BACKGROUND Little evidence exists to guide the selection of methods for teaching clinical diagnosis. PURPOSE To compare the efficacy, student preference, and cost of a Web-based (WB) program versus a standardized patient (SP) encounter for teaching clinical diagnosis skills to 2nd-year medical students. METHODS Randomized, controlled, crossover study comparing WB versus SP-based teaching fo...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Serodiagnosis of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection typically requires repeatedly reactive positive screening test followed by Western blot (WB) assay. When WB assay result is indeterminate, the results of follow-up WB assay may remain inconclusive. This study evaluated use of enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) and particle agglutination test (PAT) as seq...

BACKGROUND The clinical diagnosis of meningococcal disease (MCD) can be difficult. Non-culture methods like the previous ELISA meningococcal PCR improved case confirmation rates, but were not ideal. A Taqman meningococcal PCR, using DNA extracted from serum (S-Taqman), which has an improved sensitivity compared to the ELISA method in vitro, was introduced into clinical practice in July 1997. A ...

High-intensity (resistance) exercise (HIT) and whole-body electromyostimulation (WB-EMS) are both approaches to realize time-efficient favorable changes of body composition and strength. The purpose of this study was to determine the effectiveness of WB-EMS compared with the gold standard reference HIT, for improving body composition and muscle strength in middle-aged men. Forty-eight healthy u...

BACKGROUND Measuring hepatitis C virus (HCV) RNA in serum or plasma may underestimate the true HCV burden. Extracting viral RNA from whole blood (WB) with a cationic surfactant (Catrimox-14) has resulted in HCV RNA concentrations up to 1000-fold higher than from serum or plasma in some studies, but not others. We compared the Catrimox-14 WB assay with a standard serum assay. METHODS Seventy-t...

In this study, Glucoamylase production by Aspergillus Niger was investigated under solid state conditions with low cost by-products of agricultural processes as substrate. Highest enzyme production was observed when a combination of wheat bran (WB) and corn flour (CF) was used as compared to WB+ rice bran, WB+ rice flour and WB alone. Different additions of (CF) were tested and WB+ 10% CF showe...

This paper focuses on the contribution of digital government (DGOV) to Whistleblowing (WB). While considerable efforts have been devoted to DGOV and WB separately, research work at the intersection of these two domains is very scarce; hence and a systematic DGOV for WB (DGOV4WB) research framework has yet to emerge. This paper aims to identify the potential issues in whistleblowing and explore ...

Two predictive models were developed within a geographic information system using Genetic Algorithm Rule-Set Prediction (GARP) and the growing degree day (GDD)-water budget (WB) concept to predict the distribution and potential risk of visceral leishmaniasis (VL) in the State of Bahia, Brazil. The objective was to define the environmental suitability of the disease as well as to obtain a deeper...

the effect of different levels of wood betony (wb), stachys lavandulifolia extract, as complement in feed, on the performance of common carp, cyprinus carpio was evaluated. the fish (44±0.62 g) was assigned to four treatments, three replicates each. the fish was fed on normal diet with no wb (control) vs. diet containing 2, 4 and 8% of wb extract. fish were successively fed on the diet, 2% live...

We report on two listening tests to determine the speech quality of different wideband (WB) speech codecs. In the first test, we have studied various network conditions, including WB–WB and WB–narrowband (WB– NB) tandeming, packet loss, and background noise. In addition to other findings, this test showed some codec quality rank-order changes when compared to the literature. To evaluate the hyp...