Evaluation of partitional algorithms for clustering medical documents

There are large quantities of information about patients and their medical conditions. The discovery of trends and patterns hidden within the data could significantly enhance understanding of disease and medicine progression and management by evaluating stored medical documents. Methods are needed to facilitate discovering the trends and patterns within such large quantities of medical documents. Clustering medical documents into small number of meaningful clusters is one of these methods; because dealing with only the cluster that will contain relevant documents should improve effectiveness and efficiency. The produced clusters must be in high-quality because it will be used for further processing to discover the hidden trends and patterns. The focus of this paper is to experimentally evaluate the clusters' quality of partitional clustering algorithms that use different criterion functions in the context of clustering medical documents. Our experimental results show that E1 leads to the best solution using repeated bisection as clustering method in term entropy. And I1 is the best using direct clustering methods in term of both entropy and purity

Diarrhea Due to Cryptosporidium Parvum in Immunocompromised and Immunocompetent Patients in Khartoum State

Objective: The objective of this study is to search for Cryptosporidium parvum in Sudanese immunocompromised and immunocompetent patients presenting with diarrhea. Methods: Two hundred and thirteen stool specimens were collected from different groups of patients presenting with diarrhea and healthy control (immunocompromised: 78; immunocompetent: 90; Control: 45). The immunocompromised group included 25 HIV positive patients; 27 tuberculosis patients; 11 patients with renal failure and 15 patients receiving immunosuppressive chemotherapy. Antigen ELISA was performed to detect the presence of the parasite in stool. Positive specimens were examined by the modified ZN stain to look for the oocyst of C.parvum. Result: Seventy one of the immunocompromised patients (91.0); twenty nine of immunocompetent patients (32.2) and ten of the control group (22.2) were found to be positive for C.parvum. A significant difference was noticed between the immunocompromised patients and the other groups (P0.05). Among the immunocompromised patients; the highest percentage of positive results (96.1) was in the HIV patients. The percentage of positive results within the tuberculosis; renal failure and immunosuppressive patients were 92.6; 83.3and 86.6respectively. Conclusion: The significant detection of C. parvum among the different groups of immunocompromised should raise the awareness of the clinicians towards this parasite as an important cause of diarrhea in such groups of patients