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To satisfy the ever growing need for effective screening and diagnostic tests, medical practitioners have turned their attention to high resolution, high throughput methods. One approach is to use mass spectrometry based methods for disease diagnosis. Effective diagnosis is achieved by classifying the mass spectra as belonging to healthy or diseased individuals. Unfortunately, the high resolution mass spectrometry data contains a large degree of noisy, redundant and irrelevant information, making accurate classification difficult. To overcome these obstacles, feature extraction methods are used to select or create small sets of relevant features. This paper compares existing feature selection methods to a novel wrapper-based feature selection and centroid-based classification method. A key contribution is the exposition of different feature extraction techniques, which encompass dimensionality reduction and feature selection methods. The experiments, on two cancer data sets, indicate that feature selection algorithms tend to both reduce data dimensionality and increase classification accuracy, while the dimensionality reduction techniques sacrifice performance as a result of lowering the number of features. In order to evaluate the dimensionality reduction and feature selection techniques, we use a simple classifier, thereby making the approach tractable. In relation to previous research, the proposed algorithm is very competitive in terms of (i) classification accuracy, (ii) size of feature sets, (iii) usage of computational resources during both training and classification phases.

The advances in information and communication technologies have changed the way the governments interact with their citizens. The development of the internet and its vast capabilities played a vital role in this change. According the UN report 2010, the UN e-Government development index of the world rated United Arab Emirates in 49 which comes late 17 places than 2008 ranking. During 2008 the UAE ranked in 32. Therefore, it can be seen that UAE is having some troubles in citizens’ adoption of the e-Government. In this paper, we will examine the key berries to the use of the e-Government services by citizens through testing the effect of 11 independent variables on the citizens’ use of e-Government in municipal of Emirate of Abu Dhabi.

Introduction: Differentiation between AVNRT and AVRT can be sometimes challenging. Apical right ventricular (RV) entrainment can help in differentiation, however it has some fallacies. We thought to compare the accuracy of basal RV entrainment to RV apical entrainment in identifying the mechanism of SVT.

Methods: 42 consecutive patients with SVT undergoing catheter ablation were prospectively studied. Apical RV entrainment was performed 20 ms faster than tachycardia cycle length (TCL) initially followed by basal entrainment from the anteroseptal basal RV avoiding His or atrial capture. Postpacing interval (PPI), PPI-TCL, corrected PPI-TCL and Stim-A minus VA were measured.

Results: Entrainment was achieved from both sites of RV in 34 patients (10 men; mean age: 42±15 years), 20 with typical AVNRT, 1 with atypical AVNRT, and 13 with AVRT (8 left sided, 4 right sided, and 1 septal APs). PPI-TCL, cPPI-TCL and SA-VA were significantly longer with basal entrainment in AVNRT (171±30 vs 153±22 ms (p=0.003), 148±21 vs 131±20 ms (p=0.002) and 145±17 vs 136±15 ms (p=0.005) respectively). Receiver Operator Charecteristic (ROC) curves showed higher AUC for the above parameters with basal entrainment compared to apical entrainment. Basal PPI-TCL>110 ms had a sensitivity of 100% and a specificity of 84% for diagnosis of AVNRT. Basal cPPI-TCL>95 ms had a sensitivity of 100% and a specificity of 93% for diagnosis of AVNRT. Basal SA-VA>105 ms had a sensitivity of 100% and a specificity of 93% for diagnosis of AVNRT.

Conclusions: Entrainment from the anteroseptal basal RV is a simple maneuver that is superior to apical ventricular entrainment in identifying the mechanism of SVT.

Systemic sclerosis is a multisystem autoimmune collagen disease where structural and functional abnormalities of small blood vessels prevail. Transient ischemic attacks, ischemic stroke, and hemorrhage have been reported as primary consequence of vascular central nervous system affection in systemic sclerosis. Magnetic resonance imaging is considered to be the most sensitive diagnostic technique for detecting symptomatic and asymptomatic lesions in the brain in cases of multifocal diseases. The objective of this study is to detect subclinical as well as clinically manifest cerebral vasculopathy in patients with systemic sclerosis using magnetic resonance imaging. As much as 30 female patients with systemic sclerosis aged 27-61 years old, with disease duration of 1-9 years and with no history of other systemic disease or cerebrovascular accidents, were enrolled. Age-matched female control group of 30 clinically normal subjects, underwent brain magnetic resonance examination. Central nervous system (CNS) involvement in the form of white matter hyperintense foci of variable sizes were found in significantly abundant forms in systemic sclerosis patients on magnetic resonance evaluation than in age-related control group, signifying a form of CNS vasculopathy. Such foci showed significant correlation to clinical features of organic CNS lesion including headaches, fainting attacks and organic depression as well as to the severity of peripheral vascular disease with insignificant correlation with disease duration. In conclusion, subclinical as well as clinically manifest CNS ischemic vasculopathy is not uncommon in systemic sclerosis patients and magnetic resonance imaging is considered a sensitive noninvasive screening tool for early detection of CNS involvement in patients with systemic sclerosis.

