BACKGROUND Quantification of cytomegalovirus (CMV) deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) has important diagnostic, prognostic, and therapeutic implications in the management of transplant recipients. We aimed to assess a viral load in plasma and whole blood that distinguishes CMV disease from asymptomatic infection in a cohort of solid organ and hematopoietic stem cell transplantation. METHODS We prosp...

BACKGROUND The sensitivity of rapid influenza diagnostic test (RIDT) of children with influenza-like illness (ILI) remains low. OBJECTIVE We compare the parameters between pandemic A(H1N1) 2009 influenza with negative RIDT and ILI not H1N1 for improving the low sensitivity of RIDT for children with ILI. METHODS In a cohort of consecutive laboratory-confirmed H1N1 influenza, we identified 15...

This paper compares the coherent groups of load buses based on Reactive Reserve Margin (RRB) obtained from the V-Q curve analysis and a novel generator sensitivity based method for optimal placement of STATCOM. The V-Q curve is one of the popular methods to study voltage instability problems in power systems during the post transient period or critical peak loads. The reactive reserve margin ob...

Smart metering of utility consumption is rapidly becoming reality for multitudes of people and households. It promises real-time measurement and adjustment of power demand which is expected to result in lower overall energy use and better load balancing. On the other hand, finely granular measurements reported by smart meters can lead to starkly increased exposure of sensitive information, incl...

Simple and rapid diagnosis of influenza is useful for making treatment decisions in the clinical setting. Although many influenza rapid diagnostic tests (IRDTs) are available for the detection of seasonal influenza virus infections, their sensitivity for other viruses, such as H5N1 viruses and the recently emerged swine origin pandemic (H1N1) 2009 virus, remains largely unknown. Here, we examin...

Parasitologic confirmation of cutaneous leishmaniasis is obligatory before chemotherapy can be considered. Direct microscopic examination of scrapings taken from indurated borders of ulcers has been routinely used as primary method of diagnosis. In this report we compared the sensitivity of examination of dermal scrapings taken from the bottoms of ulcers (BDS) with that of dermal scrapings take...

Existing estimates of the incidence of infectious intestinal disease (IID) caused by norovirus are based on electron microscopy or reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR). Neither method accurately represents norovirus disease burden: Electron microscopy has poor diagnostic sensitivity, and RT-PCR has poor diagnostic specificity. In this study, viral load measurements were used...

This paper presents a statistical type inference algorithm for ontology alignment, which assigns DBpedia entities with a new type (class). To infer types for a specific entity, the algorithm first identifies types that co-occur with the type the entity already has, and subsequently prunes the set of candidates for the most confident one. The algorithm has one parameter for balancing specificity...

Monitoring multiple biosignals, such as heart rate, respiration cycle, and weight transitions, contributes to the health management of individuals. Specifically, it is possible to measure multiple biosignals using load information obtained through contact with the environment, such as a chair and bed, in daily use. A wide-range load sensor is essential since load information contains multiple b...

In this paper, the structure and working principle of an existing linear potentiometer sensor are introduced; furthermore, circuit connection method a new bipotentiometer is proposed. The sensitivity, step error, load characteristics both studied compared. simulation results their static show that sensitivity increased, relative error greatly reduced, linearity improved. Meanwhile, measurement ...