Conceptualizing and Developing Competence in Newborn Medicine Among Military Pediatricians.

Introduction: Competence in neonatal care is especially important for military pediatricians because military pediatricians can be asked to serve in remote duty locations with limited resources. We sought to understand how this competence is defined, developed, and assessed by military pediatric training programs.

Materials And Methods: After Institutional Review Board approval was obtained, we interviewed educators and recent graduates from every pediatric military training program to construct a shared definition of competence.

Comparing outcomes among outpatients treated for pyelonephritis with oral cephalosporins versus first-line agents.

Fluoroquinolones and trimethoprim/sulfamethoxazole (TMP-SMX) are first-line agents for acute pyelonephritis. Oral β-lactams are second-line agents owing to reported lower efficacy rates, primarily seen with aminopenicillins rather than cephalosporins. The increase in resistance rates and adverse effects associated with first-line agents provides justification to reconsider oral cephalosporins for pyelonephritis.

Stiffness based enrichment of leukemia cells using microfluidics.

To improve the survival rate of cancer patients, new diagnosis strategies are necessary to detect lower levels of cancer cells before and after treatment regimens. The scarcity of diseased cells, particularly in residual disease after treatment, demands highly sensitive detection approaches or the ability to enrich the diseased cells in relation to normal cells. We report a label-free microfluidic approach to enrich leukemia cells from healthy cells using inherent differences in cell biophysical properties.

Periostin promotes liver fibrogenesis by activating lysyl oxidase in hepatic stellate cells.

Liver fibrosis arises from dysregulated wound healing due to persistent inflammatory hepatic injury. Periostin is a nonstructural extracellular matrix protein that promotes organ fibrosis in adults. Here, we sought to identify the molecular mechanisms in periostin-mediated hepatic fibrosis.

Microfluidic cell sorting by stiffness to examine heterogenic responses of cancer cells to chemotherapy.

Cancers consist of a heterogeneous populations of cells that may respond differently to treatment through drug-resistant sub-populations. The scarcity of these resistant sub-populations makes it challenging to understand how to counter their resistance. We report a label-free microfluidic approach to separate cancer cells treated with chemotherapy into sub-populations enriched in chemoresistant and chemosensitive cells based on the differences in cellular stiffness.

Microfluidic Sorting of Cells by Viability Based on Differences in Cell Stiffness.

The enrichment of viable cells is an essential step to obtain effective products for cell therapy. While procedures exist to characterize the viability of cells, most methods to exclude nonviable cells require the use of density gradient centrifugation or antibody-based cell sorting with molecular labels of cell viability. We report a label-free microfluidic technique to separate live and dead cells that exploits differences in cellular stiffness.