Serum ferritin/C-reactive protein ratio is a simple and effective biomarker for diagnosing iron deficiency in the context of systemic inflammation.

Background: Diagnosing iron deficiency is challenging in the presence of systemic inflammation.

Aim: To investigate the relationship between plasma C-reactive protein (CRP), serum ferritin (SF) and transferrin saturation (TS), with the objective of establishing a straightforward ratio applicable in the presence of inflammatory syndrome.

Design: Test prospective cohort and validation retrospective cohort.

BIOFIRE® Blood Culture IDentification 2 (BCID2) panel for early adaptation of antimicrobial therapy in adult patients with bloodstream infections: a real-life experience.

Our objective was to assess the effectiveness of a multiplex PCR panel for blood culture identification (BCID2) on the implementation of appropriate antimicrobial therapy. We conducted a monocentric pre/post study comparing the time to result from direct microscopic examination (DE) to bacterial identification (BI) in positive blood cultures between 2 different periods: P1 without BCID2 and P2 with BCID2. Appropriate treatments prescribed before DE and after DE / BCID2 and after BI / BCID2 were compared using direct proportion comparison and survival analysis.

Neuronal correlates of sensorimotor association in stimulus-response compatibility.

Neuronal mechanisms underlying stimulus-response (S-R) associations in S-R compatibility tasks were identified in 2 experiments with monkeys. Visual stimuli were presented on the left and right calling for left-right movements under congruent and incongruent S-R mapping instructions. High- and low-pitched tones calling for left-right movements were presented to the left and right ear, and the stimulus side was irrelevant.

Analyzing Neuronal Processing Locus in Stimulus-Response Association Tasks.

If a neuron is being recorded while a trained animal performs a 2x2 stimulus-response association task, how can we decide whether it is related more to the encoding and analysis of the sensory stimulus, to the preparation and execution of the motor response, or to the animal's decision that associates the two? The difficulty arises because, within a single task, stimulus and response are intrinsically confounded per task instruction; it is only through proper analysis of errors in performance (behavioral noise) and variance in recorded neural activity (neuronal noise) that one can identify the sensorimotor significance of such activity. A quantitative technique is proposed here, based on the framework of signal detection theory, to determine the sensorimotor "locus" of a neural process when recorded simultaneously with the animal's performance on a trial-by-trial basis. The premise is that a pure sensory process should be influenced only by the nature of the sensory stimulus regardless of the nature of the behavioral response, and vice versa for a pure motor process.

Dynamics of single neuron activity in monkey primary motor cortex related to sensorimotor transformation.

We investigated the dynamics of neuronal activity related to sensorimotor transformation during single experimental trials of a given stimulus-response (S-R) association task. A monkey was trained to perform wrist extension/flexion movements in the horizontal plane to align a pointer with a visual target while single unit activity in the primary motor cortex (MI) was being recorded. The stimulus was a colored light-emitting diode (LED) presented to either the left or right of a central reference point.