objective: to determine the diagnostic value of serum white blood cell (wbc) count, fever (>38˚c) and wbc rise (>10%) for bacterial meningitis in patients with severe traumatic brain injury (tbi). m et h o d : this cross-sectional study was conducted in shahid rajaei hospital affiliated with shiraz university of medical sciences during a 1-year period from 2013 to 2014. we included consecutivel...

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Background: Disease prevalence is rarely explicitly considered in the early stages of the development of novel prognostic tests. Rather, researchers use the area under the receiver operating characteristic (AUROC) as the key metric to gauge and report predictive performance ability. Because this statistic does not account for disease prevalence, proposed tests may not appropriately address clin...

The INFLU A.B-Quick and Directigen Flu A+B enzyme immunoassays were compared with direct immunofluorescence and cell culture for detection of influenza A and B viruses in a total of 255 patient specimens. Both assays identified 23 of 42 influenza A viruses (sensitivity, 54.8%; specificity, 100%; positive predictive value [PPV], 100%; negative predictive value [NPV], 91.8%). The INFLU A.B-Quick ...

The receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve, the positive predictive value (PPV) curve and the negative predictive value (NPV) curve are three measures of performance for a continuous diagnostic biomarker. The ROC, PPV and NPV curves are often estimated empirically to avoid assumptions about the distributional form of the biomarkers. Recently, there has been a push to incorporate group se...

abstract background: regarding the diagnostic errors of the classic criteria including serum ascites albumin gradient (saag), total protein concentration and the adapted light et al’s criteria in distinguishing transudate versus exudates, we evaluated the ascitic fluid to serum bilirubin ratio as a new criteria in this regard. we also evaluated whether the combination of bilirubin ratio with ea...