BACKGROUND Genechip (CapitalBio, Beijing, China) is a system for diagnosing resistance to rifampin and isoniazid, which shows high efficiency in detecting drug-resistant tuberculosis. Here, we firstly evaluated the costs of Genechip for detecting the drug susceptibility of Mycobacterium tuberculosis, compared to conventional drug susceptibility test (DST) in laboratories in China. METHODOLOGY...

The purpose of this study was to explore the impact of Digital storytelling (DST) on the academic achievement, critical thinking, and learning motivation of senior high school students learning English as a foreign language. The one-year study adopted a pretest and posttest quasi-experimental design involving 110 10th grade students in two English classes. The independent variable was informati...

One-hundred-nine HLA-haploidentical living related renal transplants have been retrospectively analysed to compare the effect of donor-specific blood transfusion (DST) and different immunosuppressive regimens on graft survival and acute rejection. The recipients were divided into four groups according to the immunosuppressive therapy. Group 1 (n = 44): conventional therapy with posttransplant a...

BACKGROUND Reducing medication turnaround time can improve efficiency, patient safety, and quality of care in the hospital setting. Digital scanning technology (DST) can be used to electronically transmit scanned prescriber orders to a pharmacy computer queue for verification and processing, which may help to improve medication turnaround time. OBJECTIVES To evaluate medication turnaround tim...

We report here an effort to use molecular dynamics/free energy perturbation methodology to calculate relative binding affinities of two related drugs to DNA. Specifically, we focus on the relative binding free energies of distamycin (Dst) and its analog, 2-imidazoledistamycin (2-ImD), to d(CGCAAGTTGGC).d(GCCAACTTGCG). The pyrrole (Dst) and the imidazole variant (2-ImD) differ only in that the C...

BACKGROUND Important methodological questions still exist concerning the Dexamethasone Suppression Test (DST), including the possibility of a better way of interpreting it. The aim of the present study was to explore the feasibility of an alternative way of interpreting DST results. METHODS A total of 50 patients with major depression aged 41.0 +/- 11.4 years old participated in the study. Pa...

A new three node triangular plate element, labeled here as DST-S6 (Discrete Shear Triangular element with 6 extra Shear degrees of freedom), is proposed for the analyses of plate/shell structures comprising of thin or thick members. The formulation is based on the DKT (Discrete Kirchhoff Technique) and an appropriate use of the independent shear DOF(Degrees Of Freedom). The shear locking is com...

INTRODUCTION Extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB) represents an emerging public health problem worldwide. According to the World Health Organization, an estimated 9.7% of multidrug-resistant TB (MDR-TB) cases are defined as XDR-TB globally. The objective of this study was to determine the prevalence of drug resistance to second-line TB drugs among MDR-TB cases detected in the Fourth...

DS/AHP is a technique for multi-criteria decision making (MCDM), based on the Dempster-Shafer Theory of evidence (DST) and the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). Since its introduction it has been developed and applied by a number of authors, as well as form the foundation for other DST related MCDM techniques. This paper reviews the evolution and impact of DS/AHP, culminating in a critical pers...

Establishing an appropriate semantic overlay on Peer-to-Peer networks to obtain both semantic ability and scalability is a challenge. Current DHT-based P2P networks are limited in their ability to support semantic search. This paper proposes the DST (Distributed Suffix Tree) overlay as the intermediate layer between the DHT overlay and the semantic overlay. The DST overlay supports search of ke...