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In a pilot study, the polymerase chain reaction was found to be more sensitive than standard viral culture methods for the detection of cytomegalovirus, particularly from blood and tissues. We therefore applied this technique to 71 serially collected liver biopsies from 16 orthotopic liver transplant patients. All patients were CMV-seropositive (n = 15) or seroconverted (n = 1). Seven patients (9 biopsies) had histologically proved CMV hepatitis, and all these biopsies were CMV PCR-positive. Six of these 7 patients had a prior liver biopsy that was CMV PCR-positive, but culture and histology-negative, an average of 13.2 +/- 6.9 days before the histologically positive biopsy. The 7th patient was not biopsied prior to the diagnostic biopsy. Three patients had 7 liver biopsies that were CMV PCR-positive, but histologically negative for CMV hepatitis. Two of these three had CMV infection confirmed by viral culture of blood or liver biopsy. The remaining 6 patients had a total of 26 liver biopsies that were negative for CMV by PCR, culture, and histology. Among liver transplant patients, CMV PCR performed on liver biopsy specimens correctly identified all histologically proven cases of CMV hepatitis. CMV PCR positivity in liver tissue did not correlate with latent infection and preceded the development of CMV hepatitis or other meaningful CMV infection in 8 of 10 patients.

IBM z Systems™ have been hosting critical business applications across several industries including banking, healthcare, insurance, and retail for over 50 years. With the recent growth in the use of analytics in the business environment, more customers are seeking to integrate analytics into their core operational environments to enable real-time insight on operational data for competitive advantage. IBM z Systems support very high-performance computation for business analytics. The z System processors are typically higher frequency than any general-purpose microprocessor, and with the zEnterprise® 196 (z196) system, huge gains in performance were made through out-of-order execution. The robust cache hierarchy also provides additional performance boosts to high concurrency analytics operations. The IBM z13™ extends these performance improvements with a new SIMD (single-instruction, multiple-data) engine in the processor for targeted acceleration of business analytics workloads. This SIMD engine supports new instructions for three data types: integer, string, and floating-point. We provide an overview of the z13 SIMD architecture and show how it advances current architectures. We also discuss the compiler and math library support for this new architecture and provide a few examples of applications that can be accelerated by this new hardware feature on the z13.