Impacts of individual behavior on personal exposure to particulate matter (PM) and the associated individual health effects are still not well understood. As outdoor PM concentrations exhibit highly temporal and spatial variations, personal PM exposure depends strongly on individual trajectories and …

The Gallery at Penn College is dedicated to promoting art appreciation through exhibitions of contemporary art and accompanying programs.

A successful pilot study of a videoconferenced multidisciplinary genitourinary tumor board involving 21 physicians over six geographic sites for a 6-month period is reported. The majority of cases presented at the tumor board were of prostate or bladder origin. Specific recommendations around manage …

Objective: To determine diagnostic performance of serum PCT-Q (BRAHMS procalcitonin commercial kit) for bacterial lower respiratory tract infection among COPD patient with exacerbation. Material and methods: Prospective study was conducted in 40 hospitalized COPD patients with exacerbation between June 2008 and January 2009. Patient clinical profiles including the presence of infiltrate on chest roentgenogram, leukocytosis, positive sputum culture for bacteria and clinical outcome (mortality, length of stay and mechanical ventilation requirement) were determined. Serum procalcitonin concentration was measured by both PCT-Q commercial kits and standard quantitative assay on the first day of admission. Result: The diagnostic yield of PCT-Q for pneumonic exacerbation (the presence of pulmonary infiltrate) exhibits sensitivity and specificity of 100% and 71.9% whereas the test exhibits 50.0% sensitivity and 73.3% specificity for the presence of leukocytosis. However, positive PCT-Q provides 40.9 % sensitivity and 50.0%specificity for determining bacterial causes of exacerbation (defined by bacterial culture positivity in sputum). There is no significant correlation between positive PCT-Q and the mechanical ventilator requirement (p=0.864) as well as an average length of stay (p=0.139). The correlation between the positive PCT-Q and positive standard serum assay is noted. Conclusion: PCT-Q can be used as biomarker for pneumonic exacerbation in COPD patients whereas the PCT-Q level is poorly correlated with the clinical outcome. In addition, correlation of kits and standard assay is noted. However, the benefit of PCT-Q is shorter turnaround time.

The effect of land cover change, from natural to anthropogenic, on physical geography conditions has been studied in Kayisdagi Mountain. Land degradation is the most important environmental issue involved in this study. Most forms of land degradation are natural processes accelerated by human activi …

While provisional patent applications are never published and cannot become prior art, recent decisions from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit illustrate that parties can nonetheless m...

This paper, the first of three, examines previous research undertaken in the area of self-administration of medicines and the reuse of patients' own medicine in hospital. Advantages of such schemes are discussed, and the Working Together with Medicines project, undertaken at Queens Medical Centre, N …

This patent search tool allows you not only to search the PCT database of about 2 million International Applications but also the worldwide patent collections. This search facility features: flexible search syntax; automatic word stemming and relevance ranking; as well as graphical results.

We describe a pilot project to standardize local laboratory test names to Logical Observation Identifier Names and Codes (LOINC) at five Indian Health Service (IHS) medical facilities. An automated mapping tool was developed to assign LOINC codes. The laboratory test names not mapped to LOINC by the …

In this paper a method to determine the cycle time for sequencing batch membrane bioreactors (SBMBRs) is introduced. One of the advantages of SBMBRs is the simplicity of adapting them to varying wastewater composition. The benefit of this flexibility can only be fully utilised if the cycle times are …

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A pilot study was conducted to evaluate the performance of the MetaMap Transfer (MMTx), a tool that extracts terms from free text and suggests matches to concepts in the Unified Medical Language System' (UMLS'). Five participants, including a content domain expert and a UMLS Expert, manually extract …

Participatory design includes engaging in large-scale information-systems development where participatory design approaches have been applied throughout design and organizational implementation. The keynote suggest to extend the iterative prototyping approach by (1) emphasizing participatory design …

Tumoural angioneogenesis and its quantification are important in predicting the tumour grade and in the management with respect to the treatment available and to assess the response to treatment and the prognosis. It also plays major role in the growth ...

Listeners were presented with two simultaneous tones of different frequencies (more than one octave apart) and asked to identify the tone that was amplitude-modulated while a tonal precursor was presented to cue the frequency of the lower frequency tone. Performance thresholds were estimated based o …

This paper aims at clarifying the effect of ozone on the RAS solids to model activated sludge systems equipped with RAS-ozonation processes for the reduction of sludge production. A common hypothesis is that ozone only affects active biomass by promoting cryptic growth. Data from a pilot-scale study …

Fred C. Zacharias, The Politics of Torts, The Yale Law Journal, Vol. 95, No. 4 (Mar., 1986), pp. 698-753

Investigations proceed as an iterative and recursive learning process, involving a sequence of experiments. Evaluating the results from a prior set of experiments allows the investigator to design and predict the next experimental cycle better. The investigator looks at what has gone before with a v …

Technegas (TcG) was produced using a commercially available TcG generator. The structure and size distribution of TcG particles were examined by means of the following methods: (a) transmission electron microscopy (TEM), range: 1 nm-100 microns; (b) time-of-flight mass spectroscopy (MS), range: < …

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A Monte Carlo simulation was conducted to compare 9 pairwise multiple comparison procedures. Procedures were evaluated on the basis of any-pair power and all-pairs power. No procedure was found to be uniformly most powerful. A modification due to A. J. Hayter (1986) of Fisher's least significant dif …