BACKGROUND Procalcitonin has been advocated as a marker of bacterial infection. OBJECTIVE To evaluate diagnostic markers of infection in critically ill children, comparing procalcitonin with C reactive protein and leucocyte count in a paediatric intensive care unit (PICU). METHODS Procalcitonin, C reactive protein, and leucocyte count were measured in 175 children, median age 16 months, on ...

Argyrophilic nucleolar organizer regions (AgNORs) were determined in 94 pleural, pericardial and peritoneal effusions. The results were correlated with cytologic diagnosis to determine the diagnostic potential of this technique. Cytologically the number of normal, reactive and malignant effusions were 32, 28 and 34 respectively. The mean AgNOR counts for normal, reactive and malignant spec...

Gaining insight into Pd/C catalytic systems aimed at locating reactive centers on carbon surfaces, revealing their properties and estimating the number of reactive centers presents a challenging problem. In the present study state-of-the-art experimental techniques involving ultra high resolution SEM/STEM microscopy (1 Å resolution), high brilliance X-ray absorption spectroscopy and theoretical...

reactive power management plays an essential role in the secure operation of the power system as an ancillary service. although in electricity markets, the particular attention is paid to active power, the reactive power also plays an important on total generation costs of electricity. on the other hand, as it is mainly confined to local consumption, to avoid market power and maintain the secur...

Thirty-eight domestic goats from an area of Ehrlichia chaffeensis endemicity were tested for antibodies reactive to E. chaffeensis and for E. chaffeensis-specific 16S rRNA gene fragments by an indirect fluorescent antibody test and a nested PCR assay, respectively. Twenty-eight of 38 (73.7%) goats had antibodies reactive to E. chaffeensis (>/=1:128), and 6 of 38 (15.8%) goats were positive by d...

Malaria infections in pregnancy are associated with adverse outcomes for both mother and child. There are few data on hyper-reactive malarial splenomegaly, an aberrant immunological response to chronic or recurrent malaria in pregnancy. This retrospective assessment reviewed the impact of mefloquine treatment on pregnant women with suspected hyper-reactive malarial splenomegaly in an area of lo...

This paper presents a reactive tabu search for distribution load transfer operation. The load transfer operation at steady-state operation and planning aims at reconfiguring the target network for various purposes including loss minimization. On the contrary, the operation at restoration is called service restoration and aims at minimizing out-of-service area as quickly as possible. Both operat...

This paper presents an experimental study using two robots. In the experiment, the robots navigated through an area with or without obstacles and had as their goal to shift places with each other. Four different approaches (random, reactive, planning, anticipation) were used during the experiment and the times to accomplish the task were compared. The results indicate that the ability to antici...