Invasive pulmonary aspergillosis (IPA) is rarely reported in patients who have normal immune function. Recently, IPA risk was reported in nonimmunocompromised hosts, such as patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and critically ill patients in intensive care units. Moreover, influenza infection is also believed to be associated with IPA among immunocompetent patients. However, most...

This paper applies Infinitesimal Perturbation Analysis (IPA) to loss-related and workloadrelated metrics in a class of Stochastic Flow Models (SFM). It derives closed-form formulas for gradient estimators of these metrics with respect to various parameters of interest, such as buffer size, service rate and inflow rate. The IPA estimators derived are simple and fast to compute, and are further s...

BACKGROUND Percutaneous drainage (PCD) and surgical intervention are two primary treatment options for iliopsoas abscess (IPA). However, there is currently no consensus on when to use PCD or surgical intervention, especially in patients with gas-forming IPA. This study compared the characteristics of patients with gas-forming and non-gas forming IPA and their mortality rates under different tre...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate vessel involvement and the role of multidetector computed tomography (MDCT) in the earlydiagnosis of invasive pulmonary aspergillosis (IPA) in patients with febrile neutropenia and antibiotic-resistant feverundergoing autologous bone morrow transplantation. MATERIAL AND METHODS In all, 74 pulmonary MDCT examinations in 37 consecutive hematopoietic stem celltransplantatio...

BACKGROUND Invasive pulmonary aspergillosis (IPA) is one of the major complications encountered by patients receiving chemotherapy for hematologic malignancies. The prolonged period of intense immunosuppression following allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT) may increase the risk of IPA recurrence in patients with a history of IPA. We evaluated the impact of a history of IPA...

Phonemic analysis, the process of identifying the contrastive sounds in a language, involves finding allophones; phonetic variants of those contrastive sounds. An algorithm for finding allophones (developed by Peperkamp et al.) is evaluated on consonants in the TIMIT acoustic phonetic transcripts. A novel phonetic filter based on the active articulator is introduced and has a higher recall than...

BACKGROUND Invasive pulmonary aspergillosis (IPA) is a major cause of morbidity and mortality in patients with hematological malignancies in the setting of profound neutropenia and/or hematopoietic stem cell transplantation. Early diagnosis and therapy has been shown to improve outcomes, but reaching a definitive diagnosis quickly can be problematic. Recently, galactomannan testing of bronchoal...

OBJECTIVE Our initial report analyzed clinical and cost utilization data from the years 1999 to 2002 for an integrative medicine independent physician association (IPA) whose primary care physicians (PCPs) were exclusively doctors of chiropractic. This report updates the subsequent utilization data from the IPA for the years 2003 to 2005 and includes first-time comparisons in data points among ...

There has been an increase in research on sustainable urban development, especially recent years, and importance-performance analysis (IPA) is one of the popular methods applied development research. However, few have integrated IPA with structural equation modelling (SEM). This study developed tested SEM approach to measuring effects perceived importance city dimensions performance a resident ...

BACKGROUND Failing a high-stakes assessment at medical school is a major event for those who go through the experience. Students who fail at medical school may be more likely to struggle in professional practice, therefore helping individuals overcome problems and respond appropriately is important. There is little understanding about what factors influence how individuals experience failure or...