Predictors of Cryptococcus gattii clinical presentation and outcome: An international study.

Background: Infection by Cryptococcus gattii can lead to pulmonary or central nervous system (CNS) disease, or both. Whether site of infection and disease severity are associated with C. gattii species and lineages or with certain underlying medical conditions, or both is unclear.

Disentangling Sources of Momentum Fluctuations in Xe+Xe and Pb+Pb Collisions with the ATLAS Detector.

High-energy nuclear collisions create a quark-gluon plasma, whose initial condition and subsequent expansion vary from event to event, impacting the distribution of the eventwise average transverse momentum [P([p_{T}])]. Disentangling the contributions from fluctuations in the nuclear overlap size (geometrical component) and other sources at a fixed size (intrinsic component) remains a challenge. This problem is addressed by measuring the mean, variance, and skewness of P([p_{T}]) in ^{208}Pb+^{208}Pb and ^{129}Xe+^{129}Xe collisions at sqrt[s_{NN}]=5.

Analysis of Time-to-Positivity Data in Tuberculosis Treatment Studies: Identifying a New Limit of Quantification.

Background: The BACTEC Mycobacteria Growth Indicator Tube (MGIT) machine is the standard globally for detecting viable mycobacteria in patients' sputum. Samples are observed for no longer than 42 days, at which point the sample is declared 'negative' for tuberculosis (TB). This time to detection of bacterial growth, referred to as time-to-positivity (TTP), is increasingly of interest, not solely as a diagnostic tool but also as a continuous biomarker wherein change in TTP can be used for comparing the bactericidal activity of different TB treatments.

Perceptual Expertise of Forensic Examiners and Reviewers on Tests of Cross-Race and Disguised Face Identification and Face Memory.

Forensic facial professionals have been shown in previous studies to identify people from frontal face images more accurately than untrained participants when given 30 s per face pair. We tested whether this superiority holds in more challenging conditions. Two groups of forensic facial professionals (examiners, reviewers) and untrained participants were tested in three lab-based tasks: other-race face identification, disguised face identification, and face memory.

C-reactive Protein-based Screening of People with Tuberculosis Symptoms: A Diagnostic Accuracy Study.

: C-reactive protein (CRP)-based tuberculosis (TB) screening is recommended for people with HIV (PWH). However, its performance among people without HIV and in diverse settings is unknown. : In a multi-country study, we aimed to determine whether CRP meets the minimum accuracy targets (sensitivity ≥90%, specificity ≥70%) for an effective TB screening test.