The critical role of engineering in the rapid development of COVID-19 diagnostics: Lessons from the RADx Tech Test Verification Core.

Engineering plays a critical role in the development of medical devices, and this has been magnified since 2020 as severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 swept over the globe. In response to the coronavirus disease 2019, the National Institutes of Health launched the Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics (RADx) initiative to help meet the testing needs of the United States and effectively manage the pandemic. As the Engineering and Human Factors team for the RADx Tech Test Verification Core, we directly assessed more than 30 technologies that ultimately contributed to an increase of the country's total testing capacity by 1.

Concordance of SARS-CoV-2 Results in Self-collected Nasal Swabs vs Swabs Collected by Health Care Workers in Children and Adolescents.

Importance: Despite the expansion of SARS-CoV-2 testing, available tests have not received Emergency Use Authorization for performance with self-collected anterior nares (nasal) swabs from children younger than 14 years because the effect of pediatric self-swabbing on SARS-CoV-2 test sensitivity is unknown.

Objective: To characterize the ability of school-aged children to self-collect nasal swabs for SARS-CoV-2 testing compared with collection by health care workers.

Design, Setting, And Participants: Cross-sectional study of 197 symptomatic children and adolescents aged 4 to 14 years old.

Don't forget about human factors: Lessons learned from COVID-19 point-of-care testing.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the development of point-of-care (POC) diagnostic testing accelerated in an unparalleled fashion. As a result, there has been an increased need for accurate, robust, and easy-to-use POC testing in a variety of non-traditional settings (i.e.

Hippocampal sympathetic ingrowth and cholinergic denervation alter hippocampal muscarinic cholinergic receptors.

Cholinergic denervation of the hippocampus by medial septal (MS) lesions results in the ingrowth of peripheral sympathetic fibers, originating from the superior cervical ganglia, into the hippocampus. To determine the effect of hippocampal sympathetic ingrowth (HSI) [3H]-QNB (L-quinuclidinyl [benzilic-4,4(n)] binding was assessed in the dorsal and ventral hippocampus four weeks after MS lesions. In dorsal hippocampus, HSI was found to significantly increase the number (Bmax) of [3H]-QNB binding sites and to normalize the decrease in affinity found in animals with MS lesions plus ganglionectomy (i.