Publications by authors named "G Bino Rucker"
Background: Paediatric patients undergoing surgery for congenital heart disease (CHD) are at risk for postoperative low cardiac output syndrome (LCOS) and mortality. LCOS affects up to 25% of children after heart surgery. It consists of reduced myocardial function and increases postoperative morbidity, prolongs mechanical ventilation, and lengthens the duration of intensive care unit (ICU) stay.
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- The field of meta-analysis for diagnostic test accuracy studies is evolving, focusing on methods to analyze multiple thresholds of sensitivity and specificity.
- A case study highlighted the application of various methods for meta-analyzing diagnostic test studies, but no comprehensive simulation has compared these methods systematically.
- This article presents a simulation study that evaluates three frequentist approaches for analyzing ROC curves, finding that Hoyer et al.'s method performed the best in most scenarios and is suggested for practical use.
Quantifying the contributions, or weights, of comparisons or single studies to the estimates in a network meta-analysis (NMA) is an active area of research. We extend this work to include the contributions of paths of evidence. We present a general framework, based on the path-design matrix, that describes the problem of finding path contributions as a linear equation.
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- - The study evaluated the effectiveness of antigen rapid diagnostic tests (Ag-RDT) and RT-qPCR in detecting infectious SARS-CoV-2 by comparing them with virus isolation as a reference.
- - Out of 20 studies reviewed, both tests showed varying levels of sensitivity and specificity, with Ag-RDT showing 93% sensitivity and 87% specificity, while RT-qPCR had 98% sensitivity but only 45% specificity.
- - The findings highlight that while Ag-RDT can identify most infectious samples, RT-qPCR's high sensitivity doesn't necessarily indicate true infectivity due to its low specificity, and both tests have limitations that should be considered when interpreting results.
Introduction: Apolipoprotein-L1 (APOL1) is a primate-specific protein component of high-density lipoprotein (HDL). Two variants of APOL1 (G1 and G2), provide resistance to parasitic infections in African Americans but are also implicated in kidney-related diseases and transplant outcomes in recipients. This study aims to identify these risk variants using a novel probe-independent quantitative real-time PCR method in a high African American recipient cohort.
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