Ankylosing spondylitis: a case report with review of literature

Background: Ankylosing spondylitis is a relatively common worldwide chronic inflammatory disease that usually affects spine, sacroiliac joints in addition to peripheral joints and affects multiple other tissues, which can progress to bony fusion of the spine.Objective: To fill the gap of the absence of a published description of this condition in Libyan patients and to compare of the clinical presentation and other aspect of the condition in a Libyan patient with what is known worldwide.Materials and Methods: A case report of a 60 year old Libyan male who has Ankylosing spondylitis and then review the available literature.Results: The patient has been having a chronic low back pain and stiffness for the last 26 years. His symptoms are most severe in morning and improve with movement. He developed stiffness and limitation of movement of the neck and restriction of movements of the shoulder and hips. Examination showed kyphosis and limited neck movement and decreased chest expansion. His score on Bath Ankylosing Spondylitis Disease Activity Index is 6. His x-rays showed bamboo spine appearance of spine and osteoarthritis in both shoulder joints and hip joints. His presentation fits both European Spondyloarthropathy Study Group diagnostic criteria for spondyloarthropathies and the modified New York Criteria.Conclusion: Our Libyan patient shows a classical clinical and radiological picture of the condition and the diagnostic criteria and severity index could be applied easily to his cases.Keywords: Ankylosing spondylitis, Spondyloarthritis, back pain, back stiffness, bamboo spin

Improving collaborative filtering using lexicon-based sentiment analysis

Since data is available increasingly on the Internet, efforts are needed to develop and improve recommender systems to produce a list of possible favorite items. In this paper, we expand our work to enhance the accuracy of Arabic collaborative filtering by applying sentiment analysis to user reviews, we also addressed major problems of the current work by applying effective techniques to handle the scalability and sparsity problems. The proposed approach consists of two phases: the sentiment analysis and the recommendation phase. The sentiment analysis phase estimates sentiment scores using a special lexicon for the Arabic dataset. The item-based and singular value decomposition-based collaborative filtering are used in the second phase. Overall, our proposed approach improves the experiments’ results by reducing average of mean absolute and root mean squared errors using a large Arabic dataset consisting of 63,000 book reviews

Executing Quality Management Tools to Enhance Customer’s Journey at a Clothes Laundry Firm

Purpose: This project aims to assess and enhance the customer’s journey at a laundry company in Saudi Arabia from when the customer arrives at the parking lot of the laundry store until receiving the services and payment. Design, methodology, approach: A mixed-method approach was employed, in which qualitative data were gathered from focus group interviews and solo interviews, and quantitative data were gathered through the survey. Moreover, Quality Management Tools were used to build the action plan and offer conclusions and recommendations that would enhance the customer’s journey and improve satisfaction. Findings: Services quality issues are categorized into five categories: promotions, human resources; services; detergent products, and facilities. House of Quality represents the highest 15 prioritized solutions. These recommended solutions' relative weights range between 9% to 4%. The use of these tools highlights areas for improvement and the root causes of each issue. The seven quality tools are trustworthy tools to conquer challenges faced by the company and may be effective in improving service quality to positively strengthen organizational performance, customer satisfaction, and success. Originality, value: There are limited studies practically employing the seven Quality Management Tools to enhance customer satisfaction and improve their journey. The Saudi laundry market specifically has a dearth of this type of study. Furthermore, this market has seen rapid growth since it is known as a part of the SME sector in recent few years

Executing Quality Management Tools to Enhance Customer’s Journey at a Clothes Laundry Firm

Purpose: This project aims to assess and enhance the customer’s journey at a laundry company in Saudi Arabia from when the customer arrives at the parking lot of the laundry store until receiving the services and payment. Design, methodology, approach: A mixed-method approach was employed, in which qualitative data were gathered from focus group interviews and solo interviews, and quantitative data were gathered through the survey. Moreover, Quality Management Tools were used to build the action plan and offer conclusions and recommendations that would enhance the customer’s journey and improve satisfaction. Findings: Services quality issues are categorized into five categories: promotions, human resources; services; detergent products, and facilities. House of Quality represents the highest 15 prioritized solutions. These recommended solutions' relative weights range between 9% to 4%. The use of these tools highlights areas for improvement and the root causes of each issue. The seven quality tools are trustworthy tools to conquer challenges faced by the company and may be effective in improving service quality to positively strengthen organizational performance, customer satisfaction, and success. Originality, value: There are limited studies practically employing the seven Quality Management Tools to enhance customer satisfaction and improve their journey. The Saudi laundry market specifically has a dearth of this type of study. Furthermore, this market has seen rapid growth since it is known as a part of the SME sector in recent few years

Overlapped hierarchical clusters routing protocol for improving quality of service

The rapid development in communications and sensors technologies make wireless sensor networks (WSNs) as essential key in several advanced applications such as internet of things (IoT). The increasing demands on using WSNs required high quality of services (QoS) because most WSNs applications have critical requirements. This work aims to offer a routing protocol to improve the QoS in WSNs, taking in consideration its ability to prolong the lifetime of the network, optimize the utilization of the limited bandwidth available, and decrease the latency that accompanies the packets transmitted to the gateway. The proposed protocol is called overlapped hierarchical cluster routing protocol (OHCRP). OHCRP is compared with the traditional routing protocols such as SPEED, and THVR. The results show that OHCRP reduces latency effectively and achieve high energy conservation, which lead to increase the network lifetime and insure network availability

