Infective Endocarditis: Predictive Factors for Diagnosis and Mortality in Surgically Treated Patients

Background: Diagnosis of infective endocarditis (IE) often is challenging, and mortality is high in such patients. Our goal was to characterize common diagnostic tools to enable a rapid and accurate diagnosis and to correlate these tools with mortality outcomes. Methods: Because of the possibility of including perioperative diagnostics, only surgically treated patients with suspected left-sided IE were included in this retrospective, monocentric study. A clinical committee confirmed the diagnosis of IE. Results: 201 consecutive patients (age 64 ± 13 years, 74% male) were finally diagnosed with IE, and 14 patients turned out IE-negative. Preoperative tests with the highest sensitivity for IE were positive blood cultures (89.0%) and transesophageal echocardiography (87.5%). In receiver operating characteristics, vegetation size revealed high predictive power for IE (AUC 0.800, p < 0.001) with an optimal cut-off value of 11.5 mm. Systemic embolism was associated with mortality, and N-terminal prohormone of B-type natriuretic peptide (NT-proBNP) had predictive power for mortality. Conclusion: If diagnostic standard tools remain inconclusive, we suggest employing novel cut-off values to increase diagnostic accuracy and accelerate diagnosis. Patients with embolism or elevated NT-proBNP deserve a closer follow-up

Mehrfrequenzband-Empfaenger

WO 2009146862 A1 UPAB: 20100101 NOVELTY - The receiver (100) has a path (110) designed to process a frequency band (102) and another frequency band (104). Another path (120) is designed to process a third frequency band (106). An oscillator stage (130) provides a local oscillator signal (132) having a frequency that is between center frequencies of the respective bands (102, 104). Mixers (112, 122) are supplied with the local oscillator signal. A base band stage (140) processes an output signal (114) of the path (110) and processes another output signal (124) of the path (120) to obtain a reception signal (142). DETAILED DESCRIPTION - INDEPENDENT CLAIMS are also included for the following: (1) a method for receiving signals with a multi-frequency band receiver (2) a computer program having a set of instructions to perform a method for receiving signals with a multi-frequency band receiver. USE - Multi-frequency band receiver e.g. satellite navigation receiver (claimed) such as global navigation satellite system (GNSS) multi-frequency band receiver, for wireless data communication. ADVANTAGE - The receiver can process signals from more than two frequency bands, requires less number of components and consumes less power

Optimal path-control for dual-frequency overlay GNSS receivers

This paper presents a general overlay based front-end architecture that enables the joint reception of two signals broadcast in separate frequency bands, sharing just one common baseband stage. The consequences of this overlay in terms of signal quality are analyzed and it is shown that the noise floor superposition results in non-negligible signal degradations. However, it is also demonstrated that these degradations can be minimized by judiciously setting the relative gain between the two signal paths. As an illustration, the analytical optimal path- control expression to combine overlayed signals in an ionospheric- free pseudorange is derived for both Cramer-Rao Lower Bound and practical code tracking parameters