1,720,960 research outputs found
Abdominal tuberculosis: sonographic diagnosis and treatment response in HIV-positive adults in rural South Africa.
Short course for focused assessment with sonography for human immunodeficiency virus/tuberculosis: preliminary results in a rural setting in South Africa with high prevalence of human immunodeficiency virus and tuberculosis.
Extrapulmonary mycobacterial infections in a cohort of HIV-positive patients: ultrasound experience from Vicenza, Italy.
PURPOSE:
Extrapulmonary tuberculosis (EPTB) is frequently seen in human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)-infected individuals in Sub-Saharan Africa and recent work has shown point-of-care (POC) ultrasound to be a diagnostic aid in the resource-limited, highly endemic setting. Its role in industrialized countries, however, has rarely been studied. With international migration, EPTB is increasingly seen in European hospitals. This study reports ultrasound findings and discusses the diagnostic relevance of EPTB in an industrialized country setting.
METHODS:
In this retrospective study, we describe a cohort of 27 patients with a predominantly immigrant background diagnosed with HIV and EPTB in Northern Italy and evaluate the role of ultrasound in their clinical management. All inpatient files of HIV-positive individuals admitted to our hospital with culture-proven diagnosis of EPTB were reviewed, along with chest X-rays and ultrasound studies. The outcome and results of long-term follow-up were extracted.
RESULTS:
A total of 243 HIV-positive inpatients were identified between January 2005 and November 2011. Twenty-seven of the patients [11.1 %, 95 % confidence interval (CI) 7.4-15.7] were diagnosed with EPTB. Ultrasound showed a typical pattern of enlarged abdominal lymph nodes and focal lesions in the spleen and liver in 22 patients (81.5 %, 95 % CI 7.4-15.7) and, thus, helped to raise the suspicion of mycobacterial infection.
CONCLUSION:
As disseminated mycobacterial infections in HIV-positive patients can be treated effectively if diagnosed early, and typical sonographic findings are seen in the majority of these patients, we suggest that POC ultrasound should be integrated in diagnostic and screening algorithms for EPTB in developed countries
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
The present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Cardiac cystic echinococcosis—A systematic review and analysis of the literature
: Human cystic echinococcosis (CE) is a parasitic infection caused by the larval stage of the tapeworm Echinococcus granulosus sensu lato, primarily affecting the liver and lungs. Although the heart is affected in only 0.02-2% of all CE cases, a considerable number of cases have been, and continue to be, published. However, due to the rare occurrence of cardiac CE and the resulting lack of clinical trials, knowledge about various aspects of the disease remains limited. To obtain a clearer picture of anatomical, clinical, diagnostic as well as therapeutic aspects of cardiac CE, we systematically reviewed the literature published between 1965 and 2022. The anatomical pattern of the affected cardiac structures follows the extension of the supplying capillary bed. The majority of patients (82.7%) are symptomatic and present with prolonged non-specific symptoms such as dyspnoea, chest pain and palpitations. Acute complications generally derive from cyst rupture, occur in 18.3% of cases and manifest as embolism, pericardial tamponade, or anaphylactic reaction in 83.2%, 17.8% and 10.9% of these cases, respectively. As for CE cysts localized in other organs, the diagnosis of cardiac CE is made by imaging. Serology plays a minor role due to its limited sensitivity. Unlike abdominal CE cysts, cardiac CE cysts are usually resected independent of their stage (active/inactive), because their presence impairs cardiac performance and carries the risk of long-term sequelae. More than 80% of patients are treated with a single surgical intervention. We found a disease-related case fatality rate of 11.1%. Since local recurrence was reported up to 108 months and secondary CE up to 72 months after surgery, patients should be followed up for a minimum of 10 years
Variations on the Author
“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
We provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
We conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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