BACKGROUND Sputum culture is the gold standard for diagnosis of pulmonary tuberculosis (PTB). Although mostly used for research, culture is recommended by the World Health Organization for TB diagnosis among HIV infected smear negative PTB suspects. Even then, the number of sputum samples required remains unspecified. Here, we determined the Incremental Yield (IY) and number of samples required...

OBJECTIVE To compare the accuracy of the amplified Mycobacterium tuberculosis direct (AMTD) test with reference methods for the laboratory diagnosis of tuberculosis in HIV-infected patients. METHODS This was a study of diagnostic accuracy comparing AMTD test results with those obtained by culture on Löwenstein-Jensen (LJ) medium and by the BACTEC Mycobacteria Growth Indicator Tube 960 (BACTEC...

The reliability of the Mycobacteria Growth Indicator Tube (MGIT) 960 system for rapid detection of mycobacteria in clinical specimens was evaluated and compared to the radiometric method (BACTEC 460TB) and to mycobacterial culture on Lowenstein-Jensen (LJ) medium. Clinical specimens (n = 590) were tested without selection. A total of 121 (20.5%) isolates of mycobacteria were recovered; 98 (81.0...

We develop force field parameters for the divalent cations Mg(2+), Ca(2+), Sr(2+), and Ba(2+) for molecular dynamics simulations with the simple point charge-extended (SPC/E) water model. We follow an approach introduced recently for the optimization of monovalent ions, based on the simultaneous optimization of single-ion and ion-pair properties. We consider the solvation free energy of the div...

In this work, using extensive molecular dynamics simulations of several thermophysical properties, it is proposed to analyze possible relationships (in the corresponding state sense) between monoatomic fluids for which the repulsive interactions are modeled by an inverse n-power form, the Lennard-Jones 12-6 (LJ), or by an exponential one, the exponential-6 (Exp-6). To compare results between th...

The logics treated here are the intermediate propositional logics of the form LJ + Ni(a), where Ni(a)’s are axioms of only one variable studied in Nishimura [6]. As is easily seen, the problem of the disjunction property of LJ+Ni(a) starts from i = 10 and the case of odd i can be trivially neglected. The case of i = 10 was solved by Kreisel and Putnam [5] and other cases except i = 14 were solv...

BACKGROUND Molecular genotyping methods have shown infection with more than one Mycobacterium tuberculosis strain genotype in a single sputum culture, indicating mixed infection. AIM This study aimed to develop a PCR-based genotyping tool to determine the population structure of M. tuberculosis strain genotypes in primary Mycobacterial Growth Indicator Tubes (MGIT) and Löwenstein-Jensen (LJ) ...

The average conformation of a flexible chain molecule in solution is coupled to the local solvent structure. In a dense solvent, local chain structure often mirrors the pure solvent structure, whereas, in a dilute solvent, the chain can strongly perturb the solvent structure which, in turn, can lead to either chain expansion or compression. Here we use Monte Carlo (MC) simulation to study such ...

This lecture gives a combinatorial market mechanism that is always efficient, budget-balanced, ex post individual rational and ‘almost’ dominant strategy incentive compatible in the complete information case. In the incomplete information case, it is budget-balanced, ex post individual rational and asymptotically efficient and Bayesian incentive compatible. I. THE COMBINATORIAL SELLERS’ BID DOU...

In this work, the local pressure of fluids confined inside nanoslit pores is predicted within the framework of the density functional theory. The Euler-Lagrange equation in the density functional theory of statistical mechanics is used to obtain the force balance equation which leads to a general equation to predict the local normal component of the pressure tensor. Our approach yields a genera...