe arterial hypertension. The combination of hyponatremia, polyuria and renovascular hypertension caused by a unilateral renal artery stenosis is described as hyponatremic hypertensive syndrome. We report a case of MAS with unilateral renal artery stenosis in a preterm female neonate. A pregnant woman at 34 weeks of gestation was referred with fast growing abdominal circumference and pain. The ultrasound revealed severe polyhydramnios and fetal myocardial hypertrophy. Within the first 48 hours of the neonatal period, the diagnosis of MAS was made. We conclude that symptomatic MAS, caused by unilateral renal artery stenosis, resulting in increased renin-angiotensin-aldosterone system activity and subsequent polyuria of the non-stenotic kidney, lead to clinically significant polyhydramnios., Competing Interests: Competing interests: None declared., (© BMJ Publishing Group Limited 2020. No commercial re-use. See rights and permissions. Published by BMJ.) more...

Ultrasensitive measurements of intracellular ATP (intATP) based on the firefly luciferase reactions are frequently used to enumerate bacterial or mammalian cells. During clinical applications, extracellular ATP (extATP) should be depleted in biological samples since it interferes with intATP and affects the quantification of bacteria. The extATP can be eliminated by ATP-degrading enzymes but complete hydrolysis of extATP remains a challenge for today's commercial enzymes. The catalytic efficiency of ATP-degrading enzymes depends on enzyme characteristics, sample composition and the ability to deplete diphosphates, triphosphates and their complexes generated during the reaction. This phenomenon restricts the usage of bioluminescence-based ATP methods in clinical diagnostics. In light of this, we have developed a recombinant Shigella flexneri apyrase (RSFA) enzyme and analysed its ATP depletion potential with five commercial biochemical sources including potato apyrase, acid phosphatase, alkaline phosphatase, hexokinase and glycerol kinase. The RSFA revealed superior activity by completely eliminating the extracellular ATP and ATP-complexes, even in biological samples like urine and serum. Therefore, our results can potentially unwrap the chemical and bio-analytical applications of ATP-based bioluminescence tests to develop highly sensitive point-of-care diagnostics., (Copyright © 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.) more...

Background: Bloodstream infections (BSI) remain a major challenge with high mortality rate, with an incidence that is increasing worldwide. Early treatment with appropriate therapy can reduce BSI-related morbidity and mortality. However, despite recent progress in molecular based assays, complex sample preparation steps have become critical roadblock for a greater expansion of molecular assays. Here, we report a size based, label-free, bacteria separation from whole blood using elasto-inertial microfluidics., Results: In elasto-inertial microfluidics, the viscoelastic flow enables size based migration of blood cells into a non-Newtonian solution, while smaller bacteria remain in the streamline of the blood sample entrance and can be separated. We first optimized the flow conditions using particles, and show continuous separation of 5 μm particles from 2 μm at a yield of 95% for 5 µm particle and 93% for 2 µm particles at respective outlets. Next, bacteria were continuously separated at an efficiency of 76% from undiluted whole blood sample., Conclusion: We demonstrate separation of bacteria from undiluted while blood using elasto-inertial microfluidics. The label-free, passive bacteria preparation method has a great potential for downstream phenotypic and molecular analysis of bacteria. more...

Blood-stream infections (BSI) remain a major health challenge, with an increasing incidence worldwide and a high mortality rate. Early treatment with appropriate antibiotics can reduce BSI-related morbidity and mortality, but success requires rapid identification of the infecting organisms. The rapid, culture-independent diagnosis of BSI could be significantly facilitated by straightforward isolation of highly purified bacteria from whole blood. We present a microfluidic-based, sample-preparation system that rapidly and selectively lyses all blood cells while it extracts intact bacteria for downstream analysis. Whole blood is exposed to a mild detergent, which lyses most blood cells, and then to osmotic shock using deionized water, which eliminates the remaining white blood cells. The recovered bacteria are 100% viable, which opens up possibilities for performing drug susceptibility tests and for nucleic-acid-based molecular identification. more...

Passive particle focusing based on inertial microfluidics was recently introduced as a high-throughput alternative to active focusing methods that require an external force field to manipulate particles. In inertial microfluidics, dominant inertial forces cause particles to move across streamlines and occupy equilibrium positions along the faces of walls in flows through straight micro channels. In this study, we systematically analyzed the addition of secondary Dean forces by introducing curvature and show how randomly distributed particles entering a simple u-shaped curved channel are focused to a fixed lateral position exiting the curvature. We found the lateral particle focusing position to be fixed and largely independent of radius of curvature and whether particles entering the curvature are pre-focused (at equilibrium) or randomly distributed. Unlike focusing in straight channels, where focusing typically is limited to channel cross-sections in the range of particle size to create single focusing point, we report here particle focusing in a large cross-section area (channel aspect ratio 1:10). Furthermore, we describe a simple u-shaped curved channel, with single inlet and four outlets, for filtration applications. We demonstrate continuous focusing and filtration of 10 μm particles (with >90% filtration efficiency) from a suspension mixture at throughputs several orders of magnitude higher than flow through straight channels (volume flow rate of 4.25 ml/min). Finally, as an example of high throughput cell processing application, white blood cells were continuously processed with a filtration efficiency of 78% with maintained high viability. We expect the study will aid in the fundamental understanding of flow through curved channels and open the door for the development of a whole set of bio-analytical applications. more...

Background: This study was conducted to determine whether Diabetes Mellitus (DM) is a predictor of short term mortality ; morbidity, or early readmission to hospital after Coronary Artery Bypass Graft (CABG)., Methods: We analyzed a large cohort of 952 patients who had undergone isolated CABG. The preoperative, intera operative and postoperative risk factors as well as the complications and 30-day mortality rates were compared between the diabetics and non-diabetics. Among the 952 patients; 734 ones (77.1%) were in non-diabetic group and 218 (22.9%) were diabetics., Results: Having DM did not increase the risk of 30-day mortality. In addition, DM did not affect the major complications; arrhythmia, Myocardial Infarction(MI), infective complications, neurological complications, Pulmonary Embolism (PE) except renal complications that was higher in the diabetics (5.5% vs 1.4%; P<0.001, OR=4.2) However reoperation for bleeding was higher in non-diabetic patients (7.9% vs 4.6%; P=0.009, OR=1.7). Nevertheless ,no significant difference was observed between the two groups regarding mechanical ventilation time (hour), reintubation, length of ICU stay (day), length of hospital stay (day), and readmitting as postoperative variables., Conclusions: Except for renal complications, DM was not associated with adverse outcomes in the patients undergoing isolated CABG. more...