BACKGROUND The use of Workplace-Based Assessment (WBA) has increased in recent years. AIMS To create a modified version of Direct Observation of Procedural Skills (DOPS) adapted to the Chilean context and establish its psychometric properties. METHODS The content validity of DOPS was established through interviews and consensus survey. To be included in the new version, the respective domai...

Platelet function testing is essential for the diagnosis of congenital/acquired bleeding disorders and may be useful for the prediction of surgical bleeding. Nowadays there is also much interest in monitoring the efficacy of anti-platelet therapy and measuring platelet hyper-function. However, this often presents clinical laboratories with significant challenges as platelet function tests are c...

Visceral leishmaniasis (VL) is associated with increased circulating levels of multiple pro-inflammatory cytokines and chemokines, including IL-12, IFNγ, and TNFα, and elevated expression of IFNγ mRNA in lesional tissue such as the spleen and bone marrow. However, an immunological feature of VL patients is that their peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) typically fail to respond to stimul...

The aim of this study was to assess the cytokine response after nasal exposure to organic dusts. In a double blinded, crossover study five garbage workers with occupational airway symptoms and five healthy garbage workers were intranasally exposed to endotoxin (lipopolysaccharide LPS), beta-1,3-D-glucan (GLU), Aspergillus sp., compost or the saline dilute for 15 min. Nasal cavity volume and nas...

PURPOSE To assess 1.9 GHz radiofrequency (RF) field exposure on gene expression within a variety of discrete mouse brain regions using whole genome microarray analysis. MATERIALS AND METHODS Adult male C57BL/6 mice were exposed to 1.9 GHz pulse-modulated or continuous-wave RF fields for 4 h/day for 5 consecutive days at whole body average (WBA) specific absorption rates of 0 (sham), ∼0.2 W/kg...

The stable incidence of new leprosy cases suggests that transmission of infection continues despite worldwide implementation of MDT. Thus, specific tools are needed to diagnose early stage Mycobacterium leprae infection, the likely sources of transmission. M. leprae antigens that induce T-cell responses in M. leprae exposed and/or infected individuals thus are major targets for new diagnostic t...

BACKGROUND A better understanding of the quality of cellular immune responses directed against molecularly defined targets will guide the development of TB diagnostics and identification of molecularly defined, clinically relevant M.tb vaccine candidates. METHODS Recombinant proteins (n = 8) and peptide pools (n = 14) from M. tuberculosis (M.tb) targets were used to compare cellular immune re...

The free electron laser instability is investigated theoretically for a tenuous relativistic electron beam propagating parallel to a longitudinal wiggler field (Bo + 6Bainkoz)%. The stability analysis is based on the linearized Vlasov-Maxwell equations for perturbations about the beam equilibrium f4 = (nb/2w5)6(p_-mV)6(p,-mmV). For (W D/b)(eB/BO) of order unity or larger, it is found that the t...

Segmentation is an essential requirement in medicine when digital images are used illness diagnosis, especially, posterior tasks as analysis and disease identification. An efficient segmentation of brain Magnetic Resonance Images (MRIs) prime concern to radiologists due their poor illumination other conditions related de acquisition the images. Thresholding a popular method for that uses histog...