The purpose of this study is to verify whether acute pre-treatment with alprazolam (ALP), a benzodiazepine that inhibits HPA secretion in normal subjects, could better characterize patients with subclinical Cushing’s syndrome (SCS) than the 1-mg dexamethasone test (DST). In 22 patients with SCS, 10 with overt Cushing’s syndrome (CS), 11 with non-functioning adrenal incidentalomas (NF) and 14 no...

Submergence is a common type of environmental stress for plants. It hampers survival and decreases crop yield, mainly by inhibiting plant photosynthesis. The inhibition of photosynthesis and photochemical efficiency by submergence is primarily due to leaf senescence and excess excitation energy, caused by signals from hypoxic roots and inhibition of gas exchange, respectively. However, the infl...

OBJECTIVE Kenya, like many resource-constrained countries, has a single mycobacterial laboratory, centrally located in Nairobi, with capacity for drug-susceptibility testing (DST) - the gold standard in diagnosing drug-resistant tuberculosis. We describe and evaluate a novel operational design that attempts to overcome diagnostic delivery barriers. METHODS Review of the public DST programme i...

A digraph is m-labelled if every arcs is labelled by an integer in {1, . . . , m}. Motivated by wavelength assignment for multicasts in optical star networks, we study n-fiber colourings of labelled digraph which are colourings of the arcs of D such that at each vertex v, for each colour in λ, in(v, λ) + out(v, λ) ≤ n with in(v, λ) the number of arcs coloured λ entering v and out(v, λ) the numb...

Objective: Ethionamide being thermolabile in nature, effect of temperature on the drug and its stability in liquid and solid media during susceptibility testing procedures was assessed to understand the inconsistency in DST formats. Methods: Working solution of ethionamide and LowensteinJensen (LJ) media incorporated with ethionamide were preincubated at 4°C and 37°C prior to DST methods was in...

Dialog state tracking (DST) is a crucial component in a task-oriented dialog system for conversational information access. A common practice in current dialog systems is to define the dialog state by a set of slot-value pairs. Such representation of dialog states and the slot-filling based DST have been widely employed, but suffer from three drawbacks. (1) The dialog state can contain only a si...

A digital search tree (DST) is a fundamental data structure on words that finds myriad of applications from the popular Lempel-Ziv’78 data compression scheme to distributed hash tables. It is a digital tree in which strings (keys, words) are stored directly in (internal) nodes. The profile of a DST measures the number of nodes at the same distance from the root; it is a function of the number o...

Tuberculosis (TB) is one of major global health problems. To make matters worse, the drug resistant TB such as multi-drug resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) and extensively drug resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB) is spreading out throughout the world which means the drug susceptibility test (DST) is necessary to treat the TB patients. To reduce the time for DST, we applied the single cell tracking me...

Regulatory cells developed after donor-specific transfusion (DST)-induced acceptance of a LEW heart transplanted into a DA rat. Both DST and the cardiac transplant were necessary to generate the regulatory cells. This donor-specific tolerance can then be transferred into a new DA recipient by adoptive transfer of lymphocytes from the DST-treated long term survivor (LTS) in a dose-dependent mann...

The previous two standard operating procedures (SOPs) related to the culture and drug susceptibility testing (DST) of Mycobacterium tuberculosis with the microscopic observation drug susceptibility assay (Part 1) and nitrate reductase assay (Part 2). The present SOP is devoted to a third non-commercial culture and DST method known as colorimetric redox indicator assay (CRI). As its name indicat...