Medication non-compliance is an ignored health problem in developing countries, which have an alarming average of less than 50% of patients complying with medication instructions. Such non-compliance is considered a major challenge to effective management of most chronic diseases such as diabetes mellitus, hypertension, and dyslipidemia. Objective: To evaluate the factors affecting patient compliance and the impact of better compliance on the control of chronic diseases. Another objective is to measure the prevalence of intentional and non-intentional non compliance and their causes. Method: A cross-sectional study was conducted for 240 patients with chronic diseases who are followed up at Al-Qassimi Hospital, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates (ARE) during the period of September 2008 until March 2009. The hospital ethical committee approval was obtained before the commencement of the study. A validated data collection form and questionnaire were used to collect patients' demographics, degree of knowledge about their medications and concurrent diseases. Patients were selected based on inclusion and exclusion criteria which include chronic diseased adult patients who have one or more of the following chronic conditions (Diabetes, hypertension and/or dyslipidemia) confirmed in the patients' medical file (not on their initial diagnosis). Participants should have an active prescription without changes for at least 90 days at the time of study recruitment. Descriptive statistics were reported and statistical analysis using SPSS software version 18 was done to correlate patient demographics and patient compliance and to measure the correlation of patient compliance and the control of chronic diseases using chi square test. Results: The mean age of participants was 56.6 ± 12.4 years. Most of participants were illiterate (62.5%). Most of them had family history with chronic disease (69.2%). Most patients have more than one chronic disease (86.7%). More than three quarters of participants (77.5%) do not control one or more of their diseases. Also high percentage of participants (76.7%) was on polypharmacy regimen (mean number of drug used 7.0 ± 3.0). The most prominent complication related to chronic diseases that participants suffered from is cardiovascular diseases (27.6%). Forgetfulness is the main reason for non-intentional non-compliance (75%), while polypharmacy was considered the main causes for intentional non-compliance (13.3%). The current study revealed that there is significant association between patients' young age, having family member with chronic disease, having complications and good compliance (p-value < 0.05). Also, there is a statistically significant association between good compliance and better achievement of chronic diseases control (p-value < 0.05). It was also found that level of education and number of chronic diseases have no correlation with compliance (P-value > 0.05) Conclusion: Medication compliance is very important to control chronic diseases such as diabetes mellitus, hypertension and/or dyslipidemia and decrease their complications. Results of the study showed that there is a positive association between good compliance and achievement of better control of chronic diseases. The current study also revealed that there is significant association between patients' young age, having family member with chronic disease, having complications and good medication compliance.

PURPOSE: To evaluate the role of preoperative intravitreal bevacizumab as an adjunct to vitrectomy in diabetic eye disease.

METHODS: Twenty eyes of 18 patients were recruited and underwent a single intravitreal injection of bevacizumab 1.25 mg 1 week prior to vitrectomy. Fundus fluorescein angiography (FFA) was done before and 1 week after injections. Best corrected visual acuity (BCVA) and ophthalmic evaluation were done before, 1 week after injections, 1 day, 1 week and monthly for 3 months after vitrectomy.

RESULTS: The mean age was 47.7 ± 10.39 years. The male:female ratio was 2:3. Mean preinjection BCVA (logMAR) was 1.460 ± 0.439. FFA showed a dramatic reduction in dye leakage 1 week after injection. Intraoperative bleedings were minimal in most cases (85%, n = 17). Postoperatively, 16 patients had no bleeding (80%), 4 had minimal bleeding (20%), and 1 had recurrent fibrovascular proliferation (5%). The mean BCVA on day 1, week 1, months 2 and 3 after surgery were 1.645 ± 0.422, 1.300 ± 0.413, 1.065 ± 0.538 and 1.065 ± 0.538 logMAR, respectively (p = 0.078, 0.123, 0.002 and 0.002, respectively).

CONCLUSION: Bevacizumab administered prior to vitrectomy was well tolerated and was particularly useful during surgery.

In this paper, the generalized analysis of the first Butterworth filter based on two passive elements is introduced in the fractional-order sense. The fractional-order condition of the Butterworth circuit is presented for the first time where it will lead us back to the known condition of the integer-order circuit when the two fractional-orders equal one. Therefore, the conventional behavior of the integer-order circuit is a narrow subset of the fractional-order ones. The circuit is studied under same and different order cases, and verified through their numerical simulations. Stability analysis is also introduced showing the poles location in the fractional-order versus integer order cases.

Between 1950 and the beginning of the 21st century, the mortality rates for cancer did not significantly improve. Despite the discovery of dozens of novel anticancer drugs, cancer remains the leading cause of death worldwide. There are wide gaps between the disease incidence (0.16%), disease burden (5.6 %), and the mortality caused by cancer (12.5 %).1 However, in countries with a wide diversity of plant life, there have been intensified efforts to discover natural cancer therapeutics.