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Lancaster Lundgaard posted an update 5 months, 4 weeks ago
The geographical distribution and impact on animal and human health of both West Nile and Usutu viruses, two flaviviruses of the Japanese encephalitis complex, have been increasing during the past two decades. Both viruses circulate in Europe and Africa within a natural cycle between wild birds and mosquitoes, mainly from the Culex genus. We retrospectively analyzed sera from domestic and wild birds sampled in 2008 in two wetlands, namely the Inner Niger Delta, Mali, and the Lake Alaotra area, Madagascar. Sera were first tested using a commercial ID Screen West Nile Competition Multi-species ELISA kit. Then, positive sera and sera with insufficient volume for testing with ELISA were tested with a Microneutralization Test. In Mali, the observed seroprevalence in domestic birds was 28.5% 95%CI, 3.1 % 95%CI, 6.2% 95%CI and 9.8 % 95%CI, for West Nile virus (WNV), Usutu virus (USUV), undetermined flavivirus, and WNV/USUV respectively. Regarding domestic birds of Madagascar, the observed seroprevalence was 4.4 % 95%CI for WNV, 0.9% 95%CI for USUV, 1.3% 95%CI for undetermined flavivirus, and null for WNV/USUV. Among the 150 wild birds sampled in Madagascar, two fulvous whistling-ducks (Dendrocygna bicolor) were positive for WNV and two for an undetermined flavivirus. RBN-2397 price One white-faced whistling-duck (Dendrocygna viduata) and one Hottentot teal (Spatula hottentota) were tested positive for USUV. African and European wetlands are linked by wild bird migrations. This first detection of USUV-as well as the confirmed circulation of WNV in domestic birds of two wetlands of Mali and Madagascar-emphasizes the need to improve the surveillance, knowledge of epidemiological patterns, and phylogenetic characteristics of flavivirus in Africa, particularly in areas prone to sustained, intense flavivirus transmission such as wetlands.The particularity of pelvic actinomycosis lies in the difficulty of establishing the diagnosis prior to treatment. The objective of this retrospective bicentric study was to evaluate the pertinence and efficacy of the different diagnostic tools used pre- and post-treatment in a cohort of patients with pelvic actinomycosis. The following data were collected clinical, paraclinical, type of treatment, and the outcome and pertinence of the two diagnostic methods, bacteriological or histopathological, were evaluated. Twenty-seven women were included, with a pre-treatment diagnosis proposed for 66.7% (n = 18) of them. The diagnosis was established in 13.6% (n = 3) of cases through bacteriological samples, and in 93.8% (n = 15) of cases through histopathological samples, with endometrial biopsy positive in 100% of cases. The treatment was surgical with antibiotics for 55.6% (n = 15) of patients, medical with antibiotic therapy for 40.7% (n = 11) of patients, and surgical without antibiotics for one patient. All patients achieved recovery without recurrence, with a median follow-up of 96 days (4-4339 days). Our study suggested an excellent performance of histopathological analysis, and in particular endometrial biopsy, in the diagnosis of pelvic actinomycosis. This tool allowed early diagnosis and, in some cases, the use of antibiotic therapy alone, making it possible to avoid surgery.Accurate and robust detection of multi-class objects in very high resolution (VHR) aerial images has been playing a significant role in many real-world applications. The traditional detection methods have made remarkable progresses with horizontal bounding boxes (HBBs) due to CNNs. However, HBB detection methods still exhibit limitations including the missed detection and the redundant detection regions, especially for densely-distributed and strip-like objects. Besides, large scale variations and diverse background also bring in many challenges. Aiming to address these problems, an effective region-based object detection framework named Multi-scale Feature Integration Attention Rotation Network (MFIAR-Net) is proposed for aerial images with oriented bounding boxes (OBBs), which promotes the integration of the inherent multi-scale pyramid features to generate a discriminative feature map. Meanwhile, the double-path feature attention network supervised by the mask information of ground truth is introduced to guide the network to focus on object regions and suppress the irrelevant noise. To boost the rotation regression and classification performance, we present a robust Rotation Detection Network, which can generate efficient OBB representation. Extensive experiments and comprehensive evaluations on two publicly available datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.This work presents a novel platform conceived as an interconnect box (ICB) that brings high-frequency signals from microwave instruments to consumable lab-on-a-chip devices. The ICB can be connected to instruments with a standard coaxial connector and to consumable chips by introducing a spring-levered interface with elastomer conductive pins. With the spring-system, microwave-microfluidic chips can be mounted reliably on the setup in a couple of seconds. The high-frequency interface within the ICB is protected from the environment by an enclosure having a single slit for mounting the chip. The stability and repeatability of the contact between the ICB and inserted consumable chips are investigated to prove the reliability of the proposed ICB. Given the rapid interconnecting of chips using the proposed ICB, five different interdigital capacitor (IDC) designs having the same sensing area were investigated for dielectric permittivity extraction of liquids. The designed IDCs, embedded in a polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) channel, were fabricated with a lift-off gold patterning technology on a quartz substrate. Water-Isopropanol (IPA) mixtures with different volume fractions were flushed through the channel over IDCs and sensed based on the measured reflection coefficients. Dielectric permittivity was extracted using permittivity extraction techniques, and fitted permittivity data shows good agreement with literature from 100 to 25 GHz.
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