Background. High circulating vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) levels tend to reflect tumor aggressiveness for being associated with tumor progression and prognosis. Measurement of soluble VEGF receptor-1 (sVEGFR-1) may improve diagnostic power of VEGF assay. Methods. This study investigated regulation of plasma VEGF by sVEGFR-1 in 82 patients with head and neck squamous cell carcinoma ...

D-dimer measurement is widely accepted as a diagnostic test for pulmonary embolism in cases in which a negative value has a high predictive power. We present two cases of acute thoracic aortic dissection with particularly high D-dimer values and discuss the diagnostic value of D-dimer as an initial test with suspected aortic dissection.

The development of an online turbine generator diagnostic system is described from conception to initial field verification. The system is composed of a data center located in the power plant that collects data from online measurement devices and communicates these data to a centralized diagnostic facility in Orlando, Florida, where the actual diagnosis is done. The resulting diagnosis and reco...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate performance characteristics of DSM-IV Personality Disorders (PDs) criteria. METHOD Six hundred and sixty-eight adults recruited for the Collaborative Longitudinal Personality Disorders Study (CLPS) were assessed with diagnostic interviews. RESULTS Within-category inter-relatedness was evaluated by Cronbach's alpha and median intercriterion correlations (MIC). Cronbach'...

Fluorescence spectroscopy is a promising tool for use in the diagnosis of disease in human tissue. However, few published reports have evaluated the safety of this technique, despite the fact that many spectroscopic systems use UV illumination. This study determined the relative risk associated with light exposure from spectroscopic systems compared with the traditional light sources that are u...

This paper introduces a generic distributed prognostic health management (PHM) architecture with specific application to the electrical power systems domain. Current state-of-the-art PHM systems are mostly centralized in nature, where all the processing is reliant on a single processor. This can lead to loss of functionality in case of a crash of the central processor or monitor. Furthermore, w...

Altered oscillatory brain activity in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) may reflect underlying neuropathological changes, and its characterization might lead to new diagnostic possibilities. The present study using quantitative magnetoencephalography (MEG) was set up to examine power spectrum changes in AD patients, and their diagnostic strength. Whole-head 151-channel MEG was recorded during an eyes-cl...

a major challenge as more and more different conditions have been recognised, improved diagnostic methods have developed in parallel. This paper sets out to explore a suitable investigational procedure that leaves little chance of errors. However, it has to be said that the full diagnostic investigation can require some sophisticated diagnostic equipment such as higher power ultrasonography and...

OBJECTIVE To examine the longitudinal diagnostic efficiency of the DSM-IV criteria for obsessive-compulsive personality disorder (OCPD). METHOD At baseline, criteria and diagnoses were determined using diagnostic interviews, and blinded assessments were performed 24 months later with 550 participants. Diagnostic efficiency indices (conditional probabilities, total predictive power, and kappa)...