Installation and user guide for the 2010A Open Source release of BGS SIGMAmobile

This report serves as an installation and introductory user guide to BGS·SIGMAmobile, which is an application for digital geoscience field data collection developed within the British Geological Survey’s SIGMA (System for Integrated Geoscience Mapping) programme within the Earth & Planetary Observation & Monitoring Team. This document provides installation instructions, followed by a brief guide to using the application. In BGS we provide our field staff with a two-day training course, and while this guide does not replace that, it is hoped that these instructions will provide a basis for successful use of BGS·SIGMAmobile in your organisation. BGS·SIGMAmobile is designed to run in the field on rugged Tablet PCs, but can also be used on a laptop or a desktop PC. The system is a heavily customised ArcGIS 9.3.1 (service pack 1) and MSAccess application. The user must have a licensed copy of ArcView ArcGIS and MSAccess 2003, BGS does not supply these. The system will run with MSAccess2007 but the database must be stored as a 2002-2003 .mdb file otherwise it will not be compatible with ArcGIS. It is fully tested on the Windows XP operating system; BGS does not currently use the Windows 7 operating system and therefore no testing of the system on Windows 7 has taken place. The BGS uses the application on several models of Tablet PC including Itronix GoBooks, Xplore iX104s and GETAC V100’s. This guide does not provide instructions to its use on specific hardware platforms. BGS staff have used the system for mapping in locations including the UK, Ghana, Madagascar, Tajikistan, the Antarctic and the U.S.A. We use it as part of a workflow of other customised BGS-developed systems that enables us to: 1. automatically collate spatial information from our databases, 2. interpret new data from satellite imagery and digital photogrammetry, 3. take our baseline and interpreted data to the field, 4. populate corporate databases with our field data, 5. build 3D digital models and visualisations, 6. output our data in formats such as maps. Further information on these steps is available from the BGS website at http://www.bgs.ac.uk/research/technologies_epo.html. Only the field system has been supplied in this Open Source agreement so you will need to build/define your own methods for integrating BGS·SIGMAmobile into your mapping workflow

Intravenous and oral itraconazole versus intravenous amphotericin B deoxycholate as empirical antifungal therapy for persistent fever in neutropenic patients with cancer who are receiving Broad-spectrum antibacterial therapy: A randomized, controlled trial

Prolonged neutropenia is a major risk factor for invasive fungal infection (1–6). The incidence among neutropenic patients with cancer who are receiving intensive cytotoxic therapy ranges from 2% to 47%, depending on other concomitant risk factors (7). Mortality rates range from 35% to 90% (8). Fever may be the only clinical sign of infection, and definitive diagnosis is often problematic. Empirical therapy with amphotericin B deoxycholate reduces the relative risk for documented infection by 50% to 80% and overall mortality rates by 23% to 45% (1–2, 9–10). This practice is now standard in neutropenic patients with cancer who have persistent fever that does not respond to 3 to 7 days of treatment with broad-spectrum antibiotics (11)

Need for alternative trial designs and evaluation strategies for therapeutic studies of invasive mycoses.

Item does not contain fulltextStudies of invasive fungal infections have been and remain difficult to implement. Randomized clinical trials of fungal infections are especially slow and expensive to perform because it is difficult to identify eligible patients in a timely fashion, to prove the presence of the fungal infection in an unequivocal fashion, and to evaluate outcome in a convincing fashion. Because of these challenges, licensing decisions for antifungal agents have to date depended heavily on historical control comparisons and secondary advantages of the new agent. Although the availability of newer and potentially more effective agents makes these approaches less desirable, the fundamental difficulties of trials of invasive fungal infections have not changed. Therefore, there is a need for alternative trial designs and evaluation strategies for therapeutic studies of invasive mycoses, and this article summarizes the possible strategies in this area

Need for alternative trial designs and evaluation strategies for therapeutic studies of invasive mycoses.

Studies of invasive fungal infections have been and remain difficult to implement. Randomized clinical trials of fungal infections are especially slow and expensive to perform because it is difficult to identify eligible patients in a timely fashion, to prove the presence of the fungal infection in an unequivocal fashion, and to evaluate outcome in a convincing fashion. Because of these challenges, licensing decisions for antifungal agents have to date depended heavily on historical control comparisons and secondary advantages of the new agent. Although the availability of newer and potentially more effective agents makes these approaches less desirable, the fundamental difficulties of trials of invasive fungal infections have not changed. Therefore, there is a need for alternative trial designs and evaluation strategies for therapeutic studies of invasive mycoses, and this article summarizes the possible strategies in this area