The early bactericidal activity of antituberculosis agents is usually determined by measuring the reduction of the sputum mycobacterial load over time on solid agar medium or in liquid culture. This study investigated the value of a quantitative PCR assay for early bactericidal activity determination. Groups of 15 patients were treated with 6 different antituberculosis agents or regimens. Patie...

The implementation of antiretroviral therapy demands the need for increased access to viral load (VL) monitoring. Newer real-time VL testing technologies are faster and have larger dynamic ranges and fully automated extraction to benefit higher throughputs in resource-poor environments. The Abbott RealTime human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) assay was evaluated as a new option for testi...

Cloud Computing is growing in real time environment and provides shared resources, information, software packages and other resources as pay per use at specific time. Resources are needed to be equally balanced between various computing processes and to obtain proper utilization of resources load balancing is required. In this paper, various load balancing algorithms are compared on the basis o...

The problem of electrical load forecasting presents some particularities, compared to the generic problem of time-series prediction. One of these particularities is that several values (corresponding to one day of consumption) are usually expected as the result of the prediction. In this paper, we propose an original method dividing the problem into three parts: prediction of the daily mean, of...

The Virtual Data Space is a standard C-library which automatically distributes the work-packets generated by parallel applications across the processing nodes. VDS is a universal system ooering loadbalancing-mechanisms for applications which incorporate independent load-items and scheduling algorithms for those which comprise precedence-constraints between their diierent tasks. This paper prese...

High, sustained loads in masonry cause time-dependent deformations, which can lead to failure of the construction. This phenomenon mostly occurs in high constructions, such as historical towers, where the dead load imposes significant stresses on the base of the tower [4]. As knowledge and experimental data are lacking to describe this time-dependent behavior in historical masonry, a research p...

BACKGROUND Increased arterial stiffness leads to increased pulsatile load on the heart. We investigated associations of components of pulsatile load with a measure of left ventricular (LV) systolic function-global longitudinal strain (GLS), in a community-based cohort ascertained based on family history of hypertension. METHODS Arterial tonometry and echocardiography with speckle tracking wer...