Multicenter clinical evaluation of VITEK® 2 meropenem-vaborbactam for susceptibility testing of Enterobacterales and Pseudomonas aeruginosa

The carbapenem/beta-lactamase inhibitor (meropenem-vaborbactam; MEV) used to treat complicated urinary tract infections and pyelonephritis in adults was approved in 2017 by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). We evaluated VITEK 2 MEV (bioMérieux, Durham, NC) compared to the reference broth microdilution (BMD) method. Of 449 Enterobacterales isolates analyzed per FDA/CLSI breakpoints, overall performance was 98.2% Essential Agreement (EA), 98.7% Category Agreement (CA), and 0% Very Major Errors (VME) or Major Errors (ME). For FDA intended for use 438 Enterobacterales isolates, performance was 98.2% EA, 98.6% CA, and 0% VME or ME. Evaluable EA was 81.0% but with only 42 on-scale evaluable results. Individual species demonstrated EA and CA rates ≥ 90% without any VME or ME. When evaluated using European Committee on Antimicrobial Susceptibility Testing (EUCAST) breakpoints, overall VITEK 2 MEV performance for Enterobacterales and Pseudomonas aeruginosa demonstrated 97.3% EA, 99.2% CA, 2.3% VME, and 0.6% ME (after error resolution: 97.3% EA, 99.4% CA, 2.2% VME, and 0.4% ME) compared to the reference BMD method. Performance for P. aeruginosa included 92.2% EA, 97.4% CA, 0% VME, and 3.0% ME (after error resolution: 92.2% EA, 98.7% CA, 0% VME, and 1.5% ME). Performance for Enterobacterales included 98.2% EA, 99.6% CA, 3.0% VME, and 0.2% ME. Evaluable EA was 80.6% but due to only 67 evaluable results. These findings support VITEK 2 MEV as an accurate automated system for MEV susceptibility testing of Enterobacterales and P. aeruginosa and could be an alternate solution to the manual labor intensive reference BMD method.

Analysis of solar cooker with thermal storage for remote hilly areas: determination of heating and cooling characteristic time

Solar cooking finds a major application in rural areas of Uttarakhand, India, yet its utilization is still limited due to certain limitation such as intermittent nature of solar radiations. This drawback limits solar cooker in becoming a viable alternate solution of LPG and other pollution causing resources such as wood. In order to cater this problem a numerical analysis of box type solar cooker with storage is carried out. The energy stored in the storage material will keep the cooker warm up to the time when food is consumed. Charging and discharging time analysis is performed in with an aim to understand the effect of storage on solar cooker. Heating and cooling characteristic time are being evaluated and analysed with storage. Thermal performance of box type solar cooker is measured in terms of figures of merit according to BIS standards. The effect of storage has also been analysed in terms of charging and discharging time and first figure of merit of box type solar cooker.it has been observed that during discharging the heat is stored for more duration as compared to the charging time as discharge time is approx. 4-5 hours while charging time for the same amount of insolation is around 3-4 hours.

Development And Analysis of Ant Colony Optimization-Based Light Weight Container (ACO-LWC) Algorithm For Efficient Load Balancing

Container technology is the latest lightweight virtualization technology which is an alternate solution for virtual machines. Docker is the most popular container technology for creating and managing Linux containers. Containers appear to be the most suitable medium for use in dynamic development, packaging, shipping and many other information technology environments. The portability of the software through the movement of containers is appreciated by businesses and IT professionals. In the docker container, one or more processes may run simultaneously. The main objective of this work is to propose a new algorithm called Ant Colony Optimization-based Light Weight Container (ACO-LWC) load balancing scheduling algorithm for scheduling various process requests. This algorithm is designed such that it shows best performance in terms of load balancing. The proposed algorithm is validated by comparison with two existing load balancing scheduling algorithms namely, least connection algorithm and round robin algorithm. The proposed algorithm is validated using metrics like response time (ms), mean square error (MSE), node load, largest TPS of cluster (fetches/sec), average response time for each request (ms) and run time (s). Quantitative analysis show that the proposed ACO-LWC scheme achieves best performance in terms of all the metrics compared to the existing algorithms. In particular, the response time for least connection, round robin and the proposed ACO-LWC algorithm are 58ms, 60ms and 48ms respectively when 95% requests are finished. Similarly, the error for scheduling 120 requests using least connection, round robin and the proposed ACO-LWC algorithm are 0.15, 0.11 and 0.06 respectively.

Upgrading an Analog Recovery Loop for Optimized Decoding Jointly to an Increased data-Rate

The maximum likelihood detection theory improves the error-rate of a sub-optimal but cheaper, coded symbol recovery loop using oversampling proposed as an alternate solution for the decoding problem without the log-likelihood ratio computation. The former implementation delivers the output data in one-symbol delay, and the required transistor count makes this approach attractive for ultra-low-energy wireless applications. The proposed hardware upgrade includes an analog to digital converter and fixed-point accumulation logic to compute the soft values, replacing a trigger used as a hard detector. This work investigates the soft decoding in the presence of binary and non-binary source symbols. Simulation results show that the soft approach improves the signal-to-noise ratio by 3dB and 2.5 dB when the encoding rates are 1/3 and 2/3.

Bioplastic: An accost towards sustainable development

In the current era, plastic has become a global environmental menace affecting terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. Regular plastic resilient nature towards decomposition, and it pollutes the environment. Conventional plastic is widely used in various industrial setups with no alternate substitute available. The quest to find an alternate solution to the emerging problem development of bioplastic that is eco-friendlier and adds no pollution to the environment has been much focussed. Bioplastic is plastic synthesized from renewable biomass sources rather than petroleum origin. The development of bioplastic of microbial origin will be a promising innovation to keep our world plastic-free and promote sustainability. It can be degraded easily and gets broken down into carbon dioxide, biomass, and water rapidly. The present reviews highlight the sources of microbial-derived bioplastic, polyhydroxybutyrate (PHB), polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs), extraction methodologies, optimization strategies to improve yield, degradation, application areas, present challenges, and prospects in production. We have also provided a brief insight into gene and gene clusters responsible for bioplastic production. Overall, the article will provide a comprehensive update on bioplastic to help mitigate our current problem associated with conventional plastic usage.

Designing Smart Cart Application with Zig-Bee and RFID Protocols

Aims: To improve smart cart application for better user flexibility. Background : Users are easily purchasing with smart cart but we designed in a manner such a way that • The person no needs to stand in a queue for bill. • The stock update automatically. recorded in server. Objective : The objective of this work is to find the alternate solution for time saving. Method : We have used RFID mechanism for data transmission and we used server for storing the information of stocks. Result : It proved the increased performance of the system. Conclusion : We proved that time reduction is possible and product identification through image processing is also possible.