BACKGROUND Reducing medication turnaround time can improve efficiency, patient safety, and quality of care in the hospital setting. Digital scanning technology (DST) can be used to electronically transmit scanned prescriber orders to a pharmacy computer queue for verification and processing, which may help to improve medication turnaround time. OBJECTIVES To evaluate medication turnaround tim...

We report here an effort to use molecular dynamics/free energy perturbation methodology to calculate relative binding affinities of two related drugs to DNA. Specifically, we focus on the relative binding free energies of distamycin (Dst) and its analog, 2-imidazoledistamycin (2-ImD), to d(CGCAAGTTGGC).d(GCCAACTTGCG). The pyrrole (Dst) and the imidazole variant (2-ImD) differ only in that the C...

BACKGROUND Important methodological questions still exist concerning the Dexamethasone Suppression Test (DST), including the possibility of a better way of interpreting it. The aim of the present study was to explore the feasibility of an alternative way of interpreting DST results. METHODS A total of 50 patients with major depression aged 41.0 +/- 11.4 years old participated in the study. Pa...

A new three node triangular plate element, labeled here as DST-S6 (Discrete Shear Triangular element with 6 extra Shear degrees of freedom), is proposed for the analyses of plate/shell structures comprising of thin or thick members. The formulation is based on the DKT (Discrete Kirchhoff Technique) and an appropriate use of the independent shear DOF(Degrees Of Freedom). The shear locking is com...

INTRODUCTION Extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB) represents an emerging public health problem worldwide. According to the World Health Organization, an estimated 9.7% of multidrug-resistant TB (MDR-TB) cases are defined as XDR-TB globally. The objective of this study was to determine the prevalence of drug resistance to second-line TB drugs among MDR-TB cases detected in the Fourth...

DS/AHP is a technique for multi-criteria decision making (MCDM), based on the Dempster-Shafer Theory of evidence (DST) and the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). Since its introduction it has been developed and applied by a number of authors, as well as form the foundation for other DST related MCDM techniques. This paper reviews the evolution and impact of DS/AHP, culminating in a critical pers...

Establishing an appropriate semantic overlay on Peer-to-Peer networks to obtain both semantic ability and scalability is a challenge. Current DHT-based P2P networks are limited in their ability to support semantic search. This paper proposes the DST (Distributed Suffix Tree) overlay as the intermediate layer between the DHT overlay and the semantic overlay. The DST overlay supports search of ke...

DST elements are highly conserved sequences located in the 3' untranslated regions (UTRs) of a set of unstable soybean transcripts known as the small auxin-up RNAs (SAURs). To test whether DST sequences could function as mRNA instability determinants in plants, a model system was developed to facilitate the direct measurement of mRNA decay rates in stably transformed cells of tobacco. Initial e...

Donor-specific blood transfusion (DST), designed to prolong allograft survival, sensitized recipients of the high-responder PVG-RT1u strain, resulting in accelerated rejection of MHC-class I mismatched (PVG-R8) allografts. Rejection was found to be mediated by anti-MHC class I (Aa) alloantibody. By pretreating recipients 4 wk before grafting with cyclosporin A (CsA) daily (x7), combined with on...

PURPOSE Very few studies have examined cognitive decline in caregivers versus noncaregivers, and only 1 study has examined mediators of such decline. We evaluated the relationship between caregiver status and decline on the digit symbol test (DST; a measure of processing speed, attention, cognitive-motor translation, and visual scanning) and whether this relationship was mediated by depressed m...