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BackgroundThe necessity of performing antifungal susceptibility tests is recently increasing because of frequent cases of oral candidiasis caused by antifungal-resistant Candida species. The Etest (BioMerieux, Marcy l'Etoile, France) is a rapid and easy-to-perform in vitro antifungal susceptibility test.ObjectiveThe purpose of this study was to determine the minimal inhibitory concentrations (MICs) of antifungal agents by using the Etest for Candida species isolated from patients with oral candidiasis.MethodsForty-seven clinical isolates of Candida species (39 isolates of Candida albicans, 5 isolates of C. glabrata, and 3 isolates of C. tropicalis) were tested along with a reference strain (C. albicans ATCC 90028). The MIC end points of the Etest for fluconazole, itraconazole, voriconazole, and amphotericin B susceptibility were read after the 24-hour incubation of each isolate on RPMI 1640 agar.ResultsAll Candida isolates were found susceptible to voriconazole and amphotericin B. However, all five isolates of C. glabrata were resistant to itraconazole, among which two isolates were also resistant to fluconazole.ConclusionThis study revealed that the Etest represented a simple and efficacious method for antifungal susceptibility testing of Candida species isolated from oral candidiasis patients. Therefore, voriconazole and amphotericin B should be recommended as effective alternatives for the treatment of oral candidiasis.

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It is expected that the number of devices connecting to the Internet-of-Things (IoT) will increase geometrically in the future, with improvement of their functions. Such devices may create a huge amount of data to be processed in a limited time. Under the IoT environment, data management should play the role of an intermediate level between objects and devices that generate data and applications that access to the data for analysis and the provision of services. IoT interactively connects all communication devices and allows global access to the data generated by a device. Fog computing manages data and computation at the edge of the network near an end user and provides new types of applications and services, with low latency, high frequency bandwidth and geographical distribution. In this paper, we propose a fog computing architecture for efficiently and reliably delivering IoT data to the corresponding IoT applications while ensuring time sensitivity. Based on fog computing, the proposed architecture provides efficient power management in IoT device communication between sensors and secure management of data to be decrypted based on user attributes. The functional effectiveness and the safe data management of the method proposed are compared through experiments.

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