For the period January 2005 to June 2008, we reviewed the rates, causes, and outcomes of exit-site infection (ESI) among 137 consecutive patients [mean age: 51 +/- 16 years; 17 (12.4%) with diabetes; 76 (55%) on automated PD; time at risk: 240.41 dialysis years; mean follow-up: 20.4 +/- 13.8 months]. Treatment protocol included mini-laparotomy and Popovich-Moncrief placement method, with presur...

Electrochemistry (EC) is a mature scientific discipline aimed to study the movement of electrons in an oxidation-reduction reaction. EC covers techniques that use a measurement of potential, charge, or current to determine the concentration or the chemical reactivity of analytes. The electrical signal is directly converted into chemical information. For in-depth characterization of complex elec...

When John Fenn and coworkers first realized Malcolm Dole's dream of electrospray ionization (ESI) (1), the broad impact it would ultimately have was not obvious to most researchers working in the (admittedly much smaller) field at the time (2). Indeed, between his first publication in 1984 and ground breaking report in 1988 that described ESI-mass spectrometry (ESI-MS) as a tool for analyzing l...

The response of many previously low-detectable or undetectable compounds in electrospray ionization mass spectrometry (ESI-MS) has been enhanced by the addition of a simple, homemade needle into the traditional ESI interface. The needle located between the ESI emitter and the ion sweep cone (inlet of the detector) would ionize those neutral gaseous compounds, formed during electrospray, by a co...

Results: During this period, a total of 376 Tenckhoff catheters were implanted and 312 patients were treated. In 34.5% of the patients transferred to haemodialysis the cause was access related infection. Global catheter cumulative survival was 82%, 64% and 50% at 1, 3, and 5 years respectively. A total of 35 subcutaneous cuff excisions were electively performed in 33 patients (one patient had c...

A novel fused-droplet electrospray ionization (FD-ESI) source was developed to generate peptide and protein ions. The sample solution was first ultrasonically nebulized to form fine aerosols. The aerosols were then purged into a glass reaction chamber via nitrogen. Charged methanol droplets were continuously generated through electrospraying the acidic methanol solution from a capillary, which ...

Patient waiting times and service quality problems characterize emergency departments worldwide. The purpose of this research is to develop a reliable decision support system using the Emergency Severity Index (ESI) triage method to drive improvements in the care delivery process, as part of a hospital Emergency Care Delivery System. Models were developed using first a relatively low fidelity s...

high performance liquid chromatography (hplc) with diode array detection (dad) and electrospray ionization tandem mass spectrometry (esi/ms/ms) was used to analyze the main components in the methanol extract of fructus aurantii (fa) and the metabolites in rat biological samples after oral administration of the methanol extract of fa. there were 31 constituents identified in the extract of fa in...

BACKGROUND Emerging technologies for rapid identification of microbes demonstrate a shift from traditional biochemical and molecular testing algorithms toward methods using mass spectrometry (MS) for the semiquantitative analysis of microbial proteins and genetic elements. This study was performed to assess the diagnostic accuracy of 2 such technologies, PCR-electrospray ionization (ESI)/MS and...

We have investigated the capability of direct infusion electrospray ionization mass spectrometry in the negative ion mode, ESI(-)-MS, to differentiate representative samples of artisan cachaça, a Brazilian sugar cane distillate of large production, aged in four different types of wood casks: amburana (Amburana cearensis), jequitibA (Cariniana estrellensis), balm (Myroxylon peruiferum), and oak ...