In order to deliver public health services, epidemiologists and other public health professionals need low cost and easy-to-use computer software tools to manage data, perform data analysis, and map results. The software must function on laptop computers during field studies as well as in office environments. Epi Info' and Epi Map' are personal computer (PC) software programs developed since 19...

OBJECTIVE To compare the bias, absolute bias, precision and accuracies between the equations, viz., CKD-EPI (Scr), CKD-EPI (Scys) and MDRD in Indian patients with type 2 diabetes. METHODS 198 patients who underwent 24 h urinary collection for assessing kidney function between November 2014-January 2015 were included. Cohen's κ coefficient, Bland-Altman plot were calculated between estimated k...

BACKGROUND 3-epi-25-hydroxyvitamin D3 (3-epi-25OHD3) interferes in most liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) assays for 25-hydroxyvitamin D (25OHD). The clinical significance of this is unclear, with concentrations from undetectable to 230 nmol/L reported. Many studies have quantified 3-epi-25OHD3 based on 25OHD3 calibrators or other indirect methods, and we speculated that...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE CVJ lesion suffers from a high sensitivity to susceptibility and distortion artifacts, which sometimes makes diffusion image difficult to interpret. Our purpose was to evaluate the potential for diffusion MR imaging using RS-EPI compared with SS-EPI in the assessment of the CVJ. MATERIALS AND METHODS RS-EPI and SS-EPI DTI images were acquired from 10 healthy volunteers ...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Previous reports have shown that DWI is useful in detecting cholesteatoma. SS-EPI is the most widely used DWI technique. However, SS-EPI may have susceptibility artifacts due to field inhomogeneity in the imaging of the temporal bone region. Our purpose was to prospectively evaluate the advantage of MS-EPI for the diagnosis of middle ear cholesteatoma by comparing it with...

There is growing evidence as to the benefits of collecting BOLD fMRI data with increased sampling rates. However, many of the newly developed acquisition techniques developed to collect BOLD data with ultra-short TRs require hardware, software, and non-standard analytic pipelines that may not be accessible to all researchers. We propose to incorporate the method of shifted echo into a standard ...

Introduction: Low frequency fluctuations (LFFs) in T2*-weighted MR images have been used to map functional connectivity in both humans and rats [1, 2, 3]. Most FC studies utilize gradient echo EPI (GE-EPI) because of its high sensitivity to BOLD signal fluctuations. However, fMRI studies have shown that the BOLD signal in GE-EPI images contains a strong contribution from large veins. At high fi...