Surveillance affecting infection control in a veterinary teaching hospital

2017 Spring.Includes bibliographical references.Healthcare-associated infections (HCAI) are poorly understood in veterinary medicine. Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus pseudintermedius (MRSP) is an increasingly reported pathogen of dogs. Consequently, there are increasing concerns regarding treatment difficulties and propagation of antibiotic resistance. The first study seeks to estimate the burden of MRSP carriage among dogs presenting to the Colorado State University Veterinary Teaching Hospital (CSU-VTH). This study enrolled 243 canine patients across 3 different hospital services upon admission to the VTH and 155 canine patients across 3 different hospital services that received paired samples at two different time points. The 3 hospital services were Community Practice (healthy patients), Dermatology (patients with skin disease) and Surgical Oncology (patients with a higher risk of acquiring an infection during visit). The estimated prevalence of MRSP carriage at enrollment and follow-up was 4%. For enrollment samples, no patients enrolled through Community Practice carried MRSP, while 8% of Dermatology patients and 3% of Surgical Oncology patients were MRSP carriers. For paired samples, carriage persistence was only seen for patients enrolled through Dermatology. Results of this study showed that the prevalence of MRSP carriers among dogs presenting to the CSU-VTH falls within ranges previously published. MRSP colonization was seen most commonly among dogs with skin disease and least commonly among healthy dogs. The second study focuses on surveillance for HCAIs via patient temperatures stored in the electronic medical record (EMR) system of a VTH. Little work has been done in veterinary medicine on surveillance of HCAIs in a VTH. The EMR system contains patient temperature data for each visit. This study explores the association between fevers after admission and known risk factors for HCAIs (e.g. duration of stay in the hospital, critical care involvement). This study included all medical records corresponding to canine visits from the period of January 1, 2012 to June 30, 2015. After selecting for visits of ≥ 1 night and removing missing data, 6,254 unique canine visits remained. Visits were classified into type of case (Medicine, Surgery, Oncology, Other) and whether critical care (ECC) was involved). Length of stay was determined based on admission and discharge date. A visit that produced a fever after admission was a visit where the animal had a normal rectal temperature (≤102.5°F) upon admission and subsequently produced a fever (>102.5°F) after admission. The cumulative incidence of fevers after admission was calculated. Odds ratios (OR) between fevers after admission and case type and ECC involvement and duration of stay in the hospital were calculated via multivariable logistic regression. The estimated cumulative incidence of fevers after admission was 9%. Results of multivariable regression showed that a negative association existed between Medicine-type cases, Oncology-type cases and long duration of hospitalization (>2 days). This study shows that fevers after admission are associated with known risk factors for HCAIs and may be useful in a syndromic approach to HCAI surveillance. This study did not explore the association between HCAI and fevers after admission

Discrimination and classification of tobacco wastes by identification and quantification of polyphenols with LC–MS/MS

The chemical composition of polyphenols in tobacco waste was identified by HPLC-PDA–ESI/MS/MS and the contents of chlorogenic acids and rutin in 10 varieties of tobacco wastes were determined by HPLC–UV. The relationships between the contents of active polyphenols and the varieties of tobacco wastes were interpreted by hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA) and principal component analysis (PCA). The results showed that 15 polyphenols were identified in a methanolic extract of dried tobacco waste. The tobacco wastes were characterized by high levels of chlorogenic acids (3-CQA, 5-CQA, and 4-CQA) and rutin; their ranges in the 10 tobacco varieties were 0.116–0.196, 0.686–1.781, 0.094–0.192, and 0.413–0.998 %, respectively. According to multivariate statistics models, two active compound variables can be considered important for the discrimination of the varieties of tobacco wastes: chlorogenic acids and rutin. Consequently, samples of 10 tobacco varieties were characterized into three groups by HCA based on the PCA pattern. In conclusion, tobacco waste could be used as a new pharmaceutical material for the production of natural chlorogenic acids and rutin in the ethnopharmacological industry

DiffBIR: Towards Blind Image Restoration with Generative Diffusion Prior

We present DiffBIR, which leverages pretrained text-to-image diffusion models for blind image restoration problem. Our framework adopts a two-stage pipeline. In the first stage, we pretrain a restoration module across diversified degradations to improve generalization capability in real-world scenarios. The second stage leverages the generative ability of latent diffusion models, to achieve realistic image restoration. Specifically, we introduce an injective modulation sub-network -- LAControlNet for finetuning, while the pre-trained Stable Diffusion is to maintain its generative ability. Finally, we introduce a controllable module that allows users to balance quality and fidelity by introducing the latent image guidance in the denoising process during inference. Extensive experiments have demonstrated its superiority over state-of-the-art approaches for both blind image super-resolution and blind face restoration tasks on synthetic and real-world datasets. The code is available at https://github.com/XPixelGroup/DiffBIR

Lattice Gas Automata for Reactive Systems

Reactive lattice gas automata provide a microscopic approachto the dynamics of spatially-distributed reacting systems. After introducing the subject within the wider framework of lattice gas automata (LGA) as a microscopic approach to the phenomenology of macroscopic systems, we describe the reactive LGA in terms of a simple physical picture to show how an automaton can be constructed to capture the essentials of a reactive molecular dynamics scheme. The statistical mechanical theory of the automaton is then developed for diffusive transport and for reactive processes, and a general algorithm is presented for reactive LGA. The method is illustrated by considering applications to bistable and excitable media, oscillatory behavior in reactive systems, chemical chaos and pattern formation triggered by Turing bifurcations. The reactive lattice gas scheme is contrasted with related cellular automaton methods and the paper concludes with a discussion of future perspectives.Comment: to appear in PHYSICS REPORTS, 81 revtex pages; uuencoded gziped postscript file; figures available from [email protected] or [email protected]

Aggregation-induced emission (AIE) dye loaded polymer nanoparticles for gene silencing in pancreatic cancer and their in vitro and in vivo biocompatibility evaluation

We have developed aggregation-induced emission (AIE) dye loaded polymer nanoparticles with deep-red emission for siRNA delivery to pancreatic cancer cells. Two US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved surfactant polymers, Pluronics F127 and PEGylated phospholipid, were used to prepare the dye-loaded nanoparticle formulations and they can be used as nanovectors for gene silencing of mutant K-ras in pancreatic cancer cells. The successful transfection of siRNA by the developed nanovectors was confirmed by the fluorescent imaging and quantified through flow cytometry. Quantitative real time polymerase chain reaction (PCR) indicates that the expression of the mutant K-ras oncogene from the MiaPaCa-2 pancreatic cancer cells has been successfully suppressed. More importantly, our in vivo toxicity study has revealed that both the nanoparticle formulations are highly biocompatible in BALC/c mice. Overall, our results suggest that the AIE dye-loaded polymer nanoparticle formulations developed here are suitable for gene delivery and have high potential applications in translational medicine research