2,402 research outputs found
Multicenter clinical evaluation of the Luminex Aries Flu A/B & RSV assay for pediatric and adult respiratory tract specimens
ABSTRACT
Influenza A and B viruses and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) are three common viruses implicated in seasonal respiratory tract infections and are a major cause of morbidity and mortality in adults and children worldwide. In recent years, an increasing number of commercial molecular tests have become available to diagnose respiratory viral infections. The Luminex Aries Flu A/B & RSV assay is a fully automated sample-to-answer molecular diagnostic assay for the detection of influenza A, influenza B, and RSV. The clinical performance of the Aries Flu A/B & RSV assay was prospectively evaluated in comparison to that of the Luminex xTAG respiratory viral panel (RVP) at four North American clinical institutions over a 2-year period. Of the 2,479 eligible nasopharyngeal swab specimens included in the prospective study, 2,371 gave concordant results between the assays. One hundred eight specimens generated results that were discordant with those from the xTAG RVP and were further analyzed by bidirectional sequencing. Final clinical sensitivity values of the Aries Flu A/B & RSV assay were 98.1% for influenza A virus, 98.0% for influenza B virus, and 97.7% for RSV. Final clinical specificities for all three pathogens ranged from 98.6% to 99.8%. Due to the low prevalence of influenza B, an additional 40 banked influenza B-positive specimens were tested at the participating clinical laboratories and were all accurately detected by the Aries Flu A/B & RSV assay. This study demonstrates that the Aries Flu A/B & RSV assay is a suitable method for rapid and accurate identification of these causative pathogens in respiratory infections.</jats:p
Geologic evolution of Iron Mountain, central Mojave Desert, California
This is the published version. Copyright 2010 American Geophysical Union. All Rights Reserved.Geologic mapping, structural analysis, petrologic study, and U-Pb geochronology at Iron Mountain, 20 km southwest of Barstow, California, place important constraints on the paleogeographic affinities of metasedimentary rocks in the area and provide new data to test Mesozoic and Cenozoic tectonic models for the central Mojave Desert. Rocks present at Iron Mountain include: Precambrian(?) and/or lower Paleozoic(?) miogeoclinal rocks, Middle Jurassic tonalite, Middle Jurassic Hodge volcanic series, Late Jurassic hornblende diorite, Cretaceous(?) peraluminous granite, and Cretaceous(?) granodiorite prophyry. Two phases of ductile deformation are present at Iron Mountain. The first phase, which penetratively deforms the miogeoclinal rocks, tonalite, and Hodge volcanic series, developed under amphibolite and greenschist facies metamorphic conditions. Fabric development in the Hodge volcanic series preceded emplacement of 151 ± 11 Ma granite. The second fabric deforms peraluminous granite and Late Jurassic hornblende diorite as well, and consists of spaced mylonitic shear zones. The shear zones predate emplacement of Late Cretaceous dikes (83 ± 1 Ma). The presence of probable miogeoclinal strata indicates that the boundary between allochthonous eugeoclinal rocks and parautochthonous miogeoclinal/cratonal rocks must lie north of Iron Mountain. The older amphibolite facies metamorphism and contractile deformation at Iron Mountain are interpreted to be part of a belt of Middle to Late Jurassic age deformation that runs northeastward through the Mojave Desert and forms the southern continuation of the east Sierran contractile belt. Newly recognized subvertical mylonitic shear zones of Cretaceous age at Iron Mountain have not been documented elsewhere in the central Mojave Desert. No significant Tertiary ductile deformation fabrics are present at Iron Mountain
…There are Parts of the World were Things are Badly Wrong...\u27: Forum Selection Clauses and Unfair Jurisdictions
This article considers the defences that may be available to judgment debtors who face enforcement actions in respect of judgments from unfair jurisdictions
…There are Parts of the World were Things are Badly Wrong...\u27: Forum Selection Clauses and Unfair Jurisdictions
This article considers the defences that may be available to judgment debtors who face enforcement actions in respect of judgments from unfair jurisdictions
A Graph-to-Text Approach to Knowledge-Grounded Response Generation in Human-Robot Interaction
Knowledge graphs are often used to represent structured information in a
flexible and efficient manner, but their use in situated dialogue remains
under-explored. This paper presents a novel conversational model for
human--robot interaction that rests upon a graph-based representation of the
dialogue state. The knowledge graph representing the dialogue state is
continuously updated with new observations from the robot sensors, including
linguistic, situated and multimodal inputs, and is further enriched by other
modules, in particular for spatial understanding. The neural conversational
model employed to respond to user utterances relies on a simple but effective
graph-to-text mechanism that traverses the dialogue state graph and converts
the traversals into a natural language form. This conversion of the state graph
into text is performed using a set of parameterized functions, and the values
for those parameters are optimized based on a small set of Wizard-of-Oz
interactions. After this conversion, the text representation of the dialogue
state graph is included as part of the prompt of a large language model used to
decode the agent response. The proposed approach is empirically evaluated
through a user study with a humanoid robot that acts as conversation partner to
evaluate the impact of the graph-to-text mechanism on the response generation.
