RESUMEN
S. mitis/oralis has been previously reported in isolated cases of bacterial endocarditis and liver abscesses. Its presence in urine is generally considered a contaminant. A 66-year-old male patient was admitted to the hospital due to recurrent chest tightness and four-year history of exertional dyspnea. On the second day of admission, the patient presented with urgent and frequent urination, as well as dysuria. Both initial and subsequent urine cultures showed S. mitis/oralis infection, with polymorphonuclear leukocyte phagocytosis observed in the second sample. MALDI-TOF results confirmed the isolated strain as S. mitis/oralis. Drug susceptibility testing revealed multidrug resistance to penicillin, ceftriaxone, cefepime, levofloxacin, ofloxacin, and tetracycline, but sensitivity to quinupristin/dalfopristin, vancomycin, and linezolid. The clinician then prescribed vancomycin for anti-infective treatment, which proved effective. Keywords: S. mitis/oralis, UTI, MDR, phagocytosis.
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Background: Streptococcus agalactiae can produce CAMP factor, which can promote the ß-hemolysin activity of Staphylococcus aureus, forming an arrow-shaped hemolysis enhancement zone at the intersection of the two bacterial species on a blood agar plate. This characteristic feature of Streptococcus agalactiae has led to the widespread use of the CAMP test as an identification method. Methods: Vaginal/rectal swabs, collected from women at 35-37 weeks of pregnancy, were first inoculated into a selective enrichment broth media, then subcultured onto GBS chromogenic agar and 5% sheep blood agar sequentially. The VITEK-2 automatic identification system and MALDI-TOF MS were initially employed for identification, followed by the CAMP test. CAMP-negative strains underwent 16S rDNA and cfb gene sequence analysis, as well as bacterial multilocus sequence typing. Results: A total of 190 strains were isolated, with 15 identified as CAMP-negative. Further 16S rDNA gene sequence analysis confirmed that all 15 strains were Streptococcus agalactiae. The MLST typing assay revealed that these 15 strains were of the ST862 type. The cfb gene was amplified and electrophoresed, but no specific fragments were found, indicating that these strains lack the CAMP factor due to cfb gene deletion. Antibiotic susceptibility tests demonstrated no resistance to penicillin, ampicillin, vancomycin and linezolid among the GBS strains. However, there are significant differences in resistance rates to tetracycline. Conclusion: This study found that 7.9% of GBS strains isolated from the vagina/rectum of pregnant women were CAMP-negative, suggesting that the CAMP test method or primers targeting the cfb gene should not be used as the sole presumptive test for GBS identification.
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Vessel border detection in IVUS images is essential for coronary disease diagnosis. It helps to obtain the clinical indices on the inner vessel morphology to indicate the stenosis. However, the existing methods suffer the challenge of scale-dependent interference. Early methods usually rely on the hand-crafted features, thus not robust to this interference. The existing deep learning methods are also ineffective to solve this challenge, because these methods aggregate multi-scale features in the top-down way. This aggregation may bring in interference from the non-adjacent scale. Besides, they only combine the features in all scales, and thus may weaken their complementary information. We propose the scale mutualized perception to solve this challenge by considering the adjacent scales mutually to preserve their complementary information. First, the adjacent small scales contain certain semantics to locate different vessel tissues. Then, they can also perceive the global context to assist the representation of the local context in the adjacent large scale, and vice versa. It helps to distinguish the objects with similar local features. Second, the adjacent large scales provide detailed information to refine the vessel boundaries. The experiments show the effectiveness of our method in 153 IVUS sequences, and its superiority to ten state-of-the-art methods.
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BACKGROUND: Altered expression of astrocyte elevated gene-1 (AEG-1) is associated with tumorigenesis and progression. The present study aimed to investigate the clinical and prognostic significance of AEG-1 expression in pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC). METHODS: Quantitative reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR) and Western blot analyses were employed to assess AEG-1 expression in three pancreatic cancer cell lines and normal pancreatic duct epithelial cells. qRT-PCR and immunohistochemical analyses were performed to detect AEG-1 expression in ten pairs of PDAC and normal pancreas tissues. Immunohistochemistry was then used to examine AEG-1 expression in paraffin-embedded tissues obtained from 105 patients, and its association with clinicopathological parameters including cancer classification was examined. Kaplan-Meier analysis was performed to study the survival rates of patients. RESULTS: Expression of AEG-1 mRNA and protein was markedly higher in pancreatic cancer cell lines than that in the normal pancreatic duct epithelial cells. AEG-1 expression was evidently upregulated in PDAC tissues compared to that of the matched distant normal pancreas tissues. qRT-PCR data revealed that the tumor/non-tumor ratio of AEG-1 expression was >1.5-fold (up to 6.5-fold). Immunohistochemical data showed that AEG-1 protein was detected in 98.09% (103/105) of PDAC tissues; and they were found to be associated with tumor size (P = 0.025), advanced clinical stage (P = 0.004), T classification (P = 0.006), N classification (P = 0.003), and M classification (P = 0.007). Furthermore, Kaplan-Meier analysis showed that patients with high AEG-1-expressed PDAC had shorter overall survival. A multivariate Cox regression analysis revealed that clinical stage, T classification, and AEG-1 expression were the independent prognostic predictors for PDAC. CONCLUSIONS: This study suggests that AEG-1 protein was highly expressed in PDAC and associated with poor prognosis of the patients.
