Of the 52 health care facilities visited in April 2001, 50 (96%) were equipped with a public sector pharmaceutical depot selling syringes and needles directly to patients.
The ultrasound scanners employed in our studies were an SSD-280/SSD-1200 scAloka (Aloka, Tokyo, Japan) equipped with a 3.5-MHz sector or convex-array probe and a LOGIQ-700 scanner (General Electric, Milwaukee, WI, USA) equipped with a 3 to 8-MHz convex-array probe.
Sonographic examinations were conducted using a Philips HD11XE (Philips Medical Systems; Bothell, WA, USA) equipped with a 2 MHz sector transducer and a 9 MHz linear transducer.
Images were obtained by an experienced operator (GW) using a commercially available system (MyLab30, Esaote SpA, Firenze, Italy) equipped with a 3.5 MHz sector scanning electronic transducer in the left lateral decubitus position.
BCCE was only performed by competent attending physicians or fellows, or by fellows under supervision, using the Sparq Ultrasound System (Philips Healthcare, Andover, MA) equipped with a 2 4 MHz broadband sector, phased array transducer.
The forward region (8°<θ<45°) of each sector is equipped with a lead scintillator electromagnetic sampling calorimeter (EC), 16 radiation lengths thick, using a novel triangular geometry with stereo readout.
Each sector is equipped with a linear array of N t antennas (see Figure 1).
They used a magnetic sector instrument equipped with a MALDI ion source and they coupled a drift-time ion mobility spectrometer after it.
A commercially available CX-50 machine (Philips, Andover, MA, USA), equipped with a 1 5 MHz probe (S5-1 PureWave sector array), was used for all examinations.
