Comparison Study of Accuracy of phenotypic Methods for Detecting Biofilm Producer Staphylococcus aureus Isolates

Microorganisms growing in a biofilm are correlating with chronic human infections and are highly resistant to immune system, antimicrobial agents and difficult to remove from the infected host. There are different methods to determine biofilm production such as Microtitre Plate (MtP) method , Congo Red Agar method (CRA) and Tube Method (TA) method .This study was carried out from December 2015 to september 2016, 580 specimens were obtained from patients at different hospitals in Erbil city/ Iraq. Staphylococcus aureus clinical isolates were identified phenotypically by different biochemical and molecular tests. One hundred isolates were found to be Staphylococcus aureus. MtP, CRA and TA tested Biofilm determination. This study was aimed to compare three methods of biofilm production. The results found that the accuracy and specificity of MtP was 100%, while it was 87%, 75% and 91% ,81.25% for CRA and TA methods respectively . The MtP method was considered to be superior to CRA and TA methods, and this method was the better screening for biofilm formation than CRA and TA methods, so this method can be a reliable quantitative tool for detection of biofilm formation in clinical isolates of S. aureu

Rewards systems at the organizational level and execution of projects in the construction industry in Gaza strip

Rewards systems at the organizational level and execution of projects in the construction industry in Gaza stripManaging knowledge efficiently and effectively is considered a core competence for organizations to survive in the long run, so incentives play an important role in influencing of performance of employees , not available and not distributed equitably of incentives may be reflected directly on the performance of employees . This research aims to contribute to enhance the performance of construction industry through investigating rewards systems in contracting construction companies in Gaza strip, measure the effectiveness applying reward system, determine the challenges for applying different reward system. Data was gathered from employee in contracting companies by using questionnaire survey to assess the importance of applying rewards systems in contracting companies, to fulfill these objectives, research was carried in to two stages: literature review and questionnaire survey. A total number of 103 questionnaire have been completed. And after making analysis using statistical package for the social sciences program (SPSS). The result confirm that Most of the contracting companies have a comprehensive knowledge of positive and negative rewards systems and most of these companies are used both of rewards system, the study also proved the effectiveness of incentive systems in the contracting companies operating in the Gaza strip turned out that the use of incentives lead to (raise the level of performance, increase productivity, increase performance speed of doing business, increase positive competition between the work crews, access to quality in the work done and compliance with specifications, application of safety factors at work), and there are many obstacles facing the application of rewards systems in general contracting firms in the Gaza strip, majority of companies agreed that most these obstacles are (surrounding political circumstances, not to include incentives in the company's budget, the difficult economic conditions, misuse of powers in the distribution of incentives). And at the end asset of recommendation was made to encourage the firms to apply rewards systems. For example, work to strengthen the rewards system and make it more visible to staff and a more transparent and fair, including the incentives in the company's budget, and providing workshops for engineering companies to illustrate the importance of incentives in the performance of work.Supervised by : Eng. Eman Y. El - Swait

Comparison Study of mecA Gene-Based PCR With Phenotypic Methods For Detecting Biofilm Forming Methicillin Resistant Staphylococcus aureus Isolates and Comparison of mecA With femA, femB, and mecC Genes.

Staphylococcus aureus is opportunistic human pathogen that causes a variety of diseases. Out of 580 clinical specimens, 100 Staphylococcus aureus isolates were isolated and identified depending on cultural, morphological and different biochemical tests , in addition to molecular identification by using PCR with specific primer 16S rRNA. For biofilm detection, method of polystyrene microtitre plate was used and the results showed that 61% were biofilm producer and 39% were non-biofilm producer isolates. The different methods were applied for detection of methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus isolates and the identification of mecA gene by PCR was considered as the gold standard method comparing with other four phenotypic tests in sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value, negative predictive value and accuracy of method. The results of cefoxitin showed that 50 (81.97%) were similar to mecA gene PCR 50(81.97%) and sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value, negative predictive value and accuracy of these test were 100%, while, the method of oxacillin disk diffusion , oxacillin agar screening and MIC for oxacillin showed less specificity ,positive predictive value and accuracy. Whereas, sensitivity and negative predictive value for all methods equal to 100%. The results of cefoxitin disk diffusion test showed the highest specificity, accuracy compared to other phenotypic tests that were low precision in the determination of methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus isolates. On the other hand, It was found that there was a relation between femA and mecA genes, while no relation was observed between femB , mecC and with mecA

Drone-Based Vegetation Assessment in Arid Ecosystems

Proof of long-term vegetation change in arid rangelands is often insufficient to influence policy, even when the change is clear to ecologists. Drones provide a way to collect unbiased evidence of plant spatiotemporal distribution at a dramatically reduced cost for the scales needed in these habitats. Assessment of phytomass spatial distribution by drone has become a routine, but further analysis requires advanced skills in data collection and post-flight processing. Accurate assessment of phytomass temporal change will require protocols to be developed for data collection and analysis. Biodiversity assessment by drone is unreliable, but there is potential for assessing phytomass change within and among taxonomic groups in arid rangelands, by repeatedly sampling areas in which perennial plants have been classified manually

Association between proton pump inhibitor therapy and clostridium difficile infection: a contemporary systematic review and meta-analysis.

