A Neisseria gonorrhoeae immunoglobulin A1 protease mutant is infectious in the human challenge model of urethral infection.

Many mucosal pathogens, including Neisseria gonorrhoeae, produce proteases that cleave immunoglobulin A (IgA), the predominant immunoglobulin class produced at mucosal surfaces. While considerable circumstantial evidence suggests that IgA1 protease contributes to gonococcal virulence, there is no direct evidence that N. gonorrhoeae requires IgA1 protease activity to infect a human host. We constructed a N. gonorrhoeae iga mutant without introducing new antibiotic resistance markers into the final mutant strain and used human experimental infection to test the ability of the mutant to colonize the male urethra and to cause gonococcal urethritis. Four of the five male volunteers inoculated with the Iga- mutant became infected. In every respect-clinical signs and symptoms, incubation period between inoculation and infection, and the proportion of volunteers infected-the outcome of human experimental infection with FA1090iga was indistinguishable from that previously reported for a variant of parent strain FA1090 matching the mutant in expression of Opa proteins, lipooligosaccharide, and pilin. These results indicate that N. gonorrhoeae does not require IgA1 protease production to cause experimental urethritis in males.

SVD-based on-line exercise ECG signal orthogonalization.

An orthogonalization method to eliminate unwanted signal components in standard 12-lead exercise electrocardiograms (ECG's) is presented in this work. A singular-value-decomposition-based algorithm is proposed to decompose the signal into two time-orthogonal subspaces; one containing the ECG and the other containing artifacts like baseline wander and electromyogram. The method makes use of redundancy in 12-lead ECG. The same method is also tested for reconstruction of a completely lost channel. The online implementation of the method is given. It is observed that the first two decomposed channels with highest energy are sufficient to reconstruct the ST-segment and J-point. The dimension of the signal space, on the other hand, does not exceed three. Data from 23 patients, with duration ranging from 9 to 21 min, are used.

Distribution of aortic mechanical prosthetic valve closure sound model parameters on the surface of the chest.

It has been previously proposed that heart valve closure sounds can be modeled by a sum of decaying sinusoids, based on the hypothesis that the heart cavity, heart walls, major vessels, and other structures in the chest constitute a frequency selective linear acoustic system and this system is excited by the rapidly decelerating valve occluder. In this study, distribution of the parameters of this model for the second heart sound is investigated. For this purpose, heart sounds of 10 patients who have a St. Jude-type bileaflet mechanical heart valve prosthesis in aortic position are recorded. Recordings are performed at 12 different locations on the surface of the chest. To reliably assign representative parameters to each recording site, signal averaging, model order selection, and a special filtration technique are employed. The results of the analyses are discussed in relation to the above hypothesis on the heart sound generation mechanism. It is observed that site-to-site variation of frequencies of modes does not exceed the accuracy limit of proposed analysis method, but energies of these modes vary on the surface of the chest, and as a result of statistical analysis, it appears that energy of some modes are significantly different between two recording sites.

Multichannel ECG data compression by multirate signal processing and transform domain coding techniques.

In this paper, a multilead ECG data compression method is presented. First, a linear transform is applied to the standard ECG lead signals which are highly correlated with each other. In this way a set of uncorrelated transform domain signals is obtained. Then, resulting transform domain signals are compressed using various coding methods, including multirate signal processing and transform domain coding techniques.

VLSI circuits for adaptive digital beamforming in ultrasound imaging.

For phased-array ultrasound imaging, alternative beamforming techniques and their VLSI circuits are studied to form a fully digital receive front-end hardware. In order to increase the timing accuracy in beamforming, a computationally efficient interpolation scheme to increase the sampling rate is examined. For adaptive beamforming, a phase aberration correction method with very low computational complexity is described. Image quality performance of the method is examined by processing the non-aberrated and aberrated phased-array experimental data sets of an ultrasound resolution phantom. A digital beamforming scheme based on receive focusing at the raster focal points is examined. The sector images of the resolution phantom, reconstructed from the phased-array experimental data by beamforming at the radial and raster focal points, are presented for comparison of the image resolution performances of the two beamforming schemes. VLSI circuits and their implementations for the proposed techniques are presented.

A phase aberration correction method for ultrasound imaging.

A computationally efficient method for phase aberration correction in ultrasound imaging is presented. The method is based on time delay estimation via minimization of the sum of absolute differences between radio frequency samples of adjacent array elements. Effects of averaging estimated aberration patterns over scan angle and truncation to a single bit wordlength are examined. Phase distortions due to near-field inhomogeneities are simulated using silicone rubber aberrators. Performance of the method is tested using experimental data. Simulation studies addressing different factors affecting efficiency of the method, such as the number of iterations, window length, and the number of scan angles used for averaging, are presented. Images of a standard resolution phantom are reconstructed and used for qualitative testing.

A Lamb wave lens for acoustic microscopy.

In a conventional scanning acoustic microscope the excited leaky modes contribute significantly to the high contrast obtained in the images. However, all such modes exist simultaneously, and the interpretation of the images is not straightforward, especially in layered media. A lens geometry is proposed that can be used with acoustic microscopes to image layered solid structures. This lens can focus the acoustic waves in only one of the Lamb wave modes of the layered solid with a high efficiency. V(Z) curves obtained from this lens are more sensitive to material properties compared to that obtained from conventional lens. Measuring the return signal as a function of frequency results in another characteristic curve, V(f). The Lamb wave lens and the associated characterization methods for the layered structures are described. The results presented show that the Lamb wave lens is at least an order of magnitude more sensitive than the conventional lens and can easily differentiate between a good bond and disbond in a layered structure.

A new technique for line interference monitoring and reduction in biopotential amplifiers.

It has been reported that power line frequency must be accurately known if line interference is to be accurately subtracted from the output of a bipotential amplifier. In this paper, hardware developed to record the common mode line frequency signal on the body simultaneously with the ECG lead signals of a 15-channel computerized cardiograph is described. This interference reference signal and its quadrature, obtained by software, are linearly combined to be subtracted from any one of the channels to reduce line interference to below the quantization level of the 12 b A/D converter. Coefficients of the linear combination are estimated using linear regression which is applied to the relatively isoelectric regions of the data, excluding the QRS complexes. Since the interference reference signal is available in real time, simultaneously with the ECG signals, another software approach is also adopted in which an adaptive interference reduction algorithm is used to cope with varying interference. A recursive least squares algorithm with forgetting factor is used to update the coefficients. This updating mechanism is gated by the output of a software QRS detector. Results regarding the performance of both the off-line and the adaptive algorithms are given, and the effects of nonisoelectric portions of the ECG lead signals on the estimation of the coefficients are quantified.