An ontology of bacteria to help physicians to compare antibacterial spectra.

General practitioners (GPs) may lack specialist microbiological knowledge, making it difficult for them to use documents concerning antibacterial spectra provided by French health authorities. We have developed a tool to help GPs to compare antibacterial spectra, based on an ontology of bacteria generated using OWL-DL language. This tool makes it possible to search for information concerning the antibiotic susceptibility of given bacteria, regardless of the way in which this information is expressed in the document. Applied to the whole document, the tool made 4528 spectra explicit, whereas only 3471 could be understood without microbiological reasoning. A preliminary study showed that the performance of this tool was similar to that of an expert microbiologist (94 to 98% correct responses) and better than that of unassisted GPs (84-90% correct responses).

Structured representation of the pharmacodynamics section of the summary of product characteristics for antibiotics: application for automated extraction and visualization of their antimicrobial activity spectra.

OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study was to construct automatically a knowledge base concerning the pharmacodynamic properties of antibiotics and a visualization tool. DESIGN: The authors studied the various guidelines used to write the pharmacodynamics section of the Summary of Product Characteristics (SPC) for antibiotics and constructed a conceptual model of the information. Particular words, syntagms, and punctuation elements were marked in the SPC texts, and automatic extraction was then used to build a knowledge base. This base was used to create dynamic HTML tables displaying the activity spectra of the antibiotics. MEASUREMENTS: The authors analyzed the performances of automatic extraction (recall and precision). RESULTS: The conceptual pharmacodynamics model dealt with antibiotics, pathogens, susceptibility tests, and the prevalence of resistance. Automatic extraction had a recall rate of 97.9% and a precision of 96.2%. The tool displaying antibiotic spectra and resistance prevalences used color codes to identify differences in susceptibility. CONCLUSION: This tool can provide an overview of the prevalence of resistance as expressed in SPC in primary care settings. Its potential impact should be evaluated.

Fatal acute cellulitis due to Neisseria meningitidis.

We describe the first fatal evolution of cellulitis due to Neisseria meningitidis serogroup Y involving an 85-year-old woman. She presented with an extensive cellulitis of the left side of the face, neck, and thorax and septic shock. In spite of active antibiotic therapy, evolution was rapidly fatal.

Pulmonary coinfection by Trichomonas vaginalis and Pneumocystis sp. as a novel manifestation of AIDS.

A 41-year-old man was hospitalized, presenting increasing dyspnea and extensive ground-glass opacities on chest X-ray. Infection by human immunodeficiency virus was confirmed. Cytologic examination of bronchoalveolar lavage fluid revealed numerous trichomonads and aggregates of Pneumocystis sp. Treatment was followed by rapid improvement of respiratory symptoms and chest X-ray. The trichomonad species found in the lungs was identified as Trichomonas vaginalis by small-subunit rRNA gene amplification and sequencing. With the exception of rare cases of contamination of newborn babies during delivery, T. vaginalis has never been found in lungs in healthy or immunocompromised adults. In the present case, T. vaginalis is found as coinfecting agent. Our data, like those found in the literature, suggest that trichomonads are overlooked parasites that may be regularly implicated in diverse human pathologies.