Empyema is a severe complication of different diseases and traumas. Management of this complication is difficult and should comprise general and local procedures. The general procedure is mainly based on administering wide-spectrum antibiotics. Local management depends on patient general condition, but in all cases the essential procedure is to insert a drain into the pleural cavity and to evac...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the performance of GeneXpert for detection of mycobacterium tuberculosis in pus samples and compare its results with conventional techniques in terms of validity, rapidity and rifampicin resistance. METHODS This longitudinal, descriptive study was conducted at Jinnah Hospital, Lahore, Pakistan, from January 2012 to December 2015, and comprised pus samples of people suspe...

AIMS We aimed to study the diagnostic influence of adding a routine cardiovascular ultrasound screening of the cardiac anatomy and function, the pericardium, the pleura and the abdominal great vessels by the new pocket-size ultrasound device (pUS) with grey scale and colour Doppler imaging. METHODS AND RESULTS In 119 randomly selected patients admitted to a cardiac unit at a non-university ho...

OBJECTIVES To study the relationship between peritonsillar abscess (PTA) and minor salivary glands surrounding the palatine tonsils. STUDY DESIGN Prospective population-based study. SETTINGS Tertiary care university hospital. SUBJECTS AND METHOD Prospective study including 41 patients with PTA and 6 patients with a neck abscess. Amylase levels of the pus and serum were measured and compar...

The current staging system by the National Pressure Ulcer Advisory Panel (NPUAP) classifies the stages of pressure ulcers (PUs) based on clinical assessment and visual inspection. We postulate that patients presenting with clinically superficial PUs (Stage I and Stage II) will have a greater depth of injury than predicted. On admission, patients with sacral PUs were staged according to the NPUA...

For individuals with a spinal cord injury (SCI) who depend on a wheelchair for mobility, sitting-acquired pressure ulcers (PUs) are a common and life-endangering complication. In the short time following an SCI, pathoanatomical and pathophysiological changes that affect the weight-bearing tissues of the buttocks may increase the risk for PUs, exposing this already-at-risk population to the addi...

In Cognitive Radio Networks (CRNs), Primary Users (PUs) can share their idle spectra with Secondary Users (SUs) under certain mechanisms. In this paper, we propose a distributed-centralized and incentive-aware spectrum sharing scheme for the multiple-PU scenario, which introduces a Random Leader who is elected randomly from SUs or PUs. The distributed aspect of our scheme lies in that it requir...

Cognitive radio (CR)-based wireless mesh networks (WMNs) provide a very suitable framework for secondary users’ (SUs’) transmissions. When designing routing techniques in CR-WMNs, we need to consider the aggregate interference from the SUs to PUs. Although the interference from a single SU that is outside the PUs’ footprints is small, the aggregate interference from a great number of SUs transm...

The nonsporing anaerobes are commonly implicated as significant pathogens in human infections especially brain abscesses. Conventional laboratory diagnosis of anaerobes is time-consuming. Rapid detection of anaerobes from the clinical specimens is the need of the hour. Direct Gas Liquid Chromatography (GLC) has been reported to be useful in rapid detection of anaerobes from the clinical specime...

A 50-year-old man was admitted with a liver abscess and positive serology for Brucella spp. Liver pus and blood cultures remained sterile on conventional culture. Inoculation of liver pus onto eukaryotic cells by the centrifugation-shell vial technique yielded Brucella melitensis, identified by 16S rRNA gene amplification and sequencing.