BACKGROUND Absence of fetal fibronectin (fFN) in the cervicovaginal fluid (CVF) of women with symptoms of preterm labor is an excellent predictor of women who will not deliver within 2 weeks of testing. Preliminary studies suggest interleukin (IL)-6 performs similarly to fFN. The positive predictive values of both these assays are poor. Inconsistent specimen collection may explain this poor per...

OBJECTIVE To assess the predictive value of quantitative fetal fibronectin (fFN) concentration in cervicovaginal fluid for spontaneous preterm birth in women with bulging fetal membranes. STUDY DESIGN This was a prospective observational study from five UK tertiary centres of a cohort of women with singleton pregnancy and bulging fetal membranes presenting between 18 and 32 weeks of gestation...

Objective To estimate the independent association of a short cervical length (CL), positive fetal fibronectin (fFN), amniotic fluid (AF) sludge, and cervical funneling with spontaneous preterm birth in twin pregnancies. Methods Retrospective cohort study of twin pregnancies managed by a single maternal-fetal medicine practice from June 2005 to February 2014. All patients underwent transvaginal ...

BACKGROUND Premature birth is defined as birth of before 37 completed weeks' gestation. Not all pregnant women showing symptoms of preterm labour will go on to deliver before 37 weeks' gestation. Hence, addition of fetal fibronectin (fFN) testing to the diagnostic workup of women with suspected preterm labour may help to identify those women who do not require active management, and thus avoid ...

OBJECTIVE The objective of this study is to estimate the risk of preterm birth in patients with an ultrasound or physical exam indicated cervical cerclage based on the results of fetal fibronectin (fFN) and cervical length (CL) screening. METHODS Retrospective cohort of patients with a singleton pregnancy and an ultrasound or physical exam indicated Shirodkar cerclage placed by one maternal-f...

Two of the most popular modelling paradigms in computer vision are feed-forward neural networks (FFNs) and probabilistic graphical models (GMs). Various connections between the two have been studied in recent works, such as e.g. expressing mean-field based inference in a GM as an FFN. This paper establishes a new connection between FFNs and GMs. Our key observation is that any FFN implements a ...

Preterm delivery is the leading cause of neonatal mortality and morbidity. The rate of preterm births has been estimated to be about 15 million, which accounts for 11.1% of all live births worldwide. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the cervico-vaginal (CVF) cytokine IL-6 and fetal fibronectin (fFN) status as predictors of preterm delivery in patients with symptoms of preterm labor. Pa...

OBJECTIVE Our objective was to systematically review the current medical literature to assess the accuracy of the combination of fetal fibronectin (fFN) plus ultrasound assessment of cervical length (CL) as screening tools for preterm labor and prediction of preterm birth (PTB), and to compare this to the traditional clinical method of digital cervical examination. STUDY DESIGN We searched Pu...

Extracting from the policy documents related to seed production and distribution, marketing distribution networks, focussed group discussions workshops this paper identifies options of promoting seeds biofortified crops in Indian state Bihar. Accordingly, four plausible options, viz., established network registered dealers (ENRD), fast forward using truthfully labelled (FFN), farmer exchange (F...

A simple, rapid and sensitive voltammetric method for the determination of floctafenine (FFN) and metopimazine (MPZ) was developed. Well-defined cathodic waves were obtained for both drugs in Britton-Robinson buffer pH 9.0 using the differential-pulse mode at the hanging mercury drop electrode (HMDE). The current-concentration relationship was found to be linear over the ranges 0.4-3.6 and 0.4-...