Abstract Introduction Emerging epidemiological evidence suggests that proton pump inhibitor (PPI) acid-suppression therapy is associated with an increased risk of Clostridium difficile infection (CDI). Methods Ovid MEDLINE, EMBASE, ISI Web of Science, and Scopus were searched from 1990 to January 2012 for analytical studies that reported an adjusted effect estimate of the association between PPI use and CDI. We performed random-effect meta-analyses. We used the GRADE framework to interpret the findings. Results We identified 47 eligible citations (37 case-control and 14 cohort studies) with corresponding 51 effect estimates. The pooled OR was 1.65, 95% CI (1.47, 1.85), I2 = 89.9%, with evidence of publication bias suggested by a contour funnel plot. A novel regression based method was used to adjust for publication bias and resulted in an adjusted pooled OR of 1.51 (95% CI, 1.26–1.83). In a speculative analysis that assumes that this association is based on causality, and based on published baseline CDI incidence, the risk of CDI would be very low in the general population taking PPIs with an estimated NNH of 3925 at 1 year. Conclusions In this rigorously conducted systemic review and meta-analysis, we found very low quality evidence (GRADE class) for an association between PPI use and CDI that does not support a cause-effect relationship

The presence of tumour-associated lymphocytes confers a good prognosis in pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma: an immunohistochemical study of tissue microarrays

Background Tumour-associated lymphocytes (TALs) have been linked with good prognosis in several solid tumours. This study aimed to evaluate the prognostic significance of CD3, CD8 and CD20 positive lymphocytes in pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma. Methods After histological re-evaluation of the tumours of 81 patients who underwent surgical resection for exclusively pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma, tissue micro-arrays (TMA) were constructed and immunohistochemistry was performed for CD3, CD8 and CD20. The number of lymphocytes within specific tumour compartments (i.e. stromal and intratumoural) was quantified. X-tile software (Yale School of Medicine, CT, USA) was used to stratify patients into 'high’ and 'low’ for each of the lymphocytes stained and their association with survival. Receiver operating curves (ROC) were constructed to evaluate the association between the TALs, alone and in combination, with clinicopathological features. Results CD3 and CD8 positive lymphocytes were associated with grade of tumour differentiation. The presence of intratumoural CD3 positive cells was associated with improved survival (p = 0.028), and intratumoural and stromal CD3 in combination also correlated with improved survival (p = 0.043). When CD20 positive lymphocyte levels were high, survival improved (p = 0.029) and similar results were seen for CD20 in combination with intratumoural CD3 (p = 0.001) and stromal CD8 (p = 0.013). Conclusions This study has shown a correlation between the presence of TALs and survival in pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma

FPGA acceleration of the phylogenetic likelihood function for Bayesian MCMC inference methods

Background Likelihood (ML)-based phylogenetic inference has become a popular method for estimating the evolutionary relationships among species based on genomic sequence data. This method is used in applications such as RAxML, GARLI, MrBayes, PAML, and PAUP. The Phylogenetic Likelihood Function (PLF) is an important kernel computation for this method. The PLF consists of a loop with no conditional behavior or dependencies between iterations. As such it contains a high potential for exploiting parallelism using micro-architectural techniques. In this paper, we describe a technique for mapping the PLF and supporting logic onto a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA)-based co-processor. By leveraging the FPGA\u27s on-chip DSP modules and the high-bandwidth local memory attached to the FPGA, the resultant co-processor can accelerate ML-based methods and outperform state-of-the-art multi-core processors. Results We use the MrBayes 3 tool as a framework for designing our co-processor. For large datasets, we estimate that our accelerated MrBayes, if run on a current-generation FPGA, achieves a 10× speedup relative to software running on a state-of-the-art server-class microprocessor. The FPGA-based implementation achieves its performance by deeply pipelining the likelihood computations, performing multiple floating-point operations in parallel, and through a natural log approximation that is chosen specifically to leverage a deeply pipelined custom architecture. Conclusions Heterogeneous computing, which combines general-purpose processors with special-purpose co-processors such as FPGAs and GPUs, is a promising approach for high-performance phylogeny inference as shown by the growing body of literature in this field. FPGAs in particular are well-suited for this task because of their low power consumption as compared to many-core processors and Graphics Processor Units (GPUs)

2017 HRS/EHRA/ECAS/APHRS/SOLAECE expert consensus statement on catheter and surgical ablation of atrial fibrillation: executive summary.

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Measurement of the tt¯tt¯ production cross section in pp collisions at √s=13 TeV with the ATLAS detector

A measurement of four-top-quark production using proton-proton collision data at a centre-of-mass energy of 13 TeV collected by the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 139 fb−1 is presented. Events are selected if they contain a single lepton (electron or muon) or an opposite-sign lepton pair, in association with multiple jets. The events are categorised according to the number of jets and how likely these are to contain b-hadrons. A multivariate technique is then used to discriminate between signal and background events. The measured four-top-quark production cross section is found to be 26+17−15 fb, with a corresponding observed (expected) significance of 1.9 (1.0) standard deviations over the background-only hypothesis. The result is combined with the previous measurement performed by the ATLAS Collaboration in the multilepton final state. The combined four-top-quark production cross section is measured to be 24+7−6 fb, with a corresponding observed (expected) signal significance of 4.7 (2.6) standard deviations over the background-only predictions. It is consistent within 2.0 standard deviations with the Standard Model expectation of 12.0 ± 2.4 fb