A total of 755 highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART)-naive HIV-infected patients were enrolled at a government hospital in Thailand from 1 June 2000 to 15 October 2002. Census date of survival ...was on 31 October 2004 or the date of HAART initiation. Of 700 (92·6%) patients with complete data, the prevalence of hepatitis B virus (HBV) surface antigen and anti-hepatitis C virus (HCV) antibody positivity was 11·9% and 3·3%, respectively. Eight (9·6%) HBV co-infected patients did not have anti-HBV core antibody (anti-HBcAb). During 1166·7 person-years of observation (pyo), 258 (36·9%) patients died 22·1/100 pyo, 95% confidence interval (CI) 16·7–27·8. HBV and probably HCV co-infection was associated with a higher mortality with adjusted hazard ratios (aHRs) of 1·81 (95% CI 1·30–2·53) and 1·90 (95% CI 0·98–3·69), respectively. Interestingly, HBV co-infection without anti-HBc Ab was strongly associated with death (aHR 6·34, 95% CI 3·99–10·3). The influence of hepatitis co-infection on the natural history of HAART-naive HIV patients requires greater attention.
It has been reported that transplant recipients are exposed to physical and psychosocial stresses even after transplant surgery and exhibit psychological disorders such as depression.
In this study, ...we extracted trends concerning how recipients of kidney transplants cope with stress, and we also examined how they cope with depression and its countermeasures.
We administered questionnaire surveys to 109 kidney transplant recipients. These included items on personal attributes, medical information, depression, and stress-coping type scales. Statistical analysis was performed using factor analysis and multiple regression analysis.
Fifteen out of 109 (13.8%) were found to be high-risk patients for depression based on responses to the questionnaire using the depression scale. We extracted 2 factors of stress-coping type, namely Factor 1, “Directly coping with the problem,” of patients who try to directly resolve the problem in a positive manner and Factor 2, “Stress-release while avoiding the problem,” for those who relieve their feelings in response to the stress without resolving the problem itself. When multiple regression analysis was conducted with the depression scale as the dependent variable and the stress-coping factor as the independent variable, Factor 1 tended to be associated with reduced depression and Factor 2 with increased depression.
Results showed that to improve the mental health of those who receive kidney transplants, it is necessary to examine the depression and stress-coping types of such patients at an early stage and carry out education on stress-coping, focusing on resolving the actual problem.
Homogeneity plays an important role in ornamental plant and flower production. As assessing the quality of seedlings is an effective way of predicting plant growth performance, a vision system ...capable of performing this task is desirable. Yet, the optical sorting of agricultural products must find ways to incorporate knowledge from human experts into the computational solution. Our aim is evaluating feature selection techniques with respect to the performance of vision-based inspection and classification of pot plant seedlings. A large feature set was initially obtained from seedlings images and several subsets were generated with various features selection techniques. The performance of each subset was compared to some of the most popular classifiers in the literature: Naive Bayes, k-Nearest Neighbors, Logistic Regression, C4.5, Random Forest, Multilayer Perceptron as well as Partial Least Squares and Support Vector Machine Discriminant Analysis. The best classifier and subset configuration is presented; our results show that feature selection was indeed advantageous, generating accuracy gains of up to 7.4%.
Abstract
Highly radiopure NaI(Tl) was developed to search for particle candidates of dark matter. Optimized methods were combined to reduce various radioactive impurities. $^{40}$K was effectively ...reduced by the recrystallization method. The progenies of the decay chains of uranium and thorium were reduced by appropriate resins. The concentration of natural potassium in NaI(Tl) crystal was reduced to 20 ppb. Concentrations of alpha-ray emitters were successfully reduced by appropriate resin selection. The present concentrations of the thorium series and $^{226}$Ra were $1.2\pm1.4$$\mu$Bq/kg and $13\pm4$$\mu$Bq/kg, respectively. No significant excess in the concentration of $^{210}$Pb was obtained, and the upper limit was 5.7 $\mu$Bq/kg at 90$\#$ CL. The achieved level of radiopurity of NaI(Tl) crystals makes the construction of a dark matter detector possible.
