Altered Patterns of Fungal Keratitis at a London Ophthalmic Referral Hospital: An Eight-Year Retrospective Observational Study

PURPOSE: In previous studies of fungal keratitis (FK) from temperate countries, yeasts were the predominant isolates, with ocular surface disease (OSD) being the leading risk factor. Since the 2005–2006 outbreak of contact lens (CL)-associated Fusarium keratitis, there may have been a rise in CL-associated filamentary FK in the United Kingdom. This retrospective case series investigated the patterns of FK from 2007 to 2014. We compared these to 1994–2006 data from the same hospital. DESIGN: Retrospective observational study. METHODS: All cases of FK presenting to Moorfields Eye Hospital between 2007 and 2014 were identified. The definition of FK was either a fungal organism isolated by culture or fungal structures identified by light microscopy (LM) of scrape material, histopathology, or in vivo corneal confocal microscopy (IVCM). Main outcome measure was cases of FK per year. RESULTS: A total of 112 patients had confirmed FK. Median age was 47.2 years. Between 2007 and 2014, there was an increase in annual numbers of FK (Poisson regression, P [ .0001). FK was confirmed using various modalities: 79 (70.5%) by positive culture, 16 (14.3%) by LM, and 61 (54.5%) by IVCM. Seventy-eight patients (69.6%) were diagnosed with filamentary fungus alone, 28 (25%) with yeast alone, and 6 (5.4%) with mixed filamentary and yeast infections. This represents an increase in the proportion of filamentary fungal infections from the pre-2007 data. Filamentary fungal and yeast infections were associated with CL use and OSD, respectively. CONCLUSIONS: The number of FK cases has increased. This increase is due to CL-associated filamentary FK. Clinicians should be aware of these changes, which warrant epidemiologic investigations to identify modifiable risk factors

CHEMOTHERAPY FOR ACANTHAMOEBA-KERATITIS

The design of modulation schemes for the physical layer network-coded two-way MIMO relaying scenario is considered, with $n_R$ antennas at the relay R, $n_A$ and $n_B$ antennas respectively at the end nodes A and B. We consider the denoise-and-forward (DNF) protocol which employs two phases: Multiple access (MA) phase and Broadcast (BC) phase. It is known for the network-coded SISO two-way relaying that adaptively changing the networking coding map used at the relay, also known as the denoising map, according to the channel conditions greatly reduces the impact of multiple access interference which occurs at the relay during the MA phase and all these network coding maps should satisfy a requirement called the {\it exclusive law}. The network coding maps which satisfy exclusive law can be viewed equivalently as Latin Rectangles. In this paper, it is shown that for MIMO two-way relaying, deep fade occurs at the relay when the row space of the channel fade coefficient matrix is a subspace of a finite number of vector subspaces of $\mathbb{C}^{n_A+n_B}$ which are referred to as the singular fade subspaces. It is shown that proper choice of network coding map can remove most of the singular fade subspaces, referred to as the removable singular fade subspaces. For $2^{\lambda}$-PSK signal set, it is shown that the number of non-removable singular fade subspaces is a small fraction of the total number of singular fade subspaces. The Latin Rectangles for the case when the end nodes use different number of antennas are shown to be obtainable from the Latin Squares for the case when they use the same number of antennas. Also, the network coding maps which remove all the removable singular singular fade subspaces are shown to be obtainable from a small set of Latin Squares.Comment: 17 pages, 17 figures, 1 table; some mistakes correcte