The impact of antimicrobial stewardship ward rounds on antimicrobial use and predictors of advice, uptake, and outcomes.

Objectives: To identify the impact of introducing antimicrobial stewardship (AMS) ward rounds.

Methods: We used an interrupted time-series approach to investigate the impact of implementing AMS ward rounds with in-person feedback from a multi-disciplinary team in Hospital-1, also comparing to Hospital-2 in the same city where AMS ward rounds were not yet implemented. Regression models were used to identify predictors of advice given, whether advice was followed, and associations between advice uptake and length of stay.

A diagnostic host-specific transcriptome response for Mycoplasma pneumoniae pneumonia to guide pediatric patient treatment.

Mycoplasma pneumoniae causes atypical pneumonia in children and young adults. Its lack of a cell wall makes it resistant to beta-lactams, which are the first-line treatment for typical pneumonia. Current diagnostic tests are time-consuming and have low specificity, leading clinicians to administer empirical antibiotics.

Procalcitonin-guided duration of antibiotic treatment in children hospitalised with confirmed or suspected bacterial infection in the UK (BATCH): a pragmatic, multicentre, open-label, two-arm, individually randomised, controlled trial.

Background: Procalcitonin is a rapid response biomarker specific for bacterial infection, which is not routinely used in the UK National Health Service. We aimed to assess whether using a procalcitonin-guided algorithm would safely reduce the duration of antibiotic therapy compared with usual care, in which C-reactive protein is the commonly used biomarker.

Methods: The BATCH trial was a pragmatic, multicentre, open-label, parallel, two-arm, individually randomised, controlled trial conducted in 15 hospitals in England and Wales.

Multiple introductions of NRCS-A to the neonatal intensive care unit drive neonatal bloodstream infections: a case-control and environmental genomic survey.

The NRCS-A strain has emerged as a global cause of late-onset sepsis associated with outbreaks in neonatal intensive care units (NICUs) whose transmission is incompletely understood. Demographic and clinical data for 45 neonates with and 90 with other coagulase-negative staphylococci (CoNS) isolated from sterile sites were reviewed, and clinical significance was determined. isolated from 27 neonates at 2 hospitals between 2017 and 2022 underwent long-read (ONT) (=27) and short-read (Illumina) sequencing (=18).

Quality assurance of hyperspectral imaging systems for neural network supported plant phenotyping.

Background: This research proposes an easy to apply quality assurance pipeline for hyperspectral imaging (HSI) systems used for plant phenotyping. Furthermore, a concept for the analysis of quality assured hyperspectral images to investigate plant disease progress is proposed. The quality assurance was applied to a handheld line scanning HSI-system consisting of evaluating spatial and spectral quality parameters as well as the integrated illumination.