objectives microscopy of giemsa-stained thick and thin peripheral blood smear (pbs) remains as the standard laboratory method for the diagnosis of symptomatic malaria. this study was done to compare pbs with polymerase chain reaction (pcr) method for detecting asymptomatic malaria parasitemia. patients and method blood samples were collected from 900 asymptomatic school children between 7-11 ye...

BACKGROUND: Fractionated plasma metanephrine measurements are commonly used in biochemical testing in search of pheochromocytoma. METHODS: We aimed to critically appraise the diagnostic efficacy of fractionated plasma free metanephrine measurements in detecting pheochromocytoma. Nine electronic databases, meeting abstracts, and the Science Citation Index were searched and supplemented with prev...

BACKGROUND Proteinuria is recognized as an independent risk factor for cardiovascular and renal disease and as a predictor of end organ damage. The reference test, a 24-h urine protein estimation, is known to be unreliable. A random urine protein:creatinine ratio has been shown to correlate with a 24-h estimation, but it is not clear whether it can be used to reliably predict the presence of si...

We propose an approach to multiple-instance learning that reformulates the problem as a convex optimization on the likelihood ratio between the positive and the negative class for each training instance. This is casted as joint estimation of both a likelihood ratio predictor and the target (likelihood ratio variable) for instances. Theoretically, we prove a quantitative relationship between the...

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BACKGROUND Infective endocarditis (IE) is a diagnostic challenge. We aimed to systemically summarize the current evidence on the diagnostic value of procalcitonin (PCT) in identifying IE. METHODS We searched EMBASE, MEDLINE, Cochrane database, and reference lists of relevant articles with no language restrictions through September 2012 and selected studies that reported the diagnostic perform...

BACKGROUND Likelihood ratios offer important advantages over sensitivity and specificity for characterizing diagnostic tests. They can capture the magnitude of abnormality of test results, whereas sensitivity and specificity require that the test results be dichotomized into positive or negative. This is an important advantage because many diagnostic tests are measured on continuous or ordinal ...