University of Strathclyde at TREC HARD

The motivation behind the University of Strathclyde's approach to this years HARD track was inspired from previous experiences by other participants, in particular research by [1], [3] and [4]. A running theme throughout these papers was the underlying hypothesis that a user's familiarity in a topic (i.e. their previous experience searching a subject), will form the basis for what type or style of document they will perceive as relevant. In other words, the user's context with regards to their previous search experience will determine what type of document(s) they wish to retrieve

Intra-assessor consistency in question answering

In this paper we investigate the consistency of answer assessment in a complex question answering task examining features of assessor consistency, types of answers and question type

Modelling epistemic uncertainty in IR evaluation

Modern information retrieval (IR) test collections violate the completeness assumption of the Cranfield paradigm. In order to maximise the available resources, only a sample of documents (i.e. the pool) are judged for relevance by a human assessor(s). The subsequent evaluation protocol does not make any distinctions between assessed or unassessed documents, as documents that are not in the pool are assumed to be not relevant for the topic. This is beneficial from a practical point of view, as the relative performance can be compared with confidence if the experimental conditions are fair for all systems. However, given the incompleteness of relevance assessments, two forms of uncertainty emerge during evaluation. The first is Aleatory uncertainty, which refers to variation in system performance across the topic set, which is often addressed through the use of statistical significance tests. The second form of uncertainty is Epistemic, which refers to the amount of knowledge (or ignorance) we have about the estimate of a system's performance

Detection and molecular analysis of moxifloxacin mic values of mycobacterium tuberculosis strains isolated from clinical specimens [Klinik Örneklerden elde edilen mycobacterium tuberculosis İzolatlarının moksifloksasin mİk değerlerinin tespiti ve moleküler analizi]

PubMedID: 31414626Tuberculosis (TB) is a chronic, granulomatous and necrotizing disease caused by microorganisms belonging to the Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex group. In 2017, 6.4 million new TB cases have been reported according to the World Health Organization 2018 Global Tuberculosis Report. TB remains among the major health problems of our time due to the increasing drug resistance problem and the difficulties in definitive diagnosis in recent years. It is stated by clinicians that intensive use of quinolone group drugs with oral form in simple indications such as respiratory or urinary tract infections may lead to resistance and this may result in treatment failures. The aim of this study was to determine the moxifloxacin susceptibility of M.tuberculosis isolates obtained from clinical specimens by phenotypical methods, to determine the resistance rates of moxifloxacin and to investigate the relationship between phenotypical resistance and mutations in the gyrA gene. A hundred (n= 100) consecutive non-multidrug resistant and 37 non-consecutive multidrug resistant M.tuberculosis strains isolated from the clinical specimens of patients with pulmonary tuberculosis were included in the study. The moxifloxacin susceptibility of the isolates was determined by using Löwenstein-Jensen medium and their epidemiological properties were investigated and also mutations detected by gyrA region were compared with drug susceptibility rates. Of the 137 isolates tested for phenotypical susceptibility, 25 (18.2%) were found to be resistant to moxifloxacin. Resistance rate among non-multidrug resistant and multidrug resistant isolates were determined as 17% and 21.6%, respectively. According to the results of the sequencing analysis, of the gyrA regions of all the isolates included in the study, a single base mutation was found in a total of six samples. The location positions of the mutations were determined as D94Y, D94G, A90V, G88A and among two strains as D89N. Two of the isolates with mutations were found to be phenotypically susceptible to moxifloxacin. In our study, it was found that moxifloxacin resistance in M.tuberculosis isolates was higher than similar studies and it was found that different mechanisms may be responsible for the existing resistance other than the mutations in the gyrA gene. It was concluded that the data obtained from the study should be shared with all clinicians in the country due to the possibility of resistance development to this group of drugs in a short time and considering this drug will have an important role in the treatment of TB, it should be used more limited in non-specific indications. Further studies using larger case groups and isolates are needed for the continuation of the research. © 2019 Ankara Microbiology Society. All rights reserved

Potentiation effect of the AMPK activator A-769662 on cardiac myocytes metabolism and survival

Abstract 286 van Poster session 2 Frontiers in CardioVascular Biology, London 30th March – 1st April 2012 Second Congress of the ESC Council on Basic Cardiovascular Science