Four-Month High-Dose Rifampicin Regimens for Pulmonary Tuberculosis.

BACKGROUND: Shorter but effective tuberculosis treatment regimens would be of value to the tuberculosis treatment community. High-dose rifampicin has been associated with more rapid and secure lung sterilization and may enable shorter tuberculosis treatment regimens. METHODS: We randomly assigned adults who were given a diagnosis of rifampicin-susceptible pulmonary tuberculosis to a 6-month control regimen, a similar 4-month regimen of rifampicin at 1200 mg/d (study regimen 1 [SR1]), or a 4-month regimen of rifampicin at 1800 mg/d (study regimen 2 [SR2]).

Researchers join forces to conserve red colobus (Piliocolobus badius temminckii) in West Africa.

The recent development of the Red Colobus Conservation Action Plan has spurred momentum to promote site-based conservation of red colobus while forging partnerships among researchers and building local capacity. Communities for Red Colobus (C4RC) is a community-centered conservation organization in The Gambia, West Africa, that aims to protect Temminck's red colobus (Piliocolobus badius temminckii) while advancing opportunities for local people. We highlight the inception and initial development of C4RC with its educational and ranger teams and describe how local and international collaborations have positively impacted the organization through training and mentoring programs.

COVID-19 Diagnosis in Computerized Tomography (CT) and X-ray Scans Using Capsule Neural Network.

This study proposes a deep-learning-based solution (named CapsNetCovid) for COVID-19 diagnosis using a capsule neural network (CapsNet). CapsNets are robust for image rotations and affine transformations, which is advantageous when processing medical imaging datasets. This study presents a performance analysis of CapsNets on standard images and their augmented variants for binary and multi-class classification.