Purpose The prevalence of periprosthetic joint infection (PJI) has increased with the increasing incidence of arthroplasty surgery. Considering identification of causative microorganisms is crucial for treatment of PJI, culture-negative (CN) PJI is a significant clinical issue. The purpose of the present study is to describe epidemiology, diagnosis and treatment of CN PJI based on review of the...

Ocular or choroidal nevus (CN) is a rare benign neoplastic lesion of the eye. The cause of CN onset/progression, which arises from the transformation of ocular melanocytes, is not known. A fraction of CN patients may develop uveal melanoma. The objective of this study was to investigate the association between CN and BK polyomavirus (BKPyV), a small DNA tumor virus. Serum IgG antibodies which r...

BACKGROUND The Ca(2+)-dependent protein phosphatase enzyme calcineurin (Cn) (protein phosphatase 3) is best known for its role as director of the adaptive immune response. One of its principal substrates is the nuclear factor of activated T cells (NFAT), which translocates to the nucleus after dephosphorylation to mediate gene transcription. Drugs targeting Cn (the Cn inhibitors tacrolimus and ...

BACKGROUND Pseudomonas aeruginosa (PA) and Burkholderia cepacia complex (Bcc), commonly found in the lungs of cystic fibrosis (CF) patients, often produce cyanide (CN), which inhibits cellular respiration. CN in sputa is a potential biomarker for lung infection by CF pathogens. However, its actual concentration in the infected lungs is unknown. METHODS AND FINDINGS This work reports observati...

Objective To evaluate the value of free-run electromyography (f-EMG) monitoring of extraocular cranial nerves (EOCN) III, IV, and VI during expanded endonasal surgery (EES) of the skull base in reducing iatrogenic cranial nerve (CN) deficits. Design We retrospectively identified 200 patients out of 990 who had at least one EOCN monitored during EES. We further separated patients into groups acc...

Abstract We present new large field-of-view (∼1°×1°) Ca-CN photometry of the prototypical metal-rich globular cluster 47 Tucanae (NGC 104). Our results are following. (1) The populational number ratios red giant branch (RGB) and horizontal (RHB) in excellent agreement: n (CN-w): (CN-s) = 30:70 (±1–2), where CN-w CN-s stand for CN-weak CN-strong populations, respectively. Both RGB RHB population...

We notice that two combinatorial interpretations of the well-known Catalan numbers Cn = (2n)!/n!(n+1)! naturally give rise to a recursion for Cn. This recursion is ideal for the study of the congruences of Cn modulo 2 r, which attracted a lot of interest recently. We present short proofs of some known results, and improve Liu and Yeh’s recent classification of Cn modulo 2 r. The equivalence Cn ...