Among 2,648 specimens positive on culture for Mycobacterium tuberculosis over a 6-year period, 82% grew on Lowenstein-Jensen medium (LJ), 79% on American Trudeau Society (ATS), and 56% on Middlebrook 7H10 (7H10). When these commercial culture media were compared in regard to the number of acid-fast bacilli seen on the original smears, LJ cultures were found to have the highest isolation rates f...

A new fluorescence in situ hybridization assay based on peptide nucleic acid probes (MTB and NTM probes targeting tuberculous and nontuberculous species, respectively) for the identification of Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex and differentiation between tuberculous and nontuberculous mycobacteria (NTM) was evaluated using Lowenstein-Jensen (LJ) solid cultures from 100 consecutive sputum samp...

The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends collection of two sputum samples for tuberculosis (TB) diagnosis, with at least one being an early morning (EM) using smear microscopy. It remains unclear whether this is necessary even when sputum culture is employed. Here, we determined the diagnostic yield from spot and the incremental yield from the EM sputum sample cultures among TB-suspected ...

Press LJ, Taub MB, Schnell PH. Applied Concepts in Vision Therapy 2.0. Santa Ana: Optometric Extension Program; 2022, $159.00, 543 pages, Paperback, ISBN: 9780929780542

In view of (7), we see that Ĥk+1(x) > Ĥk(x) for all x ≥ Xk+1 such that Ĥk(x) < 1, and Ĥk+1(x) = 1 for all x ≥ Xk+1 such that Ĥk(x) = 1. Therefore, Lk+1 ≤ Lk by (5), so the first part of the proposition is proved. Let ε := c − d > 0. Notice that if Lj ≥ ε then Xj+1 ≤ Lj − ε by (OA–1). Moreover, (OA–1) also implies that if 0 ≤ Lj < ε, then Xj+1 = 0. Since we have already shown that the sequence o...

We find that the density dependence of the glass transition temperature of Lennard-Jones (LJ) and Weeks-Chandler-Andersen (WCA) systems can be predicted from properties of the zero-temperature (T=0) glasses. Below a crossover density ρs, LJ and WCA glasses show different structures, leading to different vibrational properties and consequently making LJ glasses more stable with higher glass tran...

In recent years, there has been a great growth of research on atomic and molecular cluster systems. The development of new experimental techniques1−4 allow the spectroscopic characterization of clusters together with the development of new algorithms and increased speed of computers making the realistic simulations of clusters possible allow a better understanding of clusters. Clusters form a b...

Pyrazinamide (PZA) is an important first-line antituberculosis drug because of its sterilizing activity against semidormant tubercle bacilli. In spite of its very high in vivo activity, its in vitro activity is not apparent unless an acidic environment is available, which makes PZA susceptibility testing difficult by conventional methods. The present study was, therefore, planned to assess the ...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Diagnosis of tuberculosis (TB) is largely based on microscopy and culture examination which are either less sensitive, or time consuming. In the present study a PCR (polymerase chain reaction) test based on DNA sequence coding for a 38-kilodalton protein antigen b (Pab) ,specific for Mycobacterium tuberculosis was compared with Ziehl-Neelsen (ZN) stained AFB (acid fast...

The bin packing problem (BP) consists in finding the minimum number of bins necessary to pack a set of items so that the total size of the items in each bin does not exceed the bin capacity C. The bin capacity is common for all the bins. This problem can be solved in Constraint Programming (CP) by introducing one placement variable xi for each item and one load variable lj for each bin. The Pac...