A new species of Antonia Loew (Bombyliidae, Diptera) from Egypt

A new species of Bombyliidae belonging to the genus Antonia Loew is described. This species was proposed by Efflatoun Bey in an unpublished manuscript, and his proposed name (Antonia gabalensis sp. nov.) is maintained. I present a key to differentiate the new species from Antoniasuavissima Loew, the other Antonia species represented in Egypt, together with illustrations of the genitalia and wings of the two species

Regionalizing East Mediterranean Gas: Energy Security, Stability, and the U.S. Role

View the Executive SummaryThe East Mediterranean has been witnessing an unparalleled natural resource boom since the late-2000s, when Israel, followed by Cyprus, made its first significant offshore hydrocarbon discoveries in many years. These discoveries have since proven to be substantially larger than any other resources previously explored in the East Mediterranean Sea. At the time of this writing, they consist primarily of natural gas, although liquids are expected to be discovered offshore as well, including in the potentially hydrocarbon-rich waters of Lebanon and Syria. A 2010 U.S. Geological Survey suggests the Levant basin—the area including Cyprus and Israel’s offshore zones, and the offshore and some onshore territories of Syria, Lebanon, and the Palestinian territories—could hold as much as 1.7 billion barrels of oil and up to 122 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, leaving as much as two-thirds of the region’s potential resource base still undiscovered.https://press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs/1472/thumbnail.jp

Renal expression of vascular endothelial growth factor in lupus nephritis in the pediatric age group

Background: Vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) plays a crucial role in preservation of renal functions and may also serve as a useful biomarker in monitoring the progression of lupus nephritis (LN). Objective: We thought to correlate VEGF expression in the kidney with renal histopathology in lupus nephritis to unveil its possible relation to disease activity and severity.Methods: We consecutively enrolled 15 patients with lupus nephritis and ten renal biopsy specimens from patients with cystic renal diseases as controls. The study measurements included SLEDAI, SLICC/ ACR damage index and BILAG renal score. Paraffin sections from renal biopsies were subjected to routine haematoxylin and eosin staining and Immunohistochemical staining for VEGF. Results: Among SLE patients, 7 (46.7%) showed mild expression of VEGF, 5 (33.3%) showed moderate while 3 (20%) had strong expression of the marker. On the contrary, the control samples (100%) revealed strong marker expression. All subjects with class IV and V lupus nephritis had mild renal expression of VEGF. Renal expression of VEGF had a significant positive correlation with serum creatinine and complement C3 levels. The 24 hours’ excretion of urinary proteins had a significant negative correlation with the renal expression of the marker. On the other hand, the activity indices and therapeutic modalities did not correlate with VEGF expression. Conclusion: This pilot study among pediatric cases of SLE revealed mild to moderate VEGF expression in most cases of proliferative LN. Further longitudinal studies are needed to investigate the consequences of this finding on the prognosis of the disease.Keywords: VEGF, SLE, renal biopsy, lupus nephritis

Genotypic and phenotypic patterns of antimicrobial susceptibility of Helicobacter pylori strains among Egyptian patients

Helicobacter pylori (H. pylori) is currently recognized as one of the most common chronic bacterial infections worldwide. Eradication of bacteria is effective in healing peptic ulcers, preventing ulcer relapses, and potentially decreasing the risk of progression to gastric carcinoma. For successful eradication of bacteria, it is imperative that the clinician be aware of the current antimicrobial susceptibility profiles of isolates within the region. Therefore, the aim of this study is to compare the phenotypic and genotypic patterns of antibiotics’ susceptibility to H. pylori strains among Egyptian patients. 60 symptomatic cases were enrolled. H. pylori infection was diagnosed by upper endoscopy as well as biopsy. Antimicrobial susceptibility to H. pylori strains was assessed in all subjects by disc diffusion and Ellipsometer testing (E-testing) methods. Further molecular characterization of gene

Detection and molecular characterization of vancomycin resistant Staphylococcus aureus from clinical isolates

