Ultra-fast direct method for identifying microorganisms from BACTEC lytic/10 anaerobic/F flasks

Background: Fast diagnosis of bloodstream infections remains the most important challenge for clinical microbiologists. The introduction of the mass-spectrometry represents a breakthrough, although several methods are already commonly used for the direct identification from positive blood cultures we present a faster method (ultra fast) for Lytic anaerobic flasks. Methods: We compare the ultra-fast (UF) method with the extensively employed differential centrifugation method (DC) and both to routine identification after 18–24 h of incubation. UF and DC method correlation rates to the gold standard were calculated, and statistical significance was proved with the Z test. Results: UF performed better overall than DC, with this difference being statistically significant. This tendency was observed in every subanalysis.

An Efficient Numerical Solution Method for Elliptic Problems in Divergence Form

In this paper the problem − div(a(x,y)∇u) = f with Dirichlet boundary conditions on a square is solved iteratively with high accuracy for u and ∇u using a new scheme called “hermitian box-scheme”. The design of the scheme is based on a “hermitian box”, combining the approximation of the gradient by the fourth order hermitian derivative, with a conservative discrete formulation on boxes of length 2h. The iterative technique is based on the repeated solution by a fast direct method of a discrete Poisson equation on a uniform rectangular mesh. The problem is suitably scaled before iteration. The numerical results obtained show the efficiency of the numerical scheme. This work is the extension to strongly elliptic problems of the hermitian box-scheme presented by Abbas and Croisille (J. Sci. Comput., 49 (2011), pp. 239-267).