Comparative study of monoclonal antibody scan in diagnosing orthopaedic infection

When clinical data are insufficient to diagnose infection of bone or joints, nuclear scanning becomes crucial in making an accurate diagnosis. The efficacy of (99m)technetium antigranulocyte monoclonal antibody Fab' fragment (LeukoScan) is prospectively compared with (111)indium white blood cell and (99m)technetium methylene diphosphonate bone scans in 74 patients with suspected musculoskeletal infections. They were grouped according to site of suspected infection: 33 long bones, 23 prosthetic joints, and 18 diabetic feet. Sixty-two of these 74 patients had surgical verification with histopathology or culture. The remaining 12 patients had clinical followup as proof of absence of infection. The overall sensitivity of LeukoScan, (111)indium white blood cell, and (99m)technetium methylene diphosphonate bone scans was 93%, 85% and 92%, respectively. Specificity was 89%, 75% and 52%, and accuracy was 90%, 79% and 74%, respectively. The conclusion from this study is that LeukoScan is more accurate in detecting osteomyelitis, with better sensitivity and specificity in prosthetic joints. Compared with (111)indium white blood cell scans, LeukoScan++ gives superior images, and results are obtained in 1 to 6 hours without biohazard risk from handling blood products.     

Distribution of diethylstilboestrol in pigs

The synthetic growth promoter diethylstilboestrol (DES) administered orally to pigs can be detected by radioimmunoassay (RIA) analysis of kidney, liver, faeces, bile and urine from animals fed continuously to slaughter, but not in muscle, fat or plasma. If treated animals are fed on material not containing DES for 72 h prior to slaughter, then the levels of parent compound and metabolite in all products decrease to become not significantly greater than those in control animals. The gross metabolism of DES in pigs and bovines appears to be similar.     

Forthcoming papers

Announcements

Preliminary course programme international centre for mechanical Sciences     

Mechanical Activation of Tetracalcium Phosphate

It was found that prolonged high-energy ball-milling of Hilgenstokite (tetracalcium phosphate, TTCP) resulted in a decrease in both particle and crystallite size, leading to a mechanical activation of the compound. This mechanically activated material demonstrated a high reactivity such that, in contrast to highly crystalline TTCP, a setting reaction with water to nanocrystalline hydroxyapatite (HA) and Ca(OH)₂ could be achieved at 37°C. However, crystalline TTCP is practically unreactive at physiologic temperatures because of the formation of a thin HA layer on the particle surface preventing further reaction.     

Dynamic light scattering measurements on the polystyrene/ethyl acetate system at semi-dilute concentrations as a function of temperature

Summary Measurements of autocorrelation functions extending over a broad time range are reported for a sample of polystyrene in ethyl acetate as a function of temperature between –44°C (-temperature) and 70°C. The corresponding spectra of decay times are obtained by two mathematical methods. The existence of three dynamic processes is shown and their temperature and angular behaviour is studied.     

Analysis of sequence distribution in methyl methacrylate-methyl acrylate copolymers by C NMR spectroscopy

Methyl methacrylate (MMA)-methyl acrylate (MA) copolymers, prepared in bulk at 50 °C using AIBN as initiator, were characterized by 150 MHz ¹³C NMR spectroscopy, including use of the Distortionless Enhancement by Polarization Transfer (DEPT) experiment to obtain methylene and methine carbon resonances as subspectra. Dyad, triad, tetrad and partial pentad distributions were measured from the α-methyl, methine and methylene carbon resonances. These were in good agreement with distributions calculated for the copolymers based on monomer feed compositions, conversions and reactivity ratios of 2.60 and 0.27 for methyl methacrylate and methyl acrylate, respectively.     

Adsorption of Cationic Dyes by Acrylic Films II—Kinetics of Dyeing

Concentration distributions of basic dyes in a film of acrylic polymer have been determined using a microdensitometric technique. The diffusion coefficients calculated from them are dependent on concentration. An explanation of the dependence is offered based on the ionic transfer of hydrogen (or sodium) ions for dye. From the concentration dependence an average diffusion coefficient was calculated and found to agree with that calculated from rates of dyeing. Rates of dyeing of a binary mixture have demonstrated the competitive effect predicted by the diffusion equation derived for the individual dyes.     

Web proxy cache replacement scheme based on back-propagation neural network

Web proxy caches are used to reduce the strain of contemporary web traffic on web servers and network bandwidth providers. In this research, a novel approach to web proxy cache replacement which utilizes neural networks for replacement decisions is developed and analyzed. Neural networks are trained to classify cacheable objects from real world data sets using information known to be important in web proxy caching, such as frequency and recency. Correct classification ratios between 0.85 and 0.88 are obtained both for data used for training and data not used for training. Our approach is compared with Least Recently Used (LRU), Least Frequently Used (LFU) and the optimal case which always rates an object with the number of future requests. Performance is evaluated in simulation for various neural network structures and cache conditions. The final neural networks achieve hit rates that are 86.60% of the optimal in the worst case and 100% of the optimal in the best case. Byte-hit rates are 93.36% of the optimal in the worst case and 99.92% of the optimal in the best case. We examine the input-to-output mappings of individual neural networks and analyze the resulting caching strategy with respect to specific cache conditions.     

Topology Dissemination for Reliable One-Hop Distributed Hash Tables

Many distributed hash tables (DHTs) resolve lookups in O(log n) hops, where n is the number of nodes. One-hop DHTs give lower lookup latencies and lower lookup failure rates. However, it is hard to maintain large, wide-area one-hop topologies. We contribute aecast, a new topology dissemination algorithm for one-hop DHTs. It avoids expensive repair mechanisms and critical points of failure in existing one-hop DHTs. When a node discovers by anti-entropy that it has missed a topology update, it initiates "controlled flooding,rdquo sending the update to nodes in the multicast tree that also missed the update. We compare aecast with a widely cited epidemic multicasting algorithm, pbcast, by analysis and simulation. Aecast gives at least fivefold fewer out-of-date nodes on average within one round of a topology update. We support it with a fault-tolerant topology agreement protocol, so that only legitimate topology changes propagate throughout the overlay. Consequently, we argue that one-hop DHTs deserve greater attention for Internet applications in which reasonably reliable nodes carry high lookup loads.