OBJECTIVE To compare strategies for management of women with vaginal discharge in genitourinary medicine (GUM) and family planning (FP) settings. METHODS The setting was a centre housing both FP and GUM departments within a primary care trust in Scotland. The study participants were 200 women presenting with vaginal discharge. A randomised, controlled, crossover design was employed. Strategie...

A total heart-cut LC-LC-MS technique is described for the analysis of pharmaceutical compounds. Utilizing ordinary LC-MS equipment, a standardized multi-dimensional, highly selective approach was developed. The system was developed on synthetic mixtures containing ten active pharmaceutical compounds. The methodology would be further deployed for the impurity characterization of batches of activ...

In diagnostic medicine, estimating the diagnostic accuracy of a group of raters or medical tests relative to the gold standard is often the primary goal. When a gold standard is absent, latent class models where the unknown gold standard test is treated as a latent variable are often used. However, these models have been criticized in the literature from both a conceptual and a robustness persp...

UNLABELLED Because recent reports have questioned the traditional 2-compartment model for calculating tracer clearance after a single intravenous injection, a 3-compartment model was evaluated in this study. METHODS Bayesian statistics were used, which facilitated curve fitting by treating all subjects simultaneously. (99m)Tc-Mercaptoacetyltriglycine clearance data from 154 adults and 109 chi...

OBJECTIVES To identify the proportion of articles reporting on test accuracy for which the corresponding study had been registered. DESIGN Analysis of a consecutive sample of published study reports. PARTICIPANTS PubMed was searched for publications in journals with an impact factor of 5 or higher in May and June 2012. Articles were included if they reported on original studies evaluating t...

OBJECTIVE To define a de facto reference body mass index (BMI) for women in developing countries and compare its performance with the Quetelet BMI. DESIGN A logarithmic equation for elite wt/ht references was developed using the weight (wt) and height (ht) of 10,524 non-pregnant elite mothers. Functional outcomes were compared using both BMIs. SETTING Forty-six national surveys from 36 deve...

BACKGROUND Malnutrition is a prevalent complication in patients on maintenance hemodialysis. Nutritional screening tools may be useful to identify those patients at nutritional risk from among hundreds of hemodialysis patients in a large facility. OBJECTIVE We tested several simplified nutritional screening tools on hemodialysis patients to validate the potential application of the tools. D...

Abstract Objective: Homeostasis model assessment of insulin resistance (HOMA-IR) is a simple and practical method for estimation of insulin resistance (IR), but a reliable reference interval (RI) of HOMA-IR is needed to deduce the threshold level to define IR. This RI has been controversial in different populations and even more divergent when considering factors like age, gender and body mass...

Many organisations are currently restricted in their choice of software because of restrictions imposed by existing systems. Challenges include a lack of interoperability and a risk of technological lock-in, which many small companies seek to address by utilising Open Standards and Open Source implementations of such standards when developing and deploying systems. This paper presents an overvi...

The paper proposes a method based on signal processing correlation technique to find out whether the ECG is normal or abnormal. Many of the abnormal ECGs are called Arrhythmias. ECG (lead II) obtained from conventional ECG machine of Indian patients are digitized and the data are cross-correlated with the reference standard normal ECG data. Two different beats of the same ECG data are also corr...