Currently, coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has become the most severe infectious disease affecting the world, which has spread around the world to more than 200 countries in 2020. Until the number of COVID-19 vaccines is insufficient, nucleic aci...
Disease monitoring informs the opportunities for intervention by natural resource agencies tasked with managing chronic wasting disease (CWD) in wild cervids. However, allocating funds toward testing can reduce those available for education, outreach...
Background/Objectives: Urinary tract infections (UTIs) pose an increasing risk of antimicrobial resistance, and novel diagnostic tests have been developed to address the limitations of standard urine culture in these cases. It is important that these...
Background: Here, we validate a unique and rapid susceptibility assay, Pooled Antibiotic Susceptibility Testing (P-AST), used for complicated, persistent, and recurrent urinary tract infections (UTIs), following Clinical and Laboratory Standards Inst...
Background/Objectives: While new methods for measuring antimicrobial susceptibility have been associated with improved patient outcomes, they should also be validated using standard protocols for error rates and other test metrics. The objective of t...
This study compared rates of empirical-therapy use and negative patient outcomes between complicated and recurrent urinary tract infection (r/cUTI) cases diagnosed with a multiplex polymerase chain reaction or pooled antibiotic susceptibility testing...
Reverse transcription quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction (RT-qPCR) to detect SARS-CoV-2 RNA is an essential test to monitor the occurrence of COVID-19. A methodology is proposed for the determination of maximum pool size and adjustments...
The COVID-19 pandemic puts significant stress on the viral testing capabilities of many countries. Rapid point-of-care (PoC) antigen tests are valuable tools but implementing frequent large scale testing is costly. We have developed an inexpensive de...
Massive molecular testing for SARS-CoV-2 diagnosis is mandatory to manage the spread of COVID-19. Diagnostic screening should be performed at a mass scale, extended to the asymptomatic population, and repeated over time. An accurate diagnostic pipeli...
A key requirement in containing contagious diseases, like the COVID-19 pandemic, is the ability to efficiently carry out mass diagnosis over large populations, especially when testing resources are limited and rapid identification is essential for ou...
This study evaluated the performance of urine reagent strips (URSs) in detecting Schistosoma haematobium infection in individual and pooled urine samples. Between June 2022 and April 2023, 2634 urine samples (10 mL each) from school-age children (5&n...
Background: Several screening strategies for identifying congenital CMV (cCMV) have been proposed; however, the optimal solution has yet to be determined. We aimed to determine the prevalence of cCMV by universal screening with saliva pool testing an...
An easy-to-use and affordable surveillance system is crucial for paratuberculosis control. The use of environmental samples and milk pools has been proven to be effective for the detection of Mycobacterium avium subsp. paratuberculosis (MAP)-infected...
Background/Objectives: We aimed to compare the prescribing behavior and clinical experience of urology providers when using the combined multiplex polymerase chain reaction (M-PCR)/Pooled Antibiotic Susceptibility Testing (P-AST) diagnostic test vers...
Pooled sample testing is an effective strategy to reduce the cost of disease surveillance in human and animal medicine. Testing pooled samples commonly produces matched observations with dichotomous responses in medical and epidemiological research....
To date, safety distances to toxic pool evaporation as measured by known models have been quoted in hundreds of meters, without a deeper study of the time variation of the evaporation rate. In order to evaluate this specific aspect, we designed an ex...
Anisotropic mechanical properties are a well-known issue in selective laser melted parts. The microstructure produced by selective laser melting (SLM) is directional, including the solidified melt pool structures and grains. This work investigates th...
(1) Background: With vaccination and new variants of SARS-CoV-2 on the horizon, efficient testing in schools may enable prevention of mass infection outbreaks, keeping schools safe places and buying time until decisions on feasibility and the necessi...
Laser defocusing was investigated to assess the influence on the surface quality, melt pool shape, tensile properties, and densification of selective laser melted (SLMed) IN 625. Negative (−0.5 mm, −0.3 mm), positive (+0.3 mm, +0.5 mm), and 0 mm defo...
The group testing idea is an efficient infection identification approach based on pooling the test samples of a group of individuals, which results in identification with less number of tests than individually testing the population. In our work, we...
Group testing idea is an efficient approach to detect prevalence of an infection in the test samples taken from a group of individuals. It is based on the idea of pooling the test samples and performing tests to the mixed samples. This approach resul...
Many tasks performed by swarms of unmanned aerial vehicles require localization. In many cases, the sensors that take part in the localization process suffer from inherent measurement errors. This problem is amplified when disruptions are added, eith...
The aim of the study is to determine the fractional share of organic pollutants in washing samples collected after pressure filter washings. The evaluation of the physicochemical and toxicological quality of raw washings, fractions <200 kDa, <3...
In this study, we describe how to keep a campus safe and “open” by implementing a proactive, as opposed to reactive, strategy (the Green Zone strategy). The pillars are leadership, clear communication, clean air, vaccination campaigns, an...
This study examines the impact of energy security risk on the economic growth rate of the world’s 74 largest energy-consuming countries. The Energy Security Risk Index is employed to assess national vulnerability to fluctuations in energy secur...
Porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome virus (PRRSV) remains a major threat to swine production, and its circulation after the African swine fever outbreak requires continued surveillance. This study investigated the temporal, regional, and ge...
The flow pattern in a pumping station intake basin has a significant influence on the inlet conditions of the pumping machine. For the purpose of solving the problems of flow disorder and the uneven flow velocity distribution in the intake basin of a...
Today’s possibilities of genome editing easily create plentitudes of strain mutants that need to be experimentally qualified for configuring the next steps of strain engineering. The application of design-build-test-learn cycles requires the id...
Background: Centrifugation-based hematocrit (Hct) testing remains widely used in decentralized primary care settings where access to automated hematology analyzers may be limited. Appropriate proficiency testing (PT) performance assessment therefore...
To address the shortcomings of the RIME algorithm’s weak global exploration ability, insufficient information exchange among populations, and limited population diversity, this work proposes a distributed data-guided RIME algorithm called DRIME...
Quantitative magnetization transfer magnetic resonance imaging provides a means for indirectly detecting changes in the macromolecular content of tissue noninvasively. A potential application is the diagnosis and assessment of treatment response in b...
Routine monitoring of ortho-phthalaldehyde (OPA) disinfectants is critical for endoscope reprocessing, yet commercial test strips suffer from subjective visual ambiguity, strict manual timing, and susceptibility to sample matrix dilution. This study...
This paper describes in detail the development of a ground-penetrating radar (GPR) model for the acquisition, processing and visualisation of underground utility infrastructure (UUI) in a controlled environment. The initiative was to simulate a subsu...
During the COVID-19 pandemic, veterinary diagnostic laboratories tested both human and animal samples and needed to ensure that they could accurately perform large numbers of diagnostic tests in a timely manner. Sample pooling, a methodology used eff...
The testing capacity of the laboratory is paramount for better control of the pandemic caused by SARS-CoV-2. The pooling method is promising to increase testing capacity, and the use of direct NAAT-based detection of SARS-CoV-2 on a non-invasive spec...
The primary approach to controlling the spread of the pandemic SARS-CoV-2 is to diagnose and isolate the infected people quickly. Our paper aimed to investigate the efficiency and the reliability of a hierarchical pooling approach for large-scale PCR...
16 October 2020
Pool water must be constantly disinfected. Chlorine compounds used to disinfect pools react with organic substances such as sweat, urine, and personal care products introduced into pool water by users and results in the formation of disinfection bypr...
Group testing is an efficient algorithmic approach to the infection identification problem, based on mixing the test samples and testing the mixed samples instead of individually testing each sample. In this paper, we consider the dynamic infection s...
3 September 2021
Reliability, accuracy, and timeliness of diagnostic testing for SARS-CoV-2 infection have allowed adequate public health management of the disease, thus notably helping the timely mapping of viral spread within the community. Furthermore, the most vu...
Accurate diagnosis at an early stage of infection is essential for the successful management of any contagious disease. The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), caused by the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) virus is a pan...
Somatosensory loss post-stroke is common, with touch sensation characteristically impaired. Yet, quantitative, standardized measures of touch discrimination available for clinical use are currently limited. We aimed to characterize touch impairment a...
Desert aquatic systems are widely separated, lack hydrologic connections, and are subject to drought. However, they provide unique settings to investigate distributional patterns of micrometazoans, including rotifers. Thus, to understand rotifer biod...
Machines usually employ a guess-and-check strategy to analyze data: they take the data, make a guess, check the answer, adjust it with regard to the correct one if necessary, and try again on a new data set. An active learning environment guarantees...
The SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 has wreaked havoc on the global community in terms of every imaginable parameter. The research output on COVID-19 has been nothing short of phenomenal, especially in the medical and biomedical sciences, where...
Background: Antigen tests for SARS-CoV-2 testing are rapid and inexpensive but usually have lower sensitivity than RT-qPCR and are only validated for nasopharyngeal/throat swabs; the latter are considered the gold standard in terms of material collec...
Within this paper, the feasibility of reducing test rig runs in constant velocity joint (CVJ) development by combining data from different sources (simulation and test rig) for artificial intelligence (AI) models has been investigated. Therefore, a c...
A swimming pool in Corrales de Buelna (Cantabria) was demolished in March 2017 due to the loss of mechanical performance of the laminated timber structure. The relevant deterioration was caused by rotting of the wood and corrosion of the metal connec...
Renewable energy is a prominent area of research within the energy sector, and the storage of renewable energy represents an efficient method for its utilization. There are various energy storage methods available, among which compressed air energy s...
2 November 2022
Meat of horses may be infested with nematodes of the genus Trichinella spp. and can cause serious disease in humans. Rules for the carcasses sampling of species susceptible to Trichinella spp. infection and examination are laid down in Commission Reg...
The rapid global emergence of multidrug-resistant (MDR) Klebsiella pneumoniae threatens public health, as treatment options remain limited and resistance to last-line antibiotics is rising. Natural phenolic compounds emerge as promising adjuvants to...
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