INTRODUCTION Although renal replacement therapy (RRT) is a common procedure in critically ill patients with acute kidney injury (AKI), its efficacy remains uncertain. Patients who receive RRT usually have higher mortality rates than those who do not. However, many differences exist in severity patterns between patients with and those without RRT and available results are further confounded by t...

BACKGROUND Real-time reverse transcription PCR (rRT-PCR) of sputum samples is commonly used to diagnose Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) infection. Owing to the difficulty of extracting RNA from sputum containing mucus, sputum homogenization is desirable prior to nucleic acid isolation. We determined optimal homogenization methods for isolating viral nucleic acids from sp...

The sampling based motion planning algorithm known as Rapidly-exploring Random Trees (RRT) has gained the attention of many researchers due to their computational efficiency and effectiveness. Recently, a variant of RRT called RRT* has been proposed that ensures asymptotic optimality. Subsequently its bidirectional version has also been introduced in the literature known as Bidirectional-RRT* (...

Viral hemorrhagic septicemia virus (VHSV) is an emerging pathogen that causes mass mortality in multiple fish species. In 2007, the Great Lakes freshwater strain, type IVb, caused a large die-off of freshwater drum (Aplodinotus grunniens) in Lake Winnebago, Wisconsin, USA. To evaluate the persistence and transmission of VHSV, freshwater drum from Lake Winnebago were tested for antibodies to the...

At the time of influenza A (H1N1) emergency, the WHO responded with remarkable speed by releasing guidelines and a protocol for a real-time RT-PCR assay (rRT-PCR). The aim of the present study was to evalúate the performance of the "Real Time Ready Influenza A/H1N1 Detection Set" (June 2009)-Roche kit in comparison to the CDC reference rRT-PCR protocol. The overall sensitivity of the Roche assa...

BACKGROUND Chronic kidney disease (CKD) is common in heart failure (HF) and is associated with poor outcomes. Renal replacement therapy (RRT) may be deferred over concerns regarding tolerability and outcomes in HF. Our objectives were to ascertain the incidence of RRT, changes in RRT incidence over time and the association between RRT and survival in hospitalized HF patients. METHODS A retros...

Primary bovine thyroid cell cultures and IB-RS-2 continuous cell line were used for foot-and-mouth disease virus (FMDV) isolation. In both cell culture systems, all tested samples gave positive results and the specificity of isolated virus was confirmed by the Ag-ELISA. Results of virus isolation test agreed with those obtained by RT-PCR and rRT-PCR, which enabled detection of the genetic mater...

Successful disease management requires a rapid and sensitive diagnosis method that can recognize early infection even before the manifestation of its clinical signs. The only available field diagnostic tests for foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) are lateral flow devices, commonly known as chromatographic strips. Low sensitivity and inability to detect FMD virus (FMDV) at the serotype level are limit...

INTRODUCTION Acute kidney injury (AKI) remains a serious clinical problem in the intensive care unit (ICU). It constitutes an independent risk factor for mortality, especially when renal replacement therapy (RRT) is required. AIM Due to limited evidence pertaining to timing, choice of RRT modality and lack of studies investigating AKI in Polish ICUs, we sought to analyse outcomes of adult AKI...

Abstract The slow convergence rate and large cost of the initial solution limit performance rapidly exploring random tree star (RRT*). To address this issue, paper proposes a modified RRT* algorithm (defined as FF-RRT*) that creates an optimal with fast rate. An improved hybrid sampling method is proposed to speed up by decreasing iterations overcoming application limitation original towards co...