After moving a robot along a tour of an indoor environment, participants
interacted with the robot using spoken dialogue and evaluated how well the
robot was able to answer questions about what the robot observed during the
tour. User scores show a statistically significant improvement in the perceived
factuality of the robot responses when the graph-to-text approach is employed,
compared to a baseline using inputs structured as semantic triples.Comment: Submitted to Dialogue & Discourse 202
Spin dynamics of coupled spin ladders near quantum criticality in Ba2CuTeO6
We report inelastic neutron scattering measurements of the magnetic
excitations in Ba2CuTeO6, proposed by ab initio calculations to magnetically
realize weakly coupled antiferromagnetic two-leg spin-1/2 ladders. Isolated
ladders are expected to have a singlet ground state protected by a spin gap.
Ba2CuTeO6 orders magnetically, but with a small Neel temperature relative to
the exchange strength, suggesting that the interladder couplings are relatively
small and only just able to stabilize magnetic order, placing Ba2CuTeO6 close
in parameter space to the critical point separating the gapped phase and Neel
order. Through comparison of the observed spin dynamics with linear spin wave
theory and quantum Monte Carlo calculations, we propose values for all relevant
intra- and interladder exchange parameters, which place the system on the
ordered side of the phase diagram in proximity to the critical point. We also
compare high field magnetization data with quantum Monte Carlo predictions for
the proposed model of coupled ladders.Comment: 14 pages, 12 figure
Discography in practice: a clinical and historical review
Chronic low back pain is the most common cause of disability in individuals between the ages of 45 and 65. Given the variety of anatomic and pathophysiologic causes of persistent low back pain, it is a difficult diagnosis for clinicians to treat. Discography is a diagnostic option that may link a patient’s subjective complaints of spinal pain to symptomatic disk disease when non-invasive imaging, such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), does not find structural abnormalities. A controversial procedure, discography is only necessary to assess painful discs prior to surgical interventions. For accurate discogram interpretation an experienced spine interventionalist must be careful to exclude false positive results and be aware of the patient’s underlying psychological state. This literature review will discuss the following: anatomy and function of the spine and intervertebral disc, intervertebral disc degeneration and discogenic pain, history of discography, indications and contraindications, a description of the procedure, complications, and the current debate regarding its outcomes
Detergency and its implications for oil emulsion sieving and separation
Separating petroleum hydrocarbons from water is an important problem to
address in order to mitigate the disastrous effects of hydrocarbons on aquatic
ecosystems. A rational approach to address the problem of marine oil water
separation is to disperse the oil with the aid of surfactants in order to
minimize the formation of large slicks at the water surface and to maximize the
oil-water interfacial area. Here we investigate the fundamental wetting and
transport behavior of such surfactant-stabilized droplets and the flow
conditions necessary to perform sieving and separation of these stabilized
emulsions. We show that, for water soluble surfactants, such droplets are
completely repelled by a range of materials (intrinsically underwater
superoleophobic) due to the detergency effect; therefore, there is no need for
surface micro/nanotexturing or chemical treatment to repel the oil and prevent
fouling of the filter. We then simulate and experimentally investigate the
effect of emulsion flow rate on the transport and impact behavior of such
droplets on rigid meshes to identify the minimum pore opening (w) necessary to
filter a droplet with a given diameter (d) in order to minimize the pressure
drop across the mesh and therefore maximize the filtering efficiency, which is
strongly dependent on w. We define a range of flow conditions and droplet sizes
where minimum droplet deformation is to be expected and therefore find that the
condition of is sufficient for efficient separation. With this new
understanding, we demonstrate the use of a commercially available
filter--without any additional surface engineering or functionalization--to
separate oil droplets from a surfactant stabilized emulsion with a flux of
11,000 L m hr bar. We believe these findings can inform
the design of future oil separation materials
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