Analytical validation: Comparison of two laboratory-based methods for CSF quantitative cryptococcal cultures
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Quantitative cryptococcal culture of the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) is commonly used in cryptococcal meningitis research. We assessed the 'marble method' to evenly spread CSF onto two Sabouraud dextrose agar plates compared with the 'droplet method' using drops of CSF evenly placed around two halves of one agar plate. We found high concordance between the two methods. The Bland-Altman plot showed that the droplet method differed from the marble method by an average of -0.044 log10 CFU/ml CSF, with 95% limits of agreement from -0.324 to 0.235, indicating a small bias in favor of the marble method (P < 0.001). The droplet method of quantitative cryptococcal culture had no clinical difference compared to the marble method.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.053 | 0.135 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".