Endocarditis.

Infectious endocarditis (IE) is a universally fatal condition if left unmanaged, requiring urgent evaluation and treatment. Fever, new heart murmur, vegetations found by echocardiogram, and bacteremia are the most common symptoms and findings. Blood cultures and echocardiography are obligatory diagnostic modalities and should be used with the modified Duke criteria, the accepted diagnostic aid, when establishing a diagnosis of IE.

Cost-effectiveness of ipilimumab versus high-dose interferon as an adjuvant therapy in resected high-risk melanoma.

Background: Adjuvant ipilimumab was found to improve the overall survival and reduce toxicity compared to high-dose interferon (HDI) in patients with resected, high-risk melanoma. However, the cost of ipilimumab is substantially higher than HDI. This study evaluates the cost-effectiveness of ipilimumab as an adjuvant treatment in melanoma from a healthcare perspective.

Outcomes for Muscle-invasive Bladder Cancer with Radical Cystectomy or Trimodal Therapy in US Veterans.

Background: Muscle-invasive bladder cancer (MIBC) remains undertreated despite multiple potentially curative options. Both radical cystectomy (RC) with or without neoadjuvant chemotherapy and trimodal therapy (TMT), including transurethral resection of bladder tumor followed by chemoradiotherapy, are standard treatments.

Objective: To evaluate real-world clinical outcomes of RC with neoadjuvant chemotherapy (RC-NAC), RC without NAC, TMT with National Comprehensive Cancer Network guideline-preferred radiosensitizing chemotherapy including cisplatin or mitomycin-C and 5-fluorouracil (pTMT), and TMT with nonpreferred chemotherapy (npTMT).

Cost-Effectiveness Analysis of Stereotactic Ablative Radiation Therapy in Patients With Oligometastatic Cancer.

Purpose: The Stereotactic Ablative Radiation therapy for Comprehensive Treatment of Oligometastatic Tumors phase 2 randomized clinical trial found that stereotactic ablative radiation therapy (SABR) improved outcomes among cancer patients with oligometastatic disease. Yet, the cost of SABR along with the large number of patients with oligometastatic disease raises the important question of value. This study sought to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of the addition of SABR compared with standard therapy alone among cancer patients with oligometastatic disease.

Evaluation of the Use of Cancer Registry Data for Comparative Effectiveness Research.

Importance: Researchers often analyze cancer registry data to assess for differences in survival among cancer treatments. However, the retrospective, nonrandomized design of these analyses raises questions about study validity.

Objective: To examine the extent to which comparative effectiveness analyses using observational cancer registry data produce results concordant with those of randomized clinical trials.

Analysis of the dynamic Bacillus subtilis Ser/Thr/Tyr phosphoproteome implicated in a wide variety of cellular processes.

The physiological role of proteins phosphorylated on serine/threonine/tyrosine (Ser/Thr/Tyr) residues or the identity of the corresponding kinases and phosphatases is generally poorly understood in bacteria. As a first step in analysing the importance of such phosphorylation, we sought to establish the nature of the Ser/Thr/Tyr phosphoproteome in Bacillus subtilis, using in vivo labelling with [(32)P]-orthophosphate, one-unit pH 2-DE, combined with MS. Highly reproducible 2-D profiles of phosphoproteins were obtained with early stationary-phase cells.

Dispensing error rate in a highly automated mail-service pharmacy practice.

Study Objective: To measure the rate of dispensing errors and to identify the types and sources of dispensing errors in a highly automated mail-service pharmacy practice.

Design: Descriptive analysis of a random sample of completed prescriptions.

Setting: A high-volume mail-service pharmacy practice comprising a network of prescription processing and dispensing pharmacies in the United States.

Performance validation of an improved Xenon-arc lamp-based CCD camera system for multispectral imaging in proteomics.

Advances in gel-based nonradioactive protein expression and PTM detection using fluorophores has served as the impetus for developing analytical instrumentation with improved imaging capabilities. We describe a CCD camera-based imaging instrument, equipped with both a high-pressure Xenon arc lamp and a UV transilluminator, which provides broad-band wavelength coverage (380-700 nm and UV). With six-position filter wheels, both excitation and emission wavelengths may be selected, providing optimal measurement and quantitation of virtually any dye and allowing excellent spectral resolution among different fluorophores.

Supervised Learning Extensions to the CLAM Network.

The contextual layered associative memory (CLAM) has been developed as a self-generating structure which implements a probabilistic encoding scheme. The training algorithms are geared towards the unsupervised generation of a layerable associative mapping ([Thacker and Mayhew, 1989]). We show here that the resulting structure will support layers which can be trained to produce outputs that approximate conditional probabilities of classification.