To assess the risk of contamination, we reviewed retrospectively 1,408 matched pairs of simultaneous catheter-drawn and venipuncture blood cultures. Catheter-drawn cultures were equally likely to be truly positive (14.4 versus 13.7%) but more likely to be contaminated (3.8 versus 1.8% [P = 0.001]). Direct venipuncture cultures are preferred.

A novel channel-switch-mode strategy for simultaneous sensing of Fe(3+) and Hg(2+) is developed with dual-excitation single-emission graphene quantum dots (GQDs). By utilizing the dual-channel fluorescence response performance of GQDs, this strategy achieved a facile, low-cost, masking agent-free, quantitative and selective dual-ion assay even in mixed ion samples and practical water samples.

Dual-energy or K-edge imaging is used to enhance contrast between two or more materials in an object and is routinely realised by acquiring two separate X-ray images each at different X-ray wavelength. On a broadband synchrotron source an imaging system to acquire the two images simultaneously was realised. The single-shot approach allows dual-energy and stereo imaging to be applied to dynamic ...

Published: June 1, 2014 Received: December 12, 2013 Accepted: April 27, 2014 Citation: Mediterr J Hematol Infect Dis 2014, 6(1): e2014036, DOI: 10.4084/MJHID.2014.036 This article is available from: http://www.mjhid.org/article/view/12582 This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which per...

We report a dual-band-swept, Fourier domain mode locking (FDML) laser with sweeping rate of 97.6 kHz. The laser uses a custom-designed dual-channel driver to achieve synchronization between two tunable filters. It is the first time to achieve simultaneous dual-band FDML laser. © 2012 Optical Society of America OCIS codes: (300.6360)Spectroscopy, laser; (140.4050) Mode-locked lasers

In this paper, we study the geometric RAC simultaneous drawing problem: Given two planar graphs that share a common vertex set but have disjoint edge sets, a geometric RAC simultaneous drawing is a straight-line drawing in which (i) each graph is drawn planar, (ii) there are no edge overlaps, and, (iii) crossings between edges of the two graphs occur at right-angles. We first prove that two pla...