Evaluation of tests for the diagnosis of childhood pulmonary tuberculosis (CPTB) is complicated by the absence of an accurate reference test. We present a Bayesian latent class analysis in which we evaluated the accuracy of 5 diagnostic tests for CPTB. We used data from a study of 749 hospitalized South African children suspected to have CPTB from 2009 to 2014. The following tests were used: my...

BACKGROUND Many age-associated disorders (including diabetes, cancer, and neurodegenerative diseases) are linked to mitochondrial dysfunction, which leads to impaired cellular bioenergetics and increased oxidative stress. However, it is not known what genetic and molecular pathways underlie differential vulnerability to mitochondrial dysfunction observed among different cell types. METHODOLOG...

Active immunization with the idiotype of follicular lymphoma induces tumor-specific immunity. T cells induced in vivo by idiotype vaccination recognize human leukocyte antigen (HLA)--restricted hypervariable but not conserved idiotype peptides. We hypothesized that idiotype-directed T-cell immunity occurs naturally and performed a reverse immunology analysis of idiotype HLA binding in 39 follic...

To determine if the immunoglobulins (Igs) capable of eliciting the formation of isologous anti-idiotypic antibodies are rare exceptions, BABL/c mice were immunized with five myeloma proteins of BALB/c origin. Anti-idiotypes were produced against all but one. The idiotype of the exception (T15) is remarkably abundant in BALB/c mice, whose unresponsiveness is probably due to tolerance. Neverthele...

In this Letter, the main attributes known to affect color quality are treated statistically over a set of 118 spectra representing the current mainstream lighting technology. The color rendering index (CRI) is used to assess color fidelity while colorfulness is used to complement CRI-R(a), supported by the growing evidence that assessment of light spectra cannot overlook color preference inputs...

BACKGROUND Peripherally inserted central catheter (PICC) is commonly used in nursing for patients with leukemia. The purpose of this study was to investigate the risk factors of Catheter-related infection (CRI) in patients with leukemia and to provide some nursing strategies based on the results. METHODS Clinical data from 140 patients with leukemia between May 2014 and July 2016 in Haiyang P...

BACKGROUND A Bayesian latent class evaluation was used to estimate the true prevalence of brucellosis in livestock farmers and patients with prolonged pyrexia (PP) and to validate three conditionally dependent serological tests: indirect ELISA (iELISA), Rose Bengal Test (RBT), and standard tube agglutination (STAT). A total of 335 sera from livestock farmers and 300 sera from PP patients were i...