Search results for "SPECIFICITY"
showing 10 items of 2234 documents
A Comparison of Aspergillus and Mucorales PCR Testing of Different Bronchoalveolar Lavage Fluid Fractions from Patients with Suspected Invasive Pulmo…
2018
ABSTRACT In patients with hematological malignancies, bronchoalveolar lavage fluid (BALF) specimens are commonly used for the diagnosis of mold infections. However, it is not clear whether the cell pellet (P) or the supernatant fraction (S) of the BALF specimen is optimal for molecular diagnostic testing. Thus, 99 BALF specimens were collected from 96 hematology patients with or without allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplant. The cell pellets and supernatants were processed alone and in combination (S/P) for testing by two fungus-specific real-time PCR assays compliant with international recommendations. The results achieved with S/P were revealed to be superior in comparison to thos…
Comparison of bipolar and tetrapolar impedance techniques for assessing fat mass.
2004
Whole body fat mass (BF) can be predicted by different bioimpedance (BIA) techniques measuring the whole body (tetrapolar hand-to-foot technique, HF), lower body (bipolar foot-to-foot technique, FF), or upper body (bipolar hand-to-hand technique, HH). This study analyzed 146 healthy volunteers (age 18-84 years) for whether these three techniques differ in their estimates of BF, and whether sex and age of the subjects influence estimates of BF. Reproducibility of the techniques was tested by calculating the technical error (TE). Effects of BIA technique, sex, and age on predicted BF were analyzed with ANOVA for repeated measurements in a mixed effect design. Results showed high reproducibili…
Is sentinel lymph node biopsy more accurate than axillary dissection on staging the nodal involvement in breast cancer patients?
2007
Today evaluation of axillary involvement can be routinely performed with the technique of sentinel lymph node biopsy (SLNB). One of the greatest advantages of SLNB is the nearly total absence of local postoperative complications. It is important to understand whether SLNB is better than axillary lymph-node dissection (ALND) for staging axillary nodal involvement. The aim of the study was to evaluate the axillary staging accuracy comparing three different methods: axillary dissection, sentinel node biopsy with the traditional 4-6 sections and sentinel node biopsy with complete analysis of the lymph node. 527 consecutive patients (525 females and 2 males) with invasive breast cancer < or = 3 …
Usefulness of N-terminal pro-B-type natriuretic peptide levels in predicting residual myocardial ischemia in patients with ST elevation acute myocard…
2007
N-terminal pro-b-type natriuretic peptide (NT pro-BNP) is a neurohormone synthesized predominantly in ventricular myocardium. In patients with symptoms of heart failure, elevation in NT pro-BNP accurately identifies ventricular dysfunction. However, NT pro-BNP levels are not specific for ventricular dysfunction in patients who do not have overt symptoms of heart failure, suggesting that other cardiac processes such as myocardial ischemia may also cause elevation in NT pro-BNP. The study was aimed to determine whether NT pro-BNP elevations are associated with myocardial ischemia.One hundred and thirty patients (104 males, 26 females, mean age 61+12 years), with ST elevation acute myocardial …
Lithiasic obstructive uropathy. Hydronephrosis characterization by magnetic resonance pyelography.
