A novel assay was developed to measure ratio of p-FMS (phospho FMS) to FMS using the Meso Scale Discovery(®) (MSD) technology and compared to the routinely used, IP-Western based approach. The existing IP-Western assay used lysed PBMCs (Peripheral Blood Mononuclear Cells) that were immunoprecipitated (IP) overnight, and assayed qualitatively by Western analysis. This procedure takes three days ...

This study presents a novel approach to aid in diagnosis of urinary tract infections (UTIs). A real-time PCR assay was used to screen for culture-positive urinary specimens and to identify the causative uropathogen. Semi-quantitative breakpoints were used to screen for significant bacteriuria (presence of ≥ 10(5) CFU/ml of uropathogens) or low-level bacteriuria (containing between 10(3) and 10(...

We present Intelligent Indexing: a general, scalable, collaborative approach to indexing and transcription of non-machinereadable documents that exploits visual consensus and group labeling while harnessing human recognition and domain expertise. In our system, indexers work directly on the page, and with minimal context switching can navigate the page, enter labels, and interact with the recog...

This work is devoted to the study of field-aligned interpolation in semi-Lagrangian codes. In the context of numerical simulations of magnetic fusion devices, this approach is motivated by the observation that gradients of the solution along the magnetic field lines are typically much smaller than along a perpendicular direction. In toroidal geometry, field-aligned interpolation consists of a 1...

Amongst others, 2-octyl-isothiazol-3(2 H)-one (OIT) is used as film preservative in water-based polymer resin paints and renders to prevent the growth of moulds and bacteria. It is known that biocides leach from facades with rainwater and end up in the environment via stormwater runoff. In the present study the leaching and fate of OIT used in facade coatings was determined under natural condit...

We extend first-order semi-Markov conditional random fields (semi-CRFs) to include higherorder semi-Markov features, and present efficient inference and learning algorithms, under the assumption that the higher-order semiMarkov features are sparse. We empirically demonstrate that high-order semi-CRFs outperform high-order CRFs and first-order semi-CRFs on three sequence labeling tasks with long...

We present a combination of techniques to implement a feature-rich ray tracer that applies adaptive sampling to optimize performance. We build these features upon existing methods in which we experiment with techniques to optimally combine them in a ray tracer.