Effect of diet on the quality and quantity of venom produced by Apis cerana

The bee venom samples from honey bee (Apis cerana) foraged on seven plants dominating seven sites in Malaysia were collected. The protein content of the pollen loads of these test plants were tested according to the method of Kjeldahl (AOAC 1990). The samples were analysed to determine the effects of diet type on the quantity and quality of its constituents – melittin, phospholipase A2 and apamin using HPLC. The highest melittin (677.86μg/ml), phospholipase (477.96 μg/ml) and apamin (136.10 μg/ml) content were recorded in venom collected from honey bee colonies foraged on Durian plant which has protein content (31.7%) of its pollen loads. A positive correlation was recorded between the protein content with melittin (R2= 0.9372), phospholipase A2 (R2= 0.7208) and apamin (R2=0.4128), while a negative correlation was observed between the protein content and the weight of the venom mount produced (R2= -0.7549). A direct relationship was observed between the quality of the venom and the protein content of pollen loads, while the quantity of the venom was not in accordance with the venom quality

Improving the voltage quality of Abu Hummus network in Egypt

In this paper the performance of the electrical network of Egypt is studied by considering a small part on the network (Abu Hummus city). The transmission network of Abu Hummus city was created for 66 kV, 11 kV, and 0.4 kV in the digital simulation and electrical network calculation (DIgSILENT power factory software) to study the voltage profiles. The load flow operational analysis was performed to obtain the voltage magnitudes at every bus bar. The voltage magnitudes in 11 kV and 0.4 kV networks were 10% to 15% less than the nominal value due to overloading off the transmission lines and the voltage magnitudes in 66 kV was within permissible limits. By using automatic tap-changing transformer or Static VAR System, the main idea of this paper is to obtain the voltage profiles at every bus bar to improve the voltage quality of the networks, so as to achieve better voltage profiles on the low voltage side without much effect on high voltage side under various operating conditions

Deep learning model for thorax diseases detection

Despite the availability of radiology devices in some health care centers, thorax diseases are considered as one of the most common health problems, especially in rural areas. By exploiting the power of the Internet of things and specific platforms to analyze a large volume of medical data, the health of a patient could be improved earlier. In this paper, the proposed model  is based on pre-trained ResNet-50  for diagnosing thorax diseases. Chest x-ray images are cropped to extract the rib cage part from the chest radiographs. ResNet-50 was re-train on Chest x-ray14 dataset where a chest radiograph images are inserted into the model to determine if the person is healthy or not. In the case of an unhealthy patient, the model can classify the disease into one of the fourteen chest diseases. The results show the ability of ResNet-50 in achieving impressive performance in classifying thorax diseases

Skew constacyclic codes over Fp+ vFp

In this paper, we study a special class of linear codes called skew constacyclic codes over finite non-chain rings of the form Fp+ vFp, where p is an odd prime and v2= v. We use ideal θv-constacyclic codes to define skew constacyclic codes, investigate the structural properties of skew polynomial ring 고 [x, θv]/(xn-λ) and determine them

Prevalence and antimicrobial resistance pattern of bacterial strains isolated from patients with urinary tract infection in Messalata Central Hospital, Libya

AbstractObjectivesTo investigate the prevalence of urinary tract infection among patients at Messalata Central Hospital, Libya, to identify the causative bacteria, and to explore their resistance pattern to antimicrobials.MethodsA total number of 1153 urine samples were collected from patients, who attended daily to Messalata Central Hospital, Libya, in a study extended for one year. Antimicrobial susceptibility testing and isolates typing were done using Phoenix BD (BD diagnostic). Resistance was confirmed manually using agar disk diffusion method.ResultsOf the 1153 urine samples tested, 160 (13.9%) samples were positive, from which 17 different, solely Gram negative, uropathogens were identified. Escherichia coli were the most prevalent (55.6%) bacteria, followed by Klebsiella pneumoniae subspecies pneumoniae (16.3%), Proteus mirabilis (6.3%), Pseudomonas aeruginosa (5.6%), Enterobacter cloacae and Klebsiella oxytoca (2.5%, each), Citrobacter koseri and Providencia rettgeri (1.9%, each), Acinetobacter baumannii, Enterobacter aerogenes and Proteus vulgaris (1.3%, each), and Aeromonas caviae, Citrobacter freundii, Cronobacter sakazakii, Enterobacter amnigenus biogroup 2, Pseudomonas putida and Serratia marcescens (0.6%, each). The isolated uropathogens showed increased levels of resistance ranged from 10.5% to 64.5%, with an overall resistance of 28.9%. Amikacin was the most effective antimicrobial followed by Imipenem and Meropenem (0%, 0.6% and 2.5% resistance, respectively); while, Cephalothin and Ampicillin were the least (80.6% and 90.0% resistance, respectively) effective.ConclusionsThe obtained results emphasized the emergence of highly resistant bacteria to most of tested antimicrobials and raise the alarm for physicians to change their treatment pattern depending on antimicrobial susceptibility results