Minerva

What’s the significance of finding Candida species in heart blood cultures at autopsy? A study identified of 23 patients with such findings and compared them with 10 patients with positive antemortem blood cultures for Candida, but negative postmortem heart blood cultures. The results indicate that candidaemia—whether at autopsy heart blood culture or by antemortem blood culture—is an insensitive but highly specific indicator of disseminated candidiasis (Journal of Clinical Pathology 2010;63:337-40, doi:10.1136/jcp.2009.070607).

As “e-patients” grow in number worldwide, is there a safer way for consumers to glean good information? In a randomised controlled trial to evaluate a prototype medical search engine, lay participants attempted to diagnose two patients with headache. Controls just used the history they were given and had access to the internet; the intervention group used the search engine. Both groups did equally well with the more common diagnosis, but the intervention group did significantly better with the more complex case (The Open Medical Informatics Journal 2010;4:12-20, doi:10.2174/1874431101004010012).

A fully wearable artificial pancreas system could revolutionise the treatment of type …