BACKGROUND: Enterococci exhibit intrinsic resistance or high-level minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) to beta-lactams than other streptococci. This appears to be due to low affinity of penicillin-binding proteins and rarely production of beta-lactamase, which gives the reason of testing beta-lactamase for blood and cerebrospinal fluid isolates. Ampicillin is more effective than penicillin in vitro, and MIC of ampicillin is generally 1 dilution lower than that of penicillin. The purpose of this study is to detect beta-lactamase producing enterococci an6 to compare MICs of ampicillin and penicillin by Vitek system (bioMerieux, Hazelwood, MO, USA) with those by agar dilution method. METHODS: We collected 110 isolates of Enterococcus faecalis and 51 isolates of E. faecium from clinical specimens in 1998. MICs of antibiotics were determined by agar dilution method and Vitek system. We also performed beta-lactamase test by the Cefinase (Becton Dickinson, USA) for 512 isolates of E. faecalis and 189 isolates of E. faecium collected in 1998. RESULTS: The most common sites of isolates were blood, bile, surgical/traumatic wounds, closed and open pus and urine. MICs of ampicillin were 1 to 2 dilution lower than those of penicillin for E. faecalis (P=0.03). But there were no significant differences in MICs for E. faecium (P=0.19). Five isolates (4 E. faecalis and 1 E. faecium) were susceptible to ampicillin but resistant to penicillin. There were no beta-lactamase producing enterococci among 701 isolates tested. CONCLUSIONS: MIC by Vitek system tends to be 1 to 2 dilution lower than MIC by agar dilution method to beta-lactams, and MIC of ampicillin is 1 to 2 dilution lower than MIC of penicillin, which could result in discrepancy in interpretation of susceptibilty tests. A beta-lactamase test for enterococci is not recommeneded for routine test in Korea.
Agar ; Ampicillin ; Anti-Bacterial Agents* ; beta-Lactamases ; beta-Lactams ; Bile ; Cerebrospinal Fluid ; Enterococcus faecalis ; Enterococcus* ; Korea ; Microbial Sensitivity Tests ; Penicillin-Binding Proteins ; Penicillins ; Suppuration ; Wounds and Injuries

The pupose of this study is to verify the role of urinary sodium in transient renal acidification defect which frequently combine acute infantile gastroenteritis. We studied on twenty-five infants, 2month to 36 month of age, during the 4 month period, from August, 1991 to December, 1991. The patients had acidosis for a mean of 3 days and sixty urine samples were collected during this period. The mean pH of 23 rine samples with sodium concentration<10 mmol/L was significantly higher than pH of 37 samples with sodium concentration<10 mmol/L, We separately analyzed 15 urine samples collected during metabolic acidosis after completion. of rehydration. The result was that a urinary acidification defent was observed in the urine samples with low sodium concentration but not in the sodium rich samples. We concluded that impaired urinary acidification defect is frequently during metabolic acidosis in infants with acute gastroenteritis and results from a sodium deficit rather than from transient distal renal tublur acidosis.
Acidosis ; Fluid Therapy ; Gastroenteritis* ; Humans ; Hydrogen-Ion Concentration ; Infant ; Sodium*

Clinical professionals gain new information to assist in patient care when they read the medical literature. Similarly, in clinical preventive medicine, medical science documents that have previously published can be searched and evaluated in order to confirm the scientific support for the clinical preventive medical service offered in order to prevent chronic disease. This paper introduces the medical informatics techniques for knowledge extraction that can become the basis for clinical practice. Particularly, it discusses the clinical document retrieval and knowledge discovery tools that can search for extracting the knowledge which the medical expert desires with data mining techniques. For example, Clinical medical personnel and medical researchers can locate the information from the latest literature rapidly or find and evaluate the scientific basis for the treatment and prevention of infection. This study can be used when they analyze the correlation between accumulated and different type of data and contributes to the detection of new knowledge. Recently, the concern about the visualization of massive data and information is high as the importance of big data has received greater attention. Contributions to this technique and decision support tools will increase gradually due to the way support for decision-making through scientific evidence for the pattern changing disease is evaluated or as one of the clinical practice guidelines is accepted.
Artificial Intelligence ; Chronic Disease ; Data Mining ; Decision Support Techniques ; Evidence-Based Medicine ; Information Storage and Retrieval ; Medical Informatics ; Medical Informatics Computing ; Patient Care ; Preventive Medicine