ABSTRACT We present a search, using KamLAND, a kiloton-scale anti-neutrino detector, for low-energy anti-neutrino events that were coincident with the gravitational-wave (GW) events GW150914 and ...GW151226, and the candidate event LVT151012. We find no inverse beta-decay neutrino events within 500 s of either GW signal. This non-detection is used to constrain the electron anti-neutrino fluence and the total integrated luminosity of the astrophysical sources.
Klebsiella pneumoniae carbapenemase (KPC) actively hydrolyzes carbapenems, antibiotics often used a last-line treatment for multidrug-resistant bacteria. KPC clinical relevance resides in its ...widespread dissemination. In this work, we report the genomic context of KPC coding genes blaKPC-2, blaKPC-3 and blaKPC-30 in multidrug-resistant Klebsiellapneumoniae isolates from Brazil. Plasmids harboring blaKPC-3 and blaKPC-30 were identified. Fifteen additional carbapenem-resistant K. pneumoniae isolates were selected from the same tertiary hospital, collected over a period of 8 years. Their genomes were sequenced in order to evaluate the prevalence and dissemination of blaKPC–harboring plasmids. We found that blaKPC genes were mostly carried by one of two isoforms of transposon Tn4401 (Tn4401a or Tn4401b) that were predominantly located on plasmids highly similar to the previously described plasmid pKPC_FCF3SP (IncN). The identified pKPC_FCF3SP-like plasmids carried either blaKPC-2 or blaKPC-30. Two K. pneumoniae isolates harbored pKpQIL-like (IncFII) plasmids, only recently identified in Brazil; one of them harbored blaKPC-3 in a Tn4401a transposon. Underlining the risk of horizontal spread of KPC coding genes, this study reports the prevalence of blaKPC-2 and the recent spread of blaKPC-3, and blaKPC-30, in association with different isoforms of Tn4401, together with high synteny of plasmid backbones among isolates studied here and in comparison with previous reports.
This paper describes a handwritten character string recognition system for Japanese mail address reading on a very large vocabulary. The address phrases are recognized as a whole because there is no ...extra space between words. The lexicon contains 111,349 address phrases, which are stored in a trie structure. In recognition, the text line image is matched with the lexicon entries (phrases) to obtain reliable segmentation and retrieve valid address phrases. The paper first introduces some effective techniques for text line image preprocessing and presegmentation. In presegmentation, the text line image is separated into primitive segments by connected component analysis and touching pattern splitting based on contour shape analysis. In lexicon matching, consecutive segments are dynamically combined into candidate character patterns. An accurate character classifier is embedded in lexicon matching to select characters matched with a candidate pattern from a dynamic category set. A beam search strategy is used to control the lexicon matching so as to achieve real-time recognition. In experiments on 3,589 live mail images, the proposed method achieved correct rate of 83.68 percent while the error rate is less than 1 percent.
In Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS), anti-ganglioside antibodies are strongly associated with the acute motor axonal neuropathy (AMAN) form, but there are also cases of the demyelinating form of GBS ...(acute inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy AIDP) with anti-ganglioside antibodies.
To elucidate the patterns and sequential changes in electrodiagnostic abnormalities of anti-ganglioside-positive GBS.
Detailed serial electrodiagnostic findings were reviewed for 51 patients with GBS. Anti-ganglioside antibodies were measured by ELISA.
Antibodies to GM1, GM1b, GD1a, or GalNAc-GD1a were present in 25 patients. Of these, 12 (48%) showed the AMAN pattern, 5 (20%) the AIDP pattern, and 3 (12%) isolated F-wave absence in the first examination. All five patients with the AIDP pattern showed prolonged distal latencies, but three eventually showed the AMAN pattern or rapid normalization. The remaining two still had similarly prolonged distal latencies in weeks 4 to 6, but the serial changes were distinct from those in the anti-ganglioside-negative AIDP patients who showed progressive increases in distal latencies over 2 months after onset.
Besides the simple axonal degeneration pattern, patients with anti-ganglioside-positive Guillain-Barre syndrome can show transient conduction slowing/block in the distal or proximal nerve segments, mimicking demyelination, but anti-ganglioside antibodies do not appear to be associated with acute inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy.
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