In this issue, a survey of UK intensive care units (ICUs) is described and the uptake of selective decontamination of the digestive tract (SDD) within these units is reported. Impressively, the authors achieved a 100% response from all the units contacted, but out of the total of 250, only three reported using a full SDD protocol including i.v. antibiotics, 10 more (13 in total) reported using ...

Background: Bone mineral density (BMD) measurements are frequently performed repeatedly for each patient. Subsequent BMD measurements allow reproducibility to be assessed. Objective: To examine the reproducibility of BMD by dual energy x ray absorptiometry (DXA) and to investigate the practical value of different measures of reproducibility in a group of postmenopausal women. Methods: Ninety fi...

The sentential decision diagram (SDD) has been recently proposed as a new tractable representation of Boolean functions that generalizes the influential ordered binary decision diagram (OBDD). Empirically, compiling CNFs into SDDs has yielded significant improvements in both time and space over compiling them into OBDDs, using a bottomup compilation approach. In this work, we present a top-down...

Silicon Drift Detectors (SDD) equip the two central layers of the Inner Tracking System of the ALICE experiment at the LHC. Main results of systematic studies of detector performance including noise, gain, drift speed and charge collection measurements will be reported. 1 ALICE experiment and SDD module Silicon Drift Detectors (SDD) [1] offer two-dimensional position reconstruction with a limit...

BACKGROUND Bone mineral density (BMD) measurements are frequently performed repeatedly for each patient. Subsequent BMD measurements allow reproducibility to be assessed. OBJECTIVE To examine the reproducibility of BMD by dual energy x ray absorptiometry (DXA) and to investigate the practical value of different measures of reproducibility in a group of postmenopausal women. METHODS Ninety f...

CONTEXT Although meta-analyses of randomized trials have shown that selective digestive decontamination (SDD) prevents nosocomial pneumonia in critically ill patients, the influence of trial quality on the effectiveness of SDD has not been rigorously evaluated. OBJECTIVE To assess the methodological quality of individual studies of SDD and its relation to the reported effects on pneumonia and...

The Bicoid (Bcd) protein gradient in Drosophila serves as a paradigm for gradient formation in textbooks. The SDD model (synthesis, diffusion, degradation) was proposed to explain the formation of the gradient. The SDD model states that the bcd mRNA is located at the anterior pole of the embryo at all times and serves a source for translation of the Bicoid protein, coupled with diffusion and un...

Posterior acoustic shadowing (PAS) can bias breast tumor segmentation and classification in ultrasound images. In this paper, half-contour features are proposed to classify benign and malignant breast tumors with PAS, considering the fact that the upper half of the tumor contour is less affected by PAS. Adaptive thresholding and disk expansion are employed to detect tumor contours. Based on the...

BACKGROUND Both genetic and environmental factors contribute to risk of depression, but estimates of their relative contributions are limited. Commonalities between clinically-assessed major depressive disorder (MDD) and self-declared depression (SDD) are also unclear. METHODS Using data from a large Scottish family-based cohort (GS:SFHS, N=19,994), we estimated the genetic and environmental ...

INTRODUCTION Infectious complications and especially anastomotic leakage (AL) severely impede the recuperation of patients following colorectal cancer (CRC) surgery. When the normal gut barrier fails, as in AL, pathogenic microorganisms can enter the circulation and may cause severe sepsis which is associated with substantial mortality. Moreover, AL has a negative impact on the CRC prognosis. S...