PURPOSE Severe hyperkalemia leads to significant morbidity and mortality if it is not immediately recognized and treated. The concentration of potassium (K⁺) in the serum increases along with deteriorating renal function. The use of point-of-care K⁺ (POC-K⁺) in chronic kidney disease (CKD) could reduce the time for an accurate diagnosis and treatment, saving lives. We hypothesized that POC-K⁺ w...

Objectives. Systematic review of point of care (POC) diagnostic tests for sexually transmitted infections: Chlamydia trachomatis (CT), Neisseria gonorrhoeae (NG), and Trichomonas vaginalis (TV). Methods. Literature search on PubMed for articles from January 2010 to August 2015, including original research in English on POC diagnostics for sexually transmitted CT, NG, and/or TV. Results. We iden...

Methods and Results-—Patients with chest pain presenting by ambulance were randomized to usual care (UC) or POC-Troponin; ST-elevation myocardial infarction patients or those with noncardiovascular symptoms were excluded. Pre-hospital high-sensitivity troponin was analyzed on a POC device and available to the paramedic and emergency department (ED) staff. The final diagnosis was centrally adjud...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the performance of a point-of-care (POC) syphilis test when used in urban Bolivian maternity hospitals. METHODS We tested 8892 pregnant women for syphilis using the Abbott Determine Syphilis TP rapid POC test and rapid plasma reagin (RPR) in the laboratory of four large urban maternity hospitals where national statistics reported a syphilis prevalence of at least 3%. Ser...

OBJECTIVES A study found screening (with rapid plasma reagin (RPR)) pregnant women for maternal syphilis was cost-effective in Mwanza, Tanzania. Recently, four rapid point-of-care (POC) syphilis tests were evaluated in Mwanza, and found to have reasonable sensitivity/specificity. This analysis estimates the relative cost-effectiveness of using these POC tests in the Mwanza syphilis screening in...

INTRODUCTION Early recognition of elevated lactate levels in sepsis may hasten the detection of those patients eligible for aggressive resuscitation. Point-of-care (POC) testing is now increasingly available for use in the emergency department (ED). We examined the accuracy and time-saving effect of a handheld POC device for the measurement of fingertip and whole blood lactate as compared with ...

In this dissertation, we present Procedural Object-Oriented Code (POC). POC is the aftermath of the software development activity that involves state of the art object-oriented languages, without employing object-oriented analysis and design. Huge classes, absence of abstractions for domain entities, and shallow inheritance hierarchies are hallmark design defects of procedural object-oriented c...

Aircraft measurements are presented from the 27/28 October 2008 case study of the VOCALS Regional Experiment (REx) over the remote subtropical southeast Pacific (18 S, 80 W). Data from two aircraft that took measurements approximately twelve hours apart but in the same advected airmass are used to document a remarkably sharp spatial transition in marine boundary layer (MBL), cloud, and aerosol ...

BACKGROUND Point-of-care CD4 tests at HIV diagnosis could improve linkage to care in resource-limited settings. Our objective is to evaluate the clinical and economic impact of point-of-care CD4 tests compared to laboratory-based tests in Mozambique. METHODS AND FINDINGS We use a validated model of HIV testing, linkage, and treatment (CEPAC-International) to examine two strategies of immunolo...

Upper-ocean fluxes of particulate organic carbon (POC) and biogenic silica (bSi) are calculated from four US JGOFS cruises along 1701W using a thorium-234 based approach. Both POC and bSi fluxes exhibit large variability vs. latitude during the seasonal progression of diatom dominated blooms. POC fluxes at 100m of up to 50mmolCm 2 d 1 are found late in the bloom, and farthest south near the Ros...