Can abstract screening workload be reduced using text mining? User experiences of the tool Rayyan.

Background: One time-consuming aspect of conducting systematic reviews is the task of sifting through abstracts to identify relevant studies. One promising approach for reducing this burden uses text mining technology to identify those abstracts that are potentially most relevant for a project, allowing those abstracts to be screened first.

Objectives: To examine the effectiveness of the text mining functionality of the abstract screening tool Rayyan.

Analysis of cell-free fetal DNA in maternal blood for detection of trisomy 21, 18 and 13 in a general pregnant population and in a high risk population - a systematic review and meta-analysis.

Introduction: The aim of this study was to review the performance of non-invasive prenatal testing (NIPT) for detection of trisomy 21, 18 and 13 (T21, T18 and T13) in a general pregnant population as well as to update the data on high-risk pregnancies.

Material And Methods: Systematic review and meta-analysis. PubMed, Embase and the Cochrane Library were searched.

Longevity of posterior resin composite restorations in adults – A systematic review.

Objective: To conduct a systematic review of the literature on the longevity of posterior resin composite restorations in adults.

Material And Methods: A systematic literature search was conducted according to pre-determined criteria for inclusion and exclusion. The studies selected were prospective clinical trials with a minimum follow-up time of 4 years, 40 restorations per experimental group and an annual attrition rate of less than 5%.

Intraclonal variations among Streptococcus pneumoniae isolates influence the likelihood of invasive disease in children.

Background: Pneumococcal serotypes are represented by a varying number of clonal lineages with different genetic contents, potentially affecting invasiveness. However, genetic variation within the same genetic lineage may be larger than anticipated.

Methods: A total of 715 invasive and carriage isolates from children in the same region and during the same period were compared using pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) and multilocus sequence typing.

The rise and fall of bacterial clones: Streptococcus pneumoniae.

Globally spreading bacterial strains belong to clonal types that have the capacity to colonize, spread and cause disease in the community. Recent comparative genomic analyses of well-defined clinical isolates have led to the identification of bacterial properties that are required for the successful spread of bacterial clones. In this Review, we discuss the evolution of bacterial clones, the importance of recombination versus mutations for evolution of clones, common methods used to study clonal relationships among bacteria, factors that may contribute to the clonal spread of bacteria and the potential relevance of bacterial clones to clinical disease.

Determination of accessory gene patterns predicts the same relatedness among strains of Streptococcus pneumoniae as sequencing of housekeeping genes does and represents a novel approach in molecular epidemiology.

Relatedness between isolates of Streptococcus pneumoniae can be determined from sequences of multiple genes belonging to the core genome (multilocus sequence typing [MLST]), but these do not provide information on gene content that may affect the potential of isolates to cause invasive pneumococcal disease. Gene content data, obtained using microarrays, were gathered for 40 clinical isolates of 12 serotypes belonging to 30 multilocus sequence types. We found that sequence variations in housekeeping genes assessed by MLST correlated well with whole-genome microarray analyses identifying the presence/absence of accessory genes/regions.