Automated blood culture systems

This review compares automated systems of blood culture for the detection of positive bottles, excluding mycobacteria. The performance of different systems is influenced by several key variables, including volume of the blood sample, the use of resins, shaking to increase the recovery of aerobic microorganisms, duration of incubation and final subculture. The Bactec, BacT/Alert, BioArgos and ESP systems require further study and technical improvement. There is no single ideal system of blood culture, and combinations of two or more methods are likely to provide the best results

Evaluation of the automicrobic system for the identification of Streptococcus mutans

This study was partially supported by the Andalusian Regional Governmentthrough the research project "Microbiology,Immunology,and Epidemiologyof Oral Diseases."The performance of the Automicrobic System with the Vitek gram-positive identification card (bioMérieux, France) in identifying strains of Streptococcus mutans was studied. Of 160 strains assayed, 72.5% were confirmed to be Streptococcus mutans; the remainder were identified as other species of streptocci (Streptococcus bovis, Streptococcus uberis, Streptococcus anginosus, Streptococcus sanguis I and II, Streptococcus intermedius, and Streptococcus constellatus).Andalusian Regional Governmen

Low prevalence of circulating anti-type 6 human herpes virus IgG-antibodies in Spanish children

The prevalence of circulating anti-HHV-6 IgG-antibodies in an infant population, was investigated to assess the evolution of antibody titres from birth to adulthood. Endpoint titration was done by indirect immunofluorescence, in 525 samples of serum from children, healthy adults and pregnant women. In the children, seropositivity increased from the age of 6 months, and was highest (56.52%) between 7 months and 1 year, suggesting that the initial infection occurred between 6 and 12 months of age

Identifying Topics in Social Media Posts using DBpedia

This paper describes a method for identifying topics in text published in social media, by applying topic recognition techniques that exploit DBpedia. We evaluate such method for social media in Spanish and we provide the results of the evaluation performed

Effect of water contamination on the shear bond strength of five orthodontic adhesives

Objectives: To evaluate the shear bond strength and site of failure of brackets bonded to dry and wet enamel. Study design: 50 teeth were divided into ten groups of 5 teeth each (10 surfaces). In half the groups enamel was kept dry before bonding, and in the other half distilled water was applied to wet the surface after etching. The following groups were established: 1)Acid/Transbond-XT (dry/wet) XT; 2) Transbond Plus Self Etching Primer (TSEP)/Transbond-XT paste (dry/wet); 3) Concise (dry), Transbond MIP/Concise (wet), 4) FujiOrtho-LC (dry/wet); 5) SmartBond (dry/wet). Brackets were bonded to both buccal and lingual surfaces. Specimens were stored in distilled water (24 hours at 37ºC) and thermocycled. Brackets were debonded using a Universal testing machine (cross-head speed 1 mm/min). Failure sites were classified using a stereomicroscope. Results: No significant differences in bond strength were detected between the adhesives under wet and dry conditions except for Smart- Bond, whose bond strength was significantly lower under dry conditions. For all the adhesives most bond failures were of mixed site location except for Smartbond, which failed at the adhesive-bracket interface. Conclusions: Under wet conditions the bonding capacity of the adhesives tested was similar than under dry conditions, with the exception of SmartBond which improved under wet condition

Post-hydrogen Peroxide Effect in Peroxidogenic Oral Streptococci

This study was partially supported by the Andalusian Regional Government through the research project 'Microbiology, Immunology and Epidemiology o f Oral Diseases"The effects of inhibitory concentrations of hydrogen peroxide on the growth of 11 strains of four peroxidogenic species of oral streptococci (Streptococcus oralis, Streptococcus mitis. Streptococcus sanguis and Streptococcus sobrinus) were studied. The effect of H2O2 was measured as the post-hydrogen peroxide effect (PHPE), defined as the difference in the time necessary for the bacterial population in batch cult ure to increase by one decimal logarithmic unit of the number of colony forming units per millilitre, between cultures exposed to a concentration equal to the corresponding minimum inhibitory concentration of H2O2, and non-exposed cultures. No PHPE was shown by S. oralis NCTC 11427; other strains tested gave times ranging from 20 min (S. sanguis JENA 2697) to 9 h 15 min (S. mitis OGS 232). The PHPE appears to be strain- and species-dependent.Andalusian Regional Governmen

Maximum Causal Entropy Specification Inference from Demonstrations

In many settings (e.g., robotics) demonstrations provide a natural way to specify tasks; however, most methods for learning from demonstrations either do not provide guarantees that the artifacts learned for the tasks, such as rewards or policies, can be safely composed and/or do not explicitly capture history dependencies. Motivated by this deficit, recent works have proposed learning Boolean task specifications, a class of Boolean non-Markovian rewards which admit well-defined composition and explicitly handle historical dependencies. This work continues this line of research by adapting maximum causal entropy inverse reinforcement learning to estimate the posteriori probability of a specification given a multi-set of demonstrations. The key algorithmic insight is to leverage the extensive literature and tooling on reduced ordered binary decision diagrams to efficiently encode a time unrolled Markov Decision Process. This enables transforming a naive exponential time algorithm into a polynomial time algorithm.Comment: Computer Aided Verification, 202