OBJECTIVE To determine if time to disposition decisions for emergency department (ED) patients can be reduced when blood tests are processed using point-of-care (POC) devices and to conduct a cost-effectiveness analysis of POC compared with laboratory testing. METHODS This randomised trial enrolled adults suspected of an acute coronary syndrome or presenting with conditions considered to only...

Bidirectional communication (i.e., feedforward and feedback pathways) between functional levels is common in neural systems, but in most systems little is known regarding the function and modifiability of the feedback pathway. We are exploring this issue in the crab (Cancer borealis) stomatogastric nervous system by examining bidirectional communication between projection neurons and their targ...

BACKGROUND CD4 testing is, and will remain an important part of HIV treatment and care in low and middle income countries (LMICs). We report the findings of a systematic review assessing acceptability and feasibility of POC CD4 testing in field settings. METHODS Electronic databases were searched for studies published in English between 2005 and 2015 that describe POC CD4 platforms. Studies c...

Well-developed point-of-care (POC) cancer screening tools have the potential to provide better cancer care to patients in both developed and developing countries. However, new medical technology will not be adopted by medical providers unless it addresses a population's existing needs and end-users' preferences. The goals of our study were to assess primary care providers' level of awareness, i...

Traditional transport service is either (1) reliable and ordered (e.g., TCP) or (2) unreliable and unordered (e.g., UDP). Some new computer applications such as multimedia do not t perfectly with either of these services. Partial Order Connection (POC), a new transport-layer protocol, tries to ll the gap between (1) and (2). With POC, an application speci es a partial order (PO) for valid order...

This paper proposes a new method that reduces the computational cost of the phase-only correlation (POC)-based methods for displacement estimation in old film sequences. Conventional POC-based methods calculate all the points of the POC and only use the highest peak of the POC and its neighboring points to estimate the displacement with subpixel accuracy. Our proposed method reduces the computa...

The relationship between results from Kato-Katz (KK) fecal microscopy and urine-based point-of-care circulating cathodic antigen (POC-CCA) assays for Schistosoma mansoni infection remains a critical issue. This systematic literature review of 25 published papers compares prevalence of S. mansoni infection by KK with that by the POC-CCA assay. Nineteen published studies met our inclusion criteri...

Point-of-care (POC) CD4 testing was implemented at a stand-alone HIV voluntary testing and counseling centre in Harare, Zimbabwe. To validate the use of this new technology, paired blood samples were collected from 165 patients either by a nurse or a laboratory technician and tested using POC and conventional laboratory CD4 machines. Finger prick (capillary) blood was collected directly into th...

Early identification of chronic hepatitis B is important for optimal disease management and prevention of transmission. Cost and lack of access to commercial hepatitis B surface antigen (HBsAg) immunoassays can compromise the effectiveness of HBV screening in resource-limited settings and among marginalized populations. High-quality point-of-care (POC) testing may improve HBV diagnosis in these...

OBJECTIVES To estimate the costs and benefits of clinical pathways incorporating a point of care (POC) nucleic acid amplification test (NAAT) for chlamydia and gonorrhoea in genitourinary medicine (GUM) clinics compared with standard off-site laboratory testing. METHOD We simulated 1.2 million GUM clinic attendees in England. A simulation in Microsoft Excel was developed to compare existing s...