higher) than the analytical sensitivity, allowing for acceptable clinical specificity. Furthermore, there was excellent clinical concordance between the Vitros ECi and Dade RxL cTnI assays. The cTnI values obtained with the ECi were approximately one-half of the those obtained with the RxL cTnI, probably because of the lack of antigen and antibody standardization between assays (4 ). Thus, the ...

The electron cloud instability (ECI) at PEP-II enlarges the positron beam size at high currents and reduces the luminosity. The electrons for this instability come from multipacting electrons in the straight section vacuum chambers and, perhaps, photo-emission and secondary emission of electrons from the vacuum ante-chambers in the arcs. Solenoid and transverse field magnets have been placed ov...

Documentum Enterprise Content Integration (ECI) services is a content integration middleware that provides one-query access to the Intranet and Internet content resources. The ECI Adapter technology offers an interface to any application for data and metadata extraction from unstructured Web pages. It offers a unique framework of wrapper production, automatic recovery and maintenance, developed...

T HE SENSITIVITY OF LYMPHOCYTES to irradiation provides a rationale for the use of extracorporeal irradiation (ECI ) of the circulating blood to destroy lymphocytes selectively. Since 1962, ECI has been used in various studies, including investigations of lymphocyte physiology and prolongation of allogeneic skin graft survival in calves. These studies1 established the basic feasibility and effe...

OBJECTIVE Current indices of diet quality generally include intakes of specific foods or nutrients. We sought to develop an index that discriminates healthy and unhealthy eating choices for use in large surveys as a short questionnaire and as a measure in existing studies with adequate dietary data. DESIGN The Eating Choices Index (ECI) score included four components: (i) consumption of break...

OBJECTIVES We aimed to construct widely useable summary measures of the net impact of antibiotic resistance on empiric therapy. Summary measures are needed to communicate the importance of resistance, plan and evaluate interventions, and direct policy and investment. DESIGN, SETTING AND PARTICIPANTS As an example, we retrospectively summarised the 2011 cumulative antibiogram from a Toronto ac...

To the Editor: Comparisons of the Vitros ECi thyroid-stimulating hormone (TSH) method with the AxSym (1 ), Immulite (1, 2), Elecsys (2 ), and ADVIA Centaur (2 ) have shown an unexplained progressive negative bias ,0.2 mIU/L, a phenomenon that we have also observed (Fig. 1A). To investigate the bias, we diluted the TSH International Reference Preparation 80/558 (predominately pituitary TSH) and ...

Although several studies have estimated the associations between mortality or morbidity and extreme temperatures in terms of relative risk, few studies have investigated the risk of emergency transport attributable to the whole temperature range nationwide.We acquired data on daily emergency ambulance dispatches in all 47 prefectures of Japan from 2007 to 2010. We examined the relationship betw...