Hospital discharge: testing the "Blaylock Risk Assessment Screening Score" in a surgical department.

Background and aim of the work Standardizing patients' assessment to identify individuals at greater risk in encountering difficulties at discharge may help to assist healthcare professionals in clinical decision making and address the gaps in quality that negatively affect continuity of care. We analyzed the predictive validity and the test-retest reliability of the BRASS index in surgical inpatients. Moreover, we evaluated the association between other variables and length of stay or location at discharge.

[The assessment of planned discharges: agreement between BRASS index and clinical judgement].

Unlabelled: . The assessment of planned discharges: agreement between BRASS index and clinical judgement.

Introduction: The BRASS (Blaylock Risk Assessment Screening Score) index is a risk screening tool for identification of patients at risk of difficult discharge.

The role of micro-scale current sensing in biomedicine: A unifying view and design guidelines.

The electrical activity of cells is regulated by ion fluxes and chemical signaling between them is sustained by redox-reactive molecules. Consequently, current sensing represents a straightforward way to interface electronics with biology and a common detection tool in several applications spanning from patch-clamp and nanopores to micro-scale impedance tracking. Reaching pA resolution at the ms timescale represents a challenge for the readout circuit and here all the criticalities involved in the optimal design of the sensing electrode are reviewed.

A compact microelectrode array chip with multiple measuring sites for electrochemical applications.

In this paper we demonstrate the fabrication and electrochemical characterization of a microchip with 12 identical but individually addressable electrochemical measuring sites, each consisting of a set of interdigitated electrodes acting as a working electrode as well as two circular electrodes functioning as a counter and reference electrode in close proximity. The electrodes are made of gold on a silicon oxide substrate and are passivated by a silicon nitride membrane. A method for avoiding the creation of high edges at the electrodes (known as lift-off ears) is presented.

Multichannel bipotentiostat integrated with a microfluidic platform for electrochemical real-time monitoring of cell cultures.

An electrochemical detection system specifically designed for multi-parameter real-time monitoring of stem cell culturing/differentiation in a microfluidic system is presented. It is composed of a very compact 24-channel electronic board, compatible with arrays of microelectrodes and coupled to a microfluidic cell culture system. A versatile data acquisition software enables performing amperometry, cyclic voltammetry and impedance spectroscopy in each of the 12 independent chambers over a 100 kHz bandwidth with current resolution down to 5 pA for 100 ms measuring time.

Doped overoxidized polypyrrole microelectrodes as sensors for the detection of dopamine released from cell populations.

A surface modification of interdigitated gold microelectrodes (IDEs) with a doped polypyrrole (PPy) film for detection of dopamine released from populations of differentiated PC12 cells is presented. A thin PPy layer was potentiostatically electropolymerized from an aqueous pyrrole solution onto electrode surfaces. The conducting polymer film was doped during electropolymerization by introducing counter-ions in the monomer solution.

Biosensors and molecular imaging.

The increase in the understanding of the physical and functional properties of the biological material, from the cellular level down to single molecules, owes its success to the development of suitable high-sensitivity platforms to image the biomaterial and analyze its response to specific stimuli. Imaging has indeed reached molecular capabilities, thanks to optical or magnetic markers [1], to the atomic force microscopy (AFM) in surface reconstruction [2], and is nearing success in three-dimensional (3-D) reconstruction thanks to X-ray holography [3].