background: this study was designed to investigate the accuracy of dobutamine stress echocardiography (dse) in detecting the post-revascularization recovery rate of contractile reserve (cr) in ischemic myocardium. methods: a total of 112 segments from seven patients with low ejection fraction (<35%) and coronary artery disease were evaluated with dse one week before and 12 weeks after coronary ...

background:   acute appendicitis is the most common emergency operation in the world. considering negative appendectomy, it is necessary to use accurate diagnostic methods to lower the rate. this study evaluated the sensitivity and specificity of abdominal sonography in comparison to clinical alvarado criteria in patients with suspected appendicitis. methods:   370 patients with suspected appen...

abstract background cerebral neoplasm arises from brain, spinal cord and meningeal cells. not only malignant cerebral neoplasm also benign tumor could lead to death due to mass effect on vital structures. access to these tumors is difficult, and mri and ct scan could be helpful in determining anatomical location of tumors and distinction of malignant from benign. objective for better and earlie...

background objective: to evaluate the utility of specific cut-off values for c- reactive protein (crp) and immature-to-total neutrophil ratio (i/t) as screening tests for meningitis in culture negative early onset sepsis (eos). materials and methods retrospective chart review of 97 newborns with culture negative sepsis who had lumbar puncture performed as part of the sepsis evaluation in a leve...

background : most diagnostic tests for biliary atresia (ba) are invasive. this study evaluates the sensitivity and specificity of serum  tumor necrosis factor-α (tnf-α) for diagnosing extra hepatic biliary duct atresia (ehba) in infants. materials and methods : infants with cholestasis who were admitted to children′s medical center hospital were evaluated. a total of 50 infants (20 with ehba an...

We argued recently that the positive predictive value (PPV) and the negative predictive value (NPV) are valuable metrics to include during null hypothesis significance testing: They inform the researcher about the probability of statistically significant and non-significant test outcomes actually being true. Although commonly misunderstood, a reported p value estimates only the probability of o...

background hepatic fibrosis is an inclusion indicator for treatment and a major independent predictor of treatment response in patients with chronic hepatitis c. liver biopsy, considered as the “gold standard” for evaluating liver fibrosis, has carried some drawbacks. currently used noninvasive predictors of fibrosis are considered less accurate than liver biopsy. objectives our aim was to asse...