BACKGROUND Poor quality dried blood spot (DBS) specimens are usually rejected by virology laboratories, affecting early infant diagnosis of HIV. The practice of combining two incompletely-filled DBS in one specimen preparation tube during pre-analytical specimen processing (i.e., the two-spot method) has been implemented to reduce the number of specimens being rejected for insufficient volume. ...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Standard (static) CT angiography is used to identify the intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH) spot sign. We used dynamic CT-angiography to describe spot sign characteristics and measurement parameters over 60-seconds of image acquisition. METHODS We prospectively identified consecutive patients presenting with acute ICH within 4.5 hours of symptom onset, and collected whole b...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE The computed tomography angiography (CTA) spot sign is a validated predictor of hematoma expansion and poor outcome in supratentorial intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH), but patients with brainstem ICH have typically been excluded from the analyses. We investigated the frequency of spot sign and its relationship with hematoma expansion and outcome in patients with primary pon...

objective: one complication of fixed orthodontic treatment in patients with poor oral hygiene is development of demineralized enamel lesions compromising esthetics. this study aimed to review preventive measures and treatment of white spot lesions (wsls) in patients with fixed orthodontic appliances. review of literature: in this review study, pubmed and google scholar databases were searched f...

futures contract is one of the most important derivatives that is used in financial markets in all over the world to buy or sell an asset or commodity in the future. pricing of this tool depends on expected price of asset or commodity at the maturity date. according to this, theoretical futures pricing models try to find this expected price in order to use in the futures contract. so in this ar...

in the years 2012-14 a series of extensive surveys for natural enemies of parthenium were conducted in haryana. during survey, a leaf spot disease has been regularly reported on congress grass at different parts of the kurukshetra and its adjoining areas.the fungal pathogen was isolated from the affected parts of parthenium leaves and on the basis of cultural, morphological and molecular charac...

hot spots are among the most serious operational issues in furnaces as they may result in the destruction of tubes. hence, it is essential to locate such hot spots precisely on the tube surfaces inside the industrial furnaces in order to secure a safe design and operation. in the current study, we have extended the model proposed by talmor in order to precisely locate the combustion hot spots o...

The stringent response is a regulatory system that allows bacteria to sense and adapt to nutrient-poor environments. The central mediator of the stringent response is the molecule guanosine 3',5'-bispyrophosphate (ppGpp), which is synthesized by the enzymes RelA and SpoT and which is also degraded by SpoT. Our laboratory previously demonstrated that a relA mutant of Pseudomonas aeruginosa, the ...

PURPOSE Meaningful errors in photocoagulation spot size may result from several factors. In this article we discuss one major factor, namely, fluctuations in the surgeon's accommodative state, coupled with an inaccurate setting of the slit-lamp oculars. DESIGN Experimental study. METHODS We analyzed and tested the optics of slit-lamp mounted lasers. Varying the ocular setting is correlated ...

MOTIVATION The numerical values of gene expression measured using microarrays are usually presented to the biological end-user as summary statistics of spot pixel data, such as the spot mean, median and mode. Much of the subsequent data analysis reported in the literature, however, uses only one of these spot statistics. This results in sub-optimal estimates of gene expression levels and a need...