2004
The purpose of this study was to evaluate the role of magnetic resonance (MR) pyelography in patients affected by hydronephrosis due to ureteric stones, in order to identify a pyonephrotic condition.In the last 3 years, 315 patients, who had originally been investigated by ultrasonography, were evaluated with MR pyelography in order to define the etiology of obstruction. In 67 patients hydronephrosis was referred as caused by lithiasis.MR pyelography not only confirmed urinary tract dilatation in all patients, but also identified grade and site of obstruction, both in acute dilatation (25 patients) and in chronic obstructions (42 patients). In 7 patients, MR pyelography documented pyonephro…
Diagnostic performance of 2D-shear wave elastography in the diagnosis of breast cancer: a clinical appraisal of cutoff values
2022
Purpose To assess the role of 2D-shear wave elastography (2D-SWE) in differentiating benign from malignant focal breast lesions (FBLs), providing new vendor-specific cutoff values. Methods 158 FBLs (size: 3.5-50 mm) detected in 151 women (age: 21-87 years) were prospectively evaluated by means 2D-SWE. For each lesion, an expert radiologist assessed US BI-RADS category and calculated the following four 2D-SWE parameters: (1) elasticity maximum (E-max); (2) mean elasticity (E-mean); (3) minimum elasticity (E-min); (4) elasticity ratio (E-ratio). US-guided core-biopsy was considered as standard of reference for all the FBLs classified as BI-RADS 4 or 5. For each 2D-SWE parameter, the optimal c…
Human liver cytosolic epoxide hydrolases.
1988
Human liver epoxide hydrolases were characterized by several criteria and a cytosolic cis-stilbene oxide hydrolase (cEHcso) was purified to apparent homogeneity. Styrene oxide and five phenylmethyloxiranes were tested as substrates for human liver epoxide hydrolases. With microsomes activity was highest with trans-2-methylstyrene oxide, followed by styrene 7, 8-oxide, cis-2-With methylstyrene oxide, cis-1,2-dimethylstyrene oxide, trans-1, 2-dimethylstyrene oxide and 2, 2-dimethylstyrene oxide. With cytosol the same order was obtained for the first three substrates, whereas activity with 2, 2-dimethylstyrene oxide was higher than with cis-1,2-dimethylstyrene oxide and no hydrolysis occurred …
Multicenter prospective study of concordance between embryonic cell-free DNA and trophectoderm biopsies from 1301 human blastocysts
2020
Background The recent identification of embryonic cell-free DNA in spent blastocyst media has opened a new era of possibilities for noninvasive embryo aneuploidy testing in assisted reproductive technologies. Yet, previous studies assessing a limited number of embryos reported variable concordance between embryonic cell-free DNA and trophectoderm biopsies, thus questioning the validity of this approach. Objective This study aimed to evaluate the concordance and reproducibility of testing embryonic cell-free DNA vs trophectoderm DNA obtained from the same embryo in a large sample of human blastocysts and to assess the contribution of the inner cell mass and trophectoderm to embryonic cell-fr…
False positive rate of an arrayCGH platform for single-cell preimplantation genetic screening and subsequent clinical application on day-3
2013
In this work, false positive rate of an arrayCGH platform for its use in day-3 single-blastomere analysis was calculated. For this purpose, 38 embryos diagnosed as abnormal on day-3 by FISH were re-biopsied on day-4. Single-cell day-4 arrayCGH diagnosis was then performed. A successful amplification was obtained in 97.4 % (37/38) of the day-4 cells analysed by arrayCGH. Day-3 FISH and day-4 arrayCGH diagnosis were concordant in 35/37 cases. The two discordant embryos were spread and all the cells from each embryo were re-analysed by FISH on day 5. The same error rate (2.7 %) for day-3 FISH and day-4 arrayCGH was obtained when comparing day-5 FISH re-analysis. After this pre-clinical phase, …
Professional continuous glucose monitoring in subjects with type 1 diabetes: retrospective hypoglycemia detection.
2013
Background: An important task in diabetes management is detection of hypoglycemia. Professional continuous glucose monitoring (CGM), which produces a glucose reading every 5 min, is a powerful tool for retrospective identification of unrecognized hypoglycemia. Unfortunately, CGM devices tend to be inaccurate, especially in the hypoglycemic range, which limits their applicability for hypoglycemia detection. The objective of this study was to develop an automated pattern recognition algorithm to detect hypoglycemic events in retrospective, professional CGM. Method: Continuous glucose monitoring and plasma glucose (PG) readings were obtained from 17 data sets of 10 type 1 diabetes patients und…