COMPUTER-AIDED MODEL FOR BREAST CANCER DETECTION IN MAMMOGRAMS

The objective of this research was to introduce a new system for automated detection of breast masses in mammography images. The system will be able to discriminate if the image has a mass or not, as well as benign and malignant masses. The new automated ROI segmentation model, where a profiling model integrated with a new iterative growing region scheme has been proposed. The ROI region segmentation is integrated with both statistical and texture feature extraction and selection to discriminate suspected regions effectively. A classifier model is designed using linear fisher classifier for suspected region identification. To check the system's performance, a large mammogram database has been used for experimental analysis. Sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy have been used as performance measures. In this study, the methods yielded an accuracy of 93% for normal/abnormal classification and a 79% accuracy for bening/malignant classification. The proposed model had an improvement of 8% for normal/abnormal classification, and a 7% improvement for benign/malignant classification over Naga et al., 2001. Moreover, the model improved 8% for normal/abnormal classification over Subashimi et al., 2015. The early diagnosis of this disease has a major role in its treatment. Thus the use of computer systems as a detection tool could be viewed as essential to helping with this disease

Two versus three doses of COVID-19 vaccine and post-vaccination COVID-19 infection in hemodialysis patients

Summary: Background and aim: Patients with chronic kidney disease including those undergoing hemodialysis (HD) constitute a particularly challenging group regarding COVID-19 vaccination. The present study aimed to compare the rate of reinfection after two and three doses of Sinopharm COVID-19 vaccine in HD patients. Patients and methods: The study included 80 HD patients who received three doses of Sinopharm COVID-19 vaccine. In addition, there were another 80 patients who received only two doses of the vaccine. Patients in the latter group were selected based on propensity matching score with 1:1 ratio. Patients were monitored for post-vaccination COVID-19 infection using PCR examination of nasopharyngeal swabs. Patients were also monitored for post-vaccination complications including general complaints (headache, fever, fatigue), injection site complaints (arm pain, swelling, itching, rash), musculoskeletal complaints (muscle spasm or pain, joint pain) and others. All patients were followed for six months. Results: The present study included 80 patients submitted to COVID-19 vaccination with two doses of Sinopharm vaccine (GI) and other 80 patients who received three doses of the same vaccine (GII). At the end of follow up, 11 patients (13.8 %) in GI caught COVID-19 infection. In contrast, no patient in GII had infection (P<0.001). Comparison between patients who had COVID-19 infection and those without infection revealed that the former subgroup had significantly lower BMI (23.3 ± 2.3 versus 27.5 ± 8.1 Kg/m2), higher frequency of associated Hepatitis C (HCV) infection (54.6 % versus 2.9 %, P<0.001) and higher serum ferritin levels [median (IQR): 1101.0 (836.0–1564.0) versus 675.0 (467.0–767.7) ng/mL, P=0.01]. Binary logistic regression analysis identified high serum ferritin levels [OR (95% CI): 0.014 (0.001–0.15), P<0.001] and associated HCV infection [OR (95% CI): 0.99 (0.98–1.01), P=0.02] as significant predictors of post-vaccination COVID-19 infection in multivariate analysis. Conclusions: A three dose regime of Sinopharm COVID-19 vaccine associated with significantly lower rate of reinfection COVID-19 infection in HD patients. Infected patients had significantly lower BMI, higher frequency of HCV and higher ferritin levels

Neuronal autoantibodies in a sample of Egyptian patients with drug-resistant epilepsy

Abstract Background Epilepsy is one of the most common and chronic neurological diseases. About one-third of epilepsy patients do not achieve seizure freedom despite adequate therapy with antiseizure medications (ASMs) and develop drug-resistant epilepsy (DRE). Autoimmunity is increasingly being recognized as a cause of epilepsy in those patients. Some cases are associated with antibodies against several target antigens, including neuronal extracellular proteins as well as intracellular structures. In such patients, immunotherapy may be highly effective. This study aimed to investigate the presence of NMDA-R, AMPA1-R, AMPA2-R, CASPR2, LGI1, GABAB-R, and GAD65 autoantibodies in a sample of Egyptian patients with new-onset DRE; also, to assess the clinical, cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), electroencephalogram (EEG), and radiological characteristics of those patients. Twenty-five patients with recent onset DRE were recruited from the department of Neurology at Ain Shams University (ASU) hospitals. All patients underwent serum and CSF antibody testing using cell-based assay (CBA) at the Immunology unit of the Clinical pathology laboratory at ASU hospitals. This is beside routine CSF analysis, EEG and MRI brain with contrast. Results Out of 25 patients with recent onset DRE, one (4%) patient tested positive to anti-NMDA-R antibodies and another one (4%) tested positive to anti-GAD 65 in both serum and CSF. Although the remaining 23 patients tested negative for the 7 autoantibodies, yet 92% of them achieved either seizure freedom or more than 50% reduction in the frequency of seizure and 84% had marked improvement in seizure-associated symptoms after receiving immunotherapy trial. Also, evidence of neuroinflammation was detected in the CSF and MRI brain of the majority of those patients. Conclusions Autoimmunity should be considered as a possible etiology of new-onset DRE. It is essential to provide insight into the clinical phenotypes and other associated features of those patients, as there are probably numerous patients who are not positive for one of the available antibodies via clinical laboratory testing. In addition to early diagnosis, early treatment and empirical immunotherapy trial based on the clinical judgment is crucial and is likely to improve outcomes with near-complete seizure freedom