No abstract available.
Hypothyroidism*

No abstract available.
Mass Screening* ; Papanicolaou Test* ; Uterine Cervical Neoplasms*

No abstract available.
Mass Screening* ; Papanicolaou Test* ; Uterine Cervical Neoplasms*

Percutaneous needle biopsy of pulmonary lesion with use of fluoroscopic guidance is well estabilished as a diagnostic tool but limited by the small size and inaccessibility of certain lesions. However, percutaneous needle biopsy'has been used increasingly in relation to advance and the salty of smaller biopsy needle and new imaging modalities such as ultrasound and CT. CT, because of its characteristics of high resolution, allows tissue sampling with considerable safty from area that heretofore could not be visualized under fluoroscopy. The authors summarized 44 pulmonary lesions that underwent CT-guided transthoracic biopsy with fine-needle over a 14 month period and analyzed the sensitivity of PTNB. -CT-guided PTNB was done with 20 gauge or 22 gauge Westcott biopoy needle (Mann medical products, USA). A diagnosis was made in 27 of 44 cases (61%) including malignany in 19 of 24 cases and benignancy in 8 of 20 cases. The pulmonary mass lesions were located at the peripheral zone of the lung field in 33 cases and at the central zone in 11 cases. Complications were observed in 2 cases which were pneumothorax and hemoptysis each but specific therapy was not required The sensitivity of PTNB by one session was 61% (27/44). The sensitivity of malignancy was 79% (19/24) and benignancy was 40% (8/20). These results suggest the usefulness of PTNB using fine needles be increased in eariler diagnosis and improved staging of pulmonary nodular lesions without significant complications.
Biopsy ; Biopsy, Needle* ; Diagnosis ; Fluoroscopy ; Hemoptysis ; Lung* ; Needles* ; Pneumothorax ; Ultrasonography

OBJECTIVES: Clinical Practice Guidelines (CPGs) are an effective tool for minimizing the gap between a physician's clinical decision and medical evidence and for modeling the systematic and standardized pathway used to provide better medical treatment to patients. METHODS: In this study, sentences within the clinical guidelines are categorized according to a classification system. We used three clinical guidelines that incorporated knowledge from medical experts in the field of family medicine. These were the seventh report of the Joint National Committee (JNC7) on Prevention, Detection, Evaluation, and Treatment of High Blood Pressure from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute; the third report of the National Cholesterol Education Program (NCEP) Expert Panel on Detection, Evaluation, and Treatment of High Blood Cholesterol in Adults from the same institution; and the Standards of Medical Care in Diabetes 2010 report from the American Diabetes Association. Three annotators each tagged 346 sentences hand-chosen from these three clinical guidelines. The three annotators then carried out cross-validations of the tagged corpus. We also used various machine learning-based classifiers for sentence classification. RESULTS: We conducted experiments using real-valued features and token units, as well as a Boolean feature. The results showed that the combination of maximum entropy-based learning and information gain-based feature extraction gave the best classification performance (over 98% f-measure) in four sentence categories. CONCLUSIONS: This result confirmed the contribution of the feature reduction algorithm and optimal technique for very sparse feature spaces, such as the sentence classification problem in the clinical guideline document.
Adult ; Cholesterol ; Data Mining ; Heart ; Humans ; Hypertension ; Information Storage and Retrieval ; Joints ; Knowledge Bases ; Learning ; Lung ; Machine Learning

No abstract available.
Child* ; Dehydration* ; Humans

No abstract available.
Humans ; Inpatients*