Suction Drain Tip Cultures in Predicting a Surgical Site Infection

Materials and Methods@#This study retrospectively included 1,415 consecutive patients who underwent spinal surgery between January 2016 and December 2021. Patients diagnosed with infectious diseases were excluded. Prophylactic antibiotics were administered intraoperatively and 24 hours postoperatively. Drains were removed when the volume of postoperative fluid drainage was <50 mL and <100 mL in patients who underwent cervical and thoracic surgery and lumbar surgery in the preceding 24 hours, respectively, and cultures were made. We evaluated the correlation between the results of positive drain tip culture and SSI. @*Results@#Positive drain tip cultures were found in 51 cases (3.6%). SSI was identified in 34 cases (2.4%). The most frequently isolated microorganism was methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus epidermidis (61.8%). The sensitivity, specificity, and positive, and negative predictive values of drain tip culture were 50.0%, 97.4%, 32.1%, and 98.8%, respectively. The same bacteria were isolated from the surgical lesion in 16 of 17 SSI cases with a positive drain tip culture, thereby giving a bacteria matching rate between tissue culture and drain tip culture of 94.1%. The number of surgery levels, drain remaining period, and drain tip culture positivity were significantly increased in the SSI group. @*Conclusions@#Drain tip cultures might be useful for predicting SSI. Drain tip culture had a high positivity rate in the SSI group, and the coincidence rate for the causative pathogen was high.

EST Knowledge Integrated Systems (EKIS): An Integrated Database of EST Information for Research Application

The EST Knowledge Integrated System, EKIS (http://ekis.kribb.re.kr), was established as a part of Korea's Ministry of Education, Science and Technology initiative for genome sequencing and application research of the biological model organisms (GEAR) project. The goals of the EKIS are to collect EST information from GEAR projects and make an integrated database to provide transcriptomic and metabolomic information for biological scientists. The EKIS constitutes five independent categories and several retrieval systems in each category for incorporating massive EST data from high-throughput sequencing of 65 different species. Through the EKIS database, scientists can freely access information including BLAST functional annotation as well as Genechip and pathway information for KEGG. By integrating complex data into a framework of existing EST knowledge information, the EKIS provides new insights into specialized metabolic pathway information for an applied industrial material.

A Pattern Summary System Using BLAST for Sequence Analysis

Pattern finding is one of the important tasks in a protein or DNA sequence analysis. Alignment is the widely used technique for finding patterns in sequence analysis. BLAST (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool) is one of the most popularly used tools in bio-informatics to explore available DNA or protein sequence databases. BLAST may generate a huge output for a large sequence data that contains various sequence patterns. However, BLAST does not provide a tool to summarize and analyze the patterns or matched alignments in the BLAST output file. BLAST lacks of general and robust parsing tools to extract the essential information out from its output. This paper presents a pattern summary system which is a powerful and comprehensive tool for discovering pattern structures in huge amount of sequence data in the BLAST. The pattern summary system can identify clusters of patterns, extract the cluster pattern sequences from the subject database of BLAST, and display the clusters graphically to show the distribution of clusters in the subject database.

A Case of Pneumocystis carinii Pneumonia in a Patient with Behcet Syndrome / 감염과화학요법

Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP) is one of the most common causes of infection in patients with HIV infection. With the development of effective prophylactic agent, the incidence of PCP in patients with HIV infection has been declining. On the other hand, however, the incidence of PCP has been increasing in immunocompromised hosts without HIV infection, such as rheumatoid arthritis, bone marrow transplantaion and Behcet syndrome. The increased occurrence of PCP in non-HIV- infected subjects has been attributed to several factors, such as use of stronger immunosuppressive regimens, higher awareness of PCP, advanced diagnostic technology and nosocomial spread of P. carinii. The occurrence of PCP in patients who receive immunosuppressive drugs for autoimmune disease has not been well known in Korea. We report a patient with Behcet syndrome who suffered from PCP after immunosuppressive drugs.

A Case of Pneumocystis carinii Pneumonia in a Patient with Behcet Syndrome / 감염과화학요법

Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP) is one of the most common causes of infection in patients with HIV infection. With the development of effective prophylactic agent, the incidence of PCP in patients with HIV infection has been declining. On the other hand, however, the incidence of PCP has been increasing in immunocompromised hosts without HIV infection, such as rheumatoid arthritis, bone marrow transplantaion and Behcet syndrome. The increased occurrence of PCP in non-HIV- infected subjects has been attributed to several factors, such as use of stronger immunosuppressive regimens, higher awareness of PCP, advanced diagnostic technology and nosocomial spread of P. carinii. The occurrence of PCP in patients who receive immunosuppressive drugs for autoimmune disease has not been well known in Korea. We report a patient with Behcet syndrome who suffered from PCP after immunosuppressive drugs.