The prevalence of enterotoxigenic Bacteroides fragilis (ETBF) was investigated in stool specimens from 73 patients with colorectal cancer and from 59 control patients. Stool specimens were cultured on Bacteroides Bile Esculin agar and B. fragilis was identified by conventional methods. After DNA extraction, the enterotoxin gene (bft) was detected by PCR in 38% of the isolates from colorectal cancer patients, compared with 12% of the isolates from the control group (p 0.009). This is the first study demonstrating an increased prevalence of ETBF in colorectal cancer patients.

We developed a new method for estimation of vigilance level by using both EEG and EMG signals recorded during transition from wakefulness to sleep. Previous studies used only EEG signals for estimating the vigilance levels. In this study, it was aimed to estimate vigilance level by using both EEG and EMG signals for increasing the accuracy of the estimation rate. In our work, EEG and EMG signals were obtained from 30 subjects. In data preparation stage, EEG signals were separated to its subbands using wavelet transform for efficient discrimination, and chin EMG was used to verify and eliminate the movement artifacts. The changes in EEG and EMG were diagnosed while transition from wakefulness to sleep by using developed artificial neural network (ANN). Training and testing data sets consist of the subbanded components of EEG and power density of EMG signals were applied to the ANN for training and testing the system which gives three situations for the vigilance level of the subject: awake, drowsy, and sleep. The accuracy of estimation was about 98-99% while the accuracy of the previous study, which uses only EEG, was 95-96%.

Analysis and classification of sleep stages is essential in sleep research. In this particular study, an alternative system which estimates sleep stages of human being through a multi-layer neural network (NN) that simultaneously employs EEG, EMG and EOG. The data were recorded through polisomnography device for 7 h for each subject. These collective variant data were first grouped by an expert physician and the software of polisomnography, and then used for training and testing the proposed Artificial Neural Network (ANN). A good scoring was attained through the trained ANN, so it may be put into use in clinics where lacks of specialist physicians.

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In this study, whether the wavelet transform method is better for spectral analysis of the brain signals is investigated. For this purpose, as a spectral analysis tool, wavelet transform is compared with fast Fourier transform (FFT) applied to the electroencephalograms (EEG), which have been used in the previous studies. In addition, the time-domain characteristics of the wavelet transform are also detected. The comparison results show that the wavelet transform method is better in detecting brain diseases.

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The purpose of this study was to investigate and to compare the effects of microsuturing to that of tissue adhesives (Tisseel) on the healing of anastomosing peripheral nerve incisions. Forty-five Wistar-Albino rats were placed in special cages and separated into three groups (n = 15). In the control group, biliteral sciatic nerves were explored but no incision was made. In the first experimental group, bilateral sciatic nerves were incised and end-to-end anastomosing was performed by microsuturing the epineurium. In the second experimental group, tissue adhesive (Tisseel) was used alone in anastomosing the sciatic nerve cuts. Assessments of the healing processes were demonstrated by 1.electromyography (EMG), 2. measuring the electrical responses of the anastomosed nerves after electrical stimuli, 3. histopathological examination. Statistical analysis of the EMG findings showed that the Tisseel group was the closest in the healing process to the control group. After applying electrical stimuli to the dissected nerves, the resistance value of the Tisseel group was nearest to those of the control group. The histopathological examinations showed highly degenerative nerve bundles and prominent foreign body granuloma at the anastomosed sites of the microsutured group. The granulomatous inflammation was observed to be much less in the Tisseel group. We conclude that the healing effect of Tisseel was found to be superior to that of microsuturing as demonstrated by the findings of EMG, electrical responses of the anastomosed nerves, and histopathological examination.