Background: Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a degenerative inflammatory disease which is most commonly diagnosed by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). But, since the MRI device uses of a magnetic field, if there are metal objects in the patient's body, it can disrupt the health of the patient, the functioning of the MRI, and distortion in the images. Due to limitations of using MRI device, screening ...

OBJECTIVE To develop optimal search strategies in Medline for retrieving sound clinical studies on the diagnosis of health disorders. DESIGN Analytical survey. SETTING Medline, 2000. PARTICIPANTS 170 journals for 2000 of which 161 were indexed in Medline. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES The sensitivity, specificity, precision ("positive predictive value"), and accuracy of 4862 unique terms in 17,...

A new immunochromatographic rapid test, POC PUUMALA (Erilab Ltd., Kuopio, Finland), for detection of acute-phase Puumala virus (PUUV) infection was developed based on a highly purified baculovirus-expressed PUUV nucleocapsid protein antigen and lateral immunodiffusion techniques. After addition of sample (5 microl of serum, plasma, or fingertip blood) and buffer, PUUV-specific immunoglobulin M ...

Zygomycete infections can be devastating in immunocompromised hosts. Difficulties in the histopathologic differentiation of this class from other filamentous fungi (e.g., Aspergillus spp., Fusarium spp.) may lead to delays in diagnosis and initiation of appropriate treatment, thereby significantly affecting patient outcome. A real-time PCR assay was developed to detect species of the zygomycete...

OBJECTIVE To develop optimal search strategies in Medline for retrieving systematic reviews. DESIGN Analytical survey. DATA SOURCES 161 journals published in 2000 indexed in Medline. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES The sensitivity, specificity, and precision of retrieval of systematic reviews of 4862 unique terms in 782,485 combinations of one to five terms were determined by comparison with a hand...

aptamers define a new interesting class of receptor molecules with capability of binding to potentially any kind of molecules of interest. structurally, they are composed of nucleic acids (rna, dna or a mixture of both) with high specificity and affinity to amino acids, drugs, proteins and other molecules. apatmers are isolated from complex libraries of synthetic nucleic acids against the desir...

the use of noninvasive assessment tools such as multi-slice ct coronary angiography (msct-ca-ca) is recently considered mainly because it offers safety, patient convenience, and faster performance. the aim of the present study was to determine the ability of msct-ca-ca for the detection of significant stenoses in the coronary arteries, in comparison to conventional invasive coronary angiography...

background identification of a normal range for biomarkers, based on pregnancy outcomes (caused by their high or low values) is of special importance in clinical studies. as some pregnancy outcomes can happen in both high and low levels of biomarkers, the receiver-operating characteristic (roc) curve is unsuitable for identifying these levels separately; rather, a statistical method is preferab...