Tehran University Medical Journal

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World health organization has introduced concentration of vitamin A in breast milk as a proper indicator for characterization of vitamin A deficiency in lactating mothers and their infants (<6 mo). A normal phase high performance liquid chromatography with spectrofluorometric detection as a specific and sensitive detector was used for characterization of all-trans retional from 13-Cis retinal. The method was sensitive (0.009 ppm) and accurate (1±0.054 µ mol/l) and had a good recovery percentage (99.36%). This method was more better than before methods and was compatible with the other useful methods. Effect of freezing and defreezing on all-trans retinol content of milk sample was investigated. The result was interesting, whatever all-trans retinol content was bigger, it’s destroying was bigger too. Because of that reseon, day today reproducibility wasn’t good. Standard of retinol was 95% all-trans and pure so we should use this method because two retinol isomers wasn’t separated from each other by reversed phase chromatography and UV detection.

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Normal 0 false false false EN-GB X-NONE AR-SA MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Background: Tuberculosis is an important cause of death in some countries. The world health organization estimates that if stronger measures are not taken up to control the prevalence of this disease, from 2000 to 2020 a billion people will be infected by the bacterium. According to time consuming of common detection methods of Mycobact-erium tuberculosis such as culture, it is necessary to evaluate a rapid detection tests such as PCR. Rapid diagnosis of tuberculosis may have profound effects in patients' care According to importance of rapid detection and treatment of tuberculosis and for determine of sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value and negative predictive value of PCR by using IS6110 this study was done in Kashan university of medical science.
Methods: A total of 248 sputum samples from patients suspected of mycobacterial diseases were studied. DNA was extracted by boiling method. IS6110 PCR method by a specific pair of primers designed to amplify 123bp and 245bp sequences of the insertion sequence, 6110, in the M. tuberculosis genome was used to analyze sputum samples.
Results: 32 out of 248 (12.9%) of samples had positive culture. PCR yielded a sensitivity of 93.8% and specificity of 99.1% for the diagnosis of TB patients with TB confirmed by culture. There were two out of 32 (6.3%) PCR-positive cases among the patients with non-TB disease.
Conclusion: The findings of the present study indicate that Multiplex PCR may provide a faster method of detecting tuberculosis, thus enhancing diagnostic procedures and we conclude that the performance of an IS6110 PCR assay is valuable in the rapid diagnosis of tuberculosis.

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Background: Lung diseases and lung cancer are among the most dangerous diseases with high mortality in both men and women. Lung nodules are abnormal pulmonary masses and are among major lung symptoms. A Computer Aided Diagnosis (CAD) system may play an important role in accurate and early detection of lung nodules. This article presents a new CAD system for lung nodule detection from chest computed tomography (CT) images.

Methods: Twenty-five adult patients with lung nodules in their CT scan images presented to the National Research Institute of Tuberculosis and Lung Disease, Masih Daneshvari Hospital, Tehran, Iran in 2011-2012 were enrolled in the study. The patients were randomly assigned into two experimental (9 female, 6 male, mean age 43±5.63 yrs) and control (6 female, 4 male, mean age 39±4.91 yrs) groups. A fully-automatic method was developed for detecting lung nodules by employing medical image processing and analysis and statistical pattern recognition algorithms.

Results: Using segmentation methods, the lung parenchyma was extracted from 2-D CT images. Then, candidate regions were labeled in pseudo-color images. In the next step, some features of lung nodules were extracted. Finally, an artificial feed forward neural network was used for classification of nodules.

Conclusion: Considering the complexity and different shapes of lung nodules and large number of CT images to evaluate, finding lung nodules are difficult and time consuming for physicians and include human error. Experimental results showed the accuracy of the proposed method to be appropriate (P<0.05) for lung nodule detection.