Clinical predictors for laboratory-confirmed influenza infections: exploring case definitions for influenza-like illness.

Objective: To identify clinical signs and symptoms (ie, "terms") that accurately predict laboratory-confirmed influenza cases and thereafter generate and evaluate various influenza-like illness (ILI) case definitions for detecting influenza. A secondary objective explored whether surveillance of data beyond the chief complaint improves the accuracy of predicting influenza.

Design: Retrospective, cross-sectional study.

Comparing the accuracy of syndrome surveillance systems in detecting influenza-like illness: GUARDIAN vs. RODS vs. electronic medical record reports.

Background: A highly sensitive real-time syndrome surveillance system is critical to detect, monitor, and control infectious disease outbreaks, such as influenza. Direct comparisons of diagnostic accuracy of various surveillance systems are scarce.

Objective: To statistically compare sensitivity and specificity of multiple proprietary and open source syndrome surveillance systems to detect influenza-like illness (ILI).

The impact of alternative diagnoses on the utility of influenza-like illness case definition to detect the 2009 H1N1 pandemic.

Objective: To investigate the impact of excluding cases with alternative diagnoses on the sensitivity and specificity of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) influenza-like illness (ILI) case definition in detecting the 2009 H1N1 influenza, using Geographic Utilization of Artificial Intelligence in Real-Time for Disease Identification and Alert Notification, a disease surveillance system.

Design: Retrospective cross-sectional study design.

Setting: Emergency department of an urban tertiary care academic medical center.

Collagen stability: insights from NMR spectroscopic and hybrid density functional computational investigations of the effect of electronegative substituents on prolyl ring conformations.

Collagen-like peptides of the type (Pro-Pro-Gly)(10) fold into stable triple helices. An electron-withdrawing substituent at the H(gamma)(3) ring position of the second proline residue stabilizes these triple helices. The aim of this study was to reveal the structural and energetic origins of this effect.