BACKGROUND The diagnosis of sepsis remains a clinical challenge. Many studies suggest that presepsin plays a role in diagnosing sepsis, but the results remain controversial. This study aimed to identify the overall diagnostic accuracy of presepsin for sepsis through meta-analysis. METHODS A systematic literature search was performed in PubMed and EMBASE to identify studies evaluating the diag...

The aim of this meta-analysis was to estimate the diagnostic performance of shear wave elastography (SWE) in differentiating malignant from benign breast lesions. A literature search of PubMed, Web of Science and Scopus up to November 2014 was conducted. A summary receiver operating characteristic curve was constructed, and pooled weighted estimates of sensitivity and specificity were calculate...

introduction: doing chest x ray (cxr) for all trauma patients is not efficient and cost effective due to its low diagnostic value. the present study was designed aiming to evaluate the diagnostic accuracy of thoracic injury rule out criteria (tirc) in prediction of traumatic intra-thoracic injuries and need for cxr.  method: the present study is a prospective cross-sectional study that has been...

background: edinburgh postnatal depression scale (epds) has been used as a reliable screening tool for postpartum depression in many countries. this study aimed to assess the psychometric properties and diagnostic accuracy of the epds in a sample of iranian women. methods: using stratified sampling 262 postpartum women (2 weeks-3 months after delivery) were selected from urban and rural health ...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE The pattern of contrast leakage from DSC tissue signal intensity time curves have shown utility in distinguishing adult brain neoplasms, but has limited description in the literature for pediatric brain tumors. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the utility of grading pediatric brain tumors with this technique. MATERIALS AND METHODS A retrospective review of tissu...

OBJECTIVE To ascertain whether three-dimensional geometric and probabilistic reasoning methods can be successfully combined for computer-based assessment of conditions arising from ballistic penetrating trauma to the chest and abdomen. DESIGN The authors created a computer system (TraumaSCAN) that integrates three-dimensional geometric reasoning about anatomic likelihood of injury with probab...

Isobologram and combination index (CI) analyses are the two most popular methods for evaluating drug interactions in combination cancer chemotherapy. As the commonly used CI-based software program uses linear regression, our first objective was to evaluate the effects of logarithmic data transformation on data analysis and conclusions. Monte-Carlo simulations were conducted with experimentally ...

The potential value of N-terminal pro-brain natriuretic peptide (NT-proBNP) for contrast-induced acute kidney injury (CI-AKI) in patients with heart failure and mid-range ejection fraction (HFmrEF) is unclear. We investigated whether NT-proBNP is associated with CI-AKI and long-term mortality following elective cardiac catheterization in patients with HFmrEF.A total of 174 consecutive patients ...