Search results for "TOOL"
showing 10 items of 821 documents
Tracking zoonotic pathogens using blood-sucking flies as 'flying syringes'
2017
About 60% of emerging infectious diseases in humans are of zoonotic origin. Their increasing number requires the development of new methods for early detection and monitoring of infectious agents in wildlife. Here, we investigated whether blood meals from hematophagous flies could be used to identify the infectious agents circulating in wild vertebrates. To this aim, 1230 blood-engorged flies were caught in the forests of Gabon. Identified blood meals (30%) were from 20 vertebrate species including mammals, birds and reptiles. Among them, 9% were infected by different extant malaria parasites among which some belonged to known parasite species, others to new parasite species or to parasite …
Effect of plant sterol and galactooligosaccharides enriched beverages on oxidative stress and longevity in Caenorhabditis elegans
2020
Abstract This study evaluates the impact of two plant sterol (PS) enriched fruit beverages (0.6 g /100 ml), without (MfB) or with GOS (MfB-G) (1.2 g/100 ml) on the resistance against oxidative stress induced by non-conventional (cholesterol oxidation products (COPs)) and conventional (H2O2) oxidant compounds, as well as their impact on C. elegans longevity. Nematodes fed with both beverages (0.005–0.25%, v/v) showed similar improved oxidative stress resistance against COPs and H2O2. This effect was dependent on daf-16 transcription factor, although GOS showed an additional beneficial effect independent to daf-16. In addition, both beverages extended nematode lifespan, independently of the p…
Field performance of HBsAg rapid diagnostic tests in rural Ethiopia.
2020
Abstract Point-of-care rapid diagnostic tests (POC-RDTs) are widely used to screen and diagnose hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection and are often the only available diagnostic tools in resource-limited settings. The aim of this study was to evaluate the validity of three hepatitis B surface antigen (HBsAg) POC-RDTs (Healgen®, Advanced Quality™ and Determine™) in an area with high prevalence of HBV in eastern Ethiopia. Results were compared with a commercial enzyme linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) as gold standard. Quantification of HBsAg was performed in false negative samples. A total of 511 subjects were screened, of whom 81 (15.9 %) were HBsAg-positive with the gold standard. All three P…
Vacuolated PAS-Positive Lymphocytes on Blood Smear: An Easy Screening Tool and a Possible Biomarker for Monitoring Therapeutic Responses in Late Onse…
2018
Background: Primary aim was to investigate the diagnostic value of PAS-positive vacuolated lymphocytes on blood smear in Late Onset Pompe Disease (LOPD) patients and, secondly, to evaluate its potential utility in monitoring treatment effects.Methods: We examined blood smear of 26 LOPD patients. We evaluated 10 treated and 16 untreated LOPD patients. Among the latter group, 7 patients later initiated ERT and were tested again 6 months after start. Blood smear was also sampled from 82 controls and 19 patients with other muscle glycogenoses (MGSDs). PAS staining was used to evaluate: (1) presence of lymphocytes with glycogen-filled vacuoles, (2) quantification of vacuolated lymphocytes.Result…
Relative validity of a short food frequency questionnaire assessing adherence to the Norwegian dietary guidelines among colorectal cancer patients
2018
Background: The Norwegian food-based dietary guidelines (FBDG) aim at reducing the risk of developing chronic diseases and promote overall health. We studied the effect of the Norwegian FBDG in colorectal cancer (CRC) patients. There is a need for a time-efficient dietary assessment tool measuring adherence to these guidelines in patients treated for dietary dependent cancer, such as CRC patients. Objective: To evaluate a new short food frequency questionnaire (NORDIET-FFQ), developed to estimate adherence to the Norwegian FBDG among CRC patients. Design: Eighty-one CRC patients from both study groups in the Norwegian Dietary Guidelines and Colorectal Cancer Survival study, an ongoing dieta…
Visualizing Human Protein‐Protein Interactions and Subcellular Localizations on Cell Images Through CellMap
2020
Visualizing protein data remains a challenging and stimulating task. Useful and intuitive visualization tools may help advance biomolecular and medical research; unintuitive tools may bar important breakthroughs. This protocol describes two use cases for the CellMap (http://cellmap.protein.properties) web tool. The tool allows researchers to visualize human protein-protein interaction data constrained by protein subcellular localizations. In the simplest form, proteins are visualized on cell images that also show protein-protein interactions (PPIs) through lines (edges) connecting the proteins across the compartments. At a glance, this simultaneously highlights spatial constraints that prot…
Integrating risk management tools for regional forest planning: an interactive multiobjective value-at-risk approach
2018
In this paper, we present an approach employing multiobjective optimization to support decision making in forest management planning under risk. The primary objectives are biodiversity and timber cash flow, evaluated from two perspectives: the expected value and the value-at-risk (VaR). In addition, the risk level for both the timber cash flow and biodiversity values are included as objectives. With our approach, we highlight the trade-off between the expected value and the VaR, as well as between the VaRs of the two objectives of interest. We employ an interactive method in which a decision maker iteratively provides preference information to find the most preferred management plan and le…
Discordances in Ascriptions of Agency and Reflectivity in the First Psychotherapy Session
2018
We analyzed the first sessions of nine long-term individual psychotherapies with a model of ten discursive tools of agency ascription and studied discursive discordances, sequences of two talk turns in which the therapeutic dyad was misaligned in terms of how they ascribed agency to the client. We also studied how the clients’ agency self-ascriptions in the turn immediately following the discordances changed from the first turn. Classifying these discordance sequences, eight different types of sequences were found. One, in which the clients’ reflective agency constructions were missed by the therapists, was subjected to a detailed analysis. peerReviewed
A Brief History of Sexual Offender Risk Assessment
2016
The assessment of risk of further offending behavior by adult sexual perpetrators has come a long way since the early 1900s. From risk estimations based on clinical observation and environmental changes in the 1920s, anthropological and longitudinal studies of juvenile offenders in the 1930s, the examination of psychoneurotic patients in the 1940s to the application of actuarial prediction to clinical assessment in the 1950s, researchers and practitioners have sought to identify valid and reliable measures of recidivism risk in sexual offenders. The emphasis in risk prediction slowly changed following Meehl’s (1954) seminal contributions to the clinical-statistical debate which introduced t…
Fatigue Monitoring Tool for Airline Operators (FMT)
2017
Abstract A Fatigue Monitoring Tool (FMT) model was constructed for an operational airline in order to manage the fatigue levels of their crews in accordance with Fatigue Risk Management System (FRMS) practices. This article describes the implementation of the Fatigue Monitoring Tool model and the airline’s aims to put the recent scientific findings on aviation fatigue into practical use. The model consists of proxy points allotted to various duties and rest periods.