Audit on the radiographers practice for CTPA performing in emergency department

ComputedTomography Pulmonary Angiography (CTPA) is a first line exam used to stratify the early risk of patients with Pulmonary embolism (PE) who is a common presentation to emergency department.The diagnosis of acute Pulmonary embolism (PE) is based on direct evidence of a thrombus in two projections, either as a filling defect or as amputation of a pulmonary arterial branch When performing CTPA, it is important for the radiographer to be aware of all aspects which can lead to an indeterminate CTPA or incorrect interpretation....info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Evaluation of Jackknife and Bootstrap for Defining Confidence Intervals for Pairwise Agreement Measures

Several research fields frequently deal with the analysis of diverse classification results of the same entities. This should imply an objective detection of overlaps and divergences between the formed clusters. The congruence between classifications can be quantified by clustering agreement measures, including pairwise agreement measures. Several measures have been proposed and the importance of obtaining confidence intervals for the point estimate in the comparison of these measures has been highlighted. A broad range of methods can be used for the estimation of confidence intervals. However, evidence is lacking about what are the appropriate methods for the calculation of confidence intervals for most clustering agreement measures. Here we evaluate the resampling techniques of bootstrap and jackknife for the calculation of the confidence intervals for clustering agreement measures. Contrary to what has been shown for some statistics, simulations showed that the jackknife performs better than the bootstrap at accurately estimating confidence intervals for pairwise agreement measures, especially when the agreement between partitions is low. The coverage of the jackknife confidence interval is robust to changes in cluster number and cluster size distribution

Clear-PEM: A PET imaging system dedicated to breast cancer diagnostics

The Clear-PEM scanner for positron emission mammography under development is described. The detector is based on pixelized LYSO crystals optically coupled to avalanche photodiodes and readout by a fast low-noise electronic system. A dedicated digital trigger (TGR) and data acquisition (DAQ) system is used for on-line selection of coincidence events with high efficiency, large bandwidth and small dead-time. A specialized gantry allows to perform exams of the breast and of the axilla. In this paper we present results of the measurement of detector modules that integrate the system under construction as well as the imaging performance estimated from Monte Carlo simulated data.http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6TJM-4M942B5-D/1/e8aea93baa1aeae3538ea200a5a5466

Critical steps in clinical shotgun metagenomics for the concomitant detection and typing of microbial pathogens

High throughput sequencing has been proposed as a one-stop solution for diagnostics and molecular typing directly from patient samples, allowing timely and appropriate implementation of measures for treatment, infection prevention and control. However, it is unclear how the variety of available methods impacts the end results. We applied shotgun metagenomics on diverse types of patient samples using three different methods to deplete human DNA prior to DNA extraction. Libraries were prepared and sequenced with Illumina chemistry. Data was analyzed using methods likely to be available in clinical microbiology laboratories using genomics. The results of microbial identification were compared to standard culture-based microbiological methods. On average, 75% of the reads corresponded to human DNA, being a major determinant in the analysis outcome. None of the kits was clearly superior suggesting that the initial ratio between host and microbial DNA or other sample characteristics were the major determinants of the proportion of microbial reads. Most pathogens identified by culture were also identified through metagenomics, but substantial differences were noted between the taxonomic classification tools. In two cases the high number of human reads resulted in insufficient sequencing depth of bacterial DNA for identification. In three samples, we could infer the probable multilocus sequence type of the most abundant species. The tools and databases used for taxonomic classification and antimicrobial resistance identification had a key impact on the results, recommending that efforts need to be aimed at standardization of the analysis methods if metagenomics is to be used routinely in clinical microbiology

Author Correction: Critical steps in clinical shotgun metagenomics for the concomitant detection and typing of microbial pathogens (vol 8, 13767, 2018)

A correction to this article has been published and is linked from the HTML and PDF versions of this paper. The error has not been fixed in the paper

Dynamic susceptibility of dipolar coupled magnetic vortices

We report a calculation of the dynamic susceptibility of a pair of ferromagnetic circular nanocylinders stacked along the common axis, one on the other, and separated by a thin nonmagnetic spacer. Our theoretical model considers the dipolar energy without restrictions on dipolar sums, along with the anisotropy and exchange energies. Our results indicate that the nanocylinders dipolar interaction may affect the susceptibility spectrum. We have found, for instance, that a 30nm thick, 70nm diameter Fe nanocylinder holds a single magnetic vortex, and the planar susceptibility (χxx) spectrum displays two low-frequency peaks (at 0.37 and 1.00 GHz). We have also found that the χxx susceptibility spectrum of dipolar-coupled vortices in a pair of Fe nanocylinders with a 5 nm spacer exhibits peaks at 0.3, 0.7, 1.2, and 1.4 GHz. Furthermore, the relative weight of the peaks is controlled by the degree of spatial localization of these excitations

Temporal variability of biodiversity patterns and trophic structure of estuarine macrobenthic assemblages along a gradient of metal contamination

The present study aimed to investigate the response of macrobenthic assemblages along a gradient of metal contamination using a combination of uni- and multivariate methods focusing on their composition, structure and function. A total of six sites were established based on a preliminary survey, which identified three areas with different levels of contamination. These areas were defined as slightly contaminated (SC), moderately contaminated (MC) and highly contaminated (HC). Each area comprised two sites, sampled in four sampling surveys (September 2012, February, May and October of 2013). To investigate the response of the macrobenthic assemblages the number of individuals (N), number of taxa (S), ShannoneWeaver diversity (H0), Pielou's equitability (J0) and different distance-based multivariate measures of b-diversity (complementarity) were analysed. b-diversity as turnover was also analysed together with spatial and temporal changes in the trophic structure. A clear gradient of increasing contamination was consistently detected, but comparisons with available sediment quality guidelines indicated that adverse biological effects may be expected in all areas. This result suggests measuring concentrations of contaminants in the sediment per se may be insufficient to establish a clear link between ecological patterns and the contamination of the system. Also it highlights the difficulty of identifying reference areas in highly urbanized and industrialized estuaries. Only multivariate analysis (dbRDA; both using the taxonomic and trophic composition) and b-diversity as turnover showed a consistent response to metal contamination. Higher heterogeneity, mainly due to contribution of rare species (i.e. species present in a single sampling period), was observed in the least contaminated area (SC), decreasing towards the HC. In terms of the trophic function, a shift from a dominance of carnivores in the SC to the dominance of deposit-feeding organisms (and associations) along the contamination gradient was evident

Excitations of interface pinned domain walls in constrained geometries

We report a theoretical investigation of the equilibrium pattern and the spectra of head-to-head and Neel domain walls of flat Fe and Py stripes, exchange coupled with a vicinal antiferromagnetic substrate. We show that the domain wall excitation spectrum is tunable by the strength of the interface field. Furthermore, strong interface coupling favors localized wall excitations