Until now, few strains of vancomycin resistant Staphylococcus aureus (VRSA) have been reported worldwide. The disk diffusion method for determination of vancomycin sensitivity frequently misclassifies intermediately susceptible isolates to fully susceptible. However, non-automated minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) detection methods are the gold standards. In the present study, 439 Gram positive clinical isolates were collected. Among them, 220 Staphylococcus aureus were identified. Multiplex polymerase chain reaction (PCR) detection method for vancomycin resistant S. aureus (VRSA) was developed for detection of both vanA gene (for vancomycin resistance) and nuc gene (specific for S. aureus) in a single step PCR compared to conventional non-automated disc diffusion and MIC detection methods. Molecular typing of VRSA isolates was performed using randomly amplified polymorphic (RAPD) DNA assay technique. The results show 10 VRSA isolates detected by disc diffusion method and MIC determination. Five out of them harbored vanA gene that were detected by multiplex PCR and most of them showed low clonal diversity.Key words: Molecular characterization, multiplex polymerase chain reaction (PCR), vancomycin resistant Staphylococcus aureus (VRSA), vanA gene, nuc gene, randomly amplified polymorphic DNA (RAPD) assay technique

Using BlazePose on Spatial Temporal Graph Convolutional Networks for Action Recognition

The ever-growing available visual data (i.e., uploaded videos and pictures by internet users) has attracted the research community’s attention in the computer vision field. Therefore, finding efficient solutions to extract knowledge from these sources is imperative. Recently, the BlazePose system has been released for skeleton extraction from images oriented to mobile devices. With this skeleton graph representation in place, a Spatial-Temporal Graph Convolutional Network can be implemented to predict the action. We hypothesize that just by changing the skeleton input data for a different set of joints that offers more information about the action of interest, it is possible to increase the performance of the Spatial-Temporal Graph Convolutional Network for HAR tasks. Hence, in this study, we present the first implementation of the BlazePose skeleton topology upon this architecture for action recognition. Moreover, we propose the Enhanced-BlazePose topology that can achieve better results than its predecessor. Additionally, we propose different skeleton detection thresholds that can improve the accuracy performance even further. We reached a top-1 accuracy performance of 40.1% on the Kinetics dataset. For the NTU-RGB+D dataset, we achieved 87.59% and 92.1% accuracy for Cross-Subject and Cross-View evaluation criteria, respectively

Correlation between the RhD genotyping and RhD serotyping in isoimmunized pregnancies

Alloimmunisation was one of the most important causes of perinatal mortality and morbidity by the middle of the last century. The objective of the present study was to investigate the presence of the RHD gene in fetal cells (amniocytes) obtained from amniotic fluid by genotyping to compare it with the RhD serotyping. Also to correlate the presence of RhD gene with the neonatal outcome. This work was carried out at Maternity hospital and Medical Genetics center, while PCR testing was done at the Medical Research center, Faculty of Medicine, Ain Shams University in the period from 2008 to 2010. The present study included recruiting of 20 RhD negative (sensitized to the RhD antigen) pregnant mothers. The entire study group was subjected to complete general, obstetric and a detailed obstetric ultrasonographic examination. Rh typing and indirect Coomb’s test were also done. Amniocentesis was performed with a 20-gauge needle under continuous ultrasound guidance. RhD serotyping of the fetuses showed that, 14 fetuses (70%) were positive and six fetuses (30%) were negative. While using RhD gentyping 13 cases (65%) were positive and seven cases (35%) were negative (P value = 0.002). Among fetuses positive for RhD genotyping six fetuses (46%) had received postnatal treatment, while among fetuses negative for RhD genotyping, neither of them had received postnatal treatment (P value =0.032), which is statistically significant. From the present study we can conclude that, the identification of an antigen-negative fetus on the basis of the blood group genotype provides significant advantages in managing the pregnancy at risk for HDFN.Keywords: Maternal alloimmunization; Rhesus; RHD; Isoimmunization; Hydrops fetalis; Fetus; Rh negativ