A case of hypothermia on CRRT

A 64‐year‐old Asian man, with past medical history of hypertension, hypothyroidism, and hyperlipidemia, presented with 3 days history of fever associated with cough and worsening shortness of breath. Subsequent clinical course was complicated by acute lung injury leading to acute respiratory distress syndrome requiring positive pressure ventilation, septic shock requiring inotropic support, and acute kidney injury requiring continuous renal replacement therapy (CRRT). On day 3 of CRRT, the patient developed significant hypothermia (temporal temperature 27.5°C), which was successfully managed. Continuous renal replacement therapy was subsequently discontinued as renal function recovered and the patient was discharged home after a prolonged hospital stay. He currently remains off dialysis and is being followed as an outpatient for chronic kidney disease. In this article, we examine various aspects of pathophysiology and management of hypothermia on CRRT and review relevant literature in this field.     

The future of patent information––a user with a view

The future of patent information is considered from the combined perspective of an information specialist, a patent agent, an inventor and a corporate patent information user. A brief overview of current patenting trends is highlighted, followed by a close look at future trends in the patent information field, including changes in the delivery, analysis and management of patent information, and in the role of intermediaries. A few examples are provided in support of forward-looking statements to illustrate the challenging dynamics involved in this field. Finally, a long-term view is considered, which indicates there remains much need for improvement.     

Acquisition of new technology information for maintenance and replacement policies

In this paper, we propose the first model that considers the option to acquire information on the profitability of a new technology that is not yet available on the market for asset maintenance and replacement decisions. We consider the uncertainty of future asset characteristics by incorporating information acquisition decisions into a non-stationary Markov decision process framework. Using this framework, we optimise asset maintenance and replacement decisions as well as the optimal timing of new technology adoption. Through mathematical analyses, the monotone properties and convexity of the value function and optimal policy are deduced. Deeper numerical analyses highlight the importance of considering the acquisition of information on future technology when formulating a maintenance and replacement policy for the asset. We also deduce a non-intuitive result: an increase in the arrival probability of new technology does not necessarily make the acquisition of additional information more attractive.     

A prognosis of patent activity development

The paper provides a statistical theory for estimating the rate of development of a technical field. The patent activity in the technical field is determined and used as a criterion of development in this field. The paper comprises three sections:

1. 1.1. Formation of basic statistical ideas about the creation and materialization of an invention. Finding an appropriate mathematical expression of these ideas.
2. 2.2. Derivation of numerical methods enabling the solution of the statistical problem stipulated in the first section.
3. 3.3. Testing of the created theory through several examples of a patent activity in the world.

In first section it is shown that it is possible to find an analogy between the methods of statistical mechanics and the methods of statistical mechanics and the methods describing the process of inventing. The theory is created using these analogy- based axioms and enables the creation of a great numer of models by which the process of inventing can be controlled.In the third section the theory is tested through the example of the patent activity in the technical field chamber X-ray apparatus supplied by a current of frequency considerably higher than from the mains in the F.R.G., U.S.A and U.S.S.R.The simplest model already provides a very good agreement between the number of patent applications actually deposited and the theoretical results and enables the prognosis of the patent activity and in this way also the estimation of the future development in a technical field. On the other hand the sensitivity of the method upon the correct selection of patent applications into the fields is shown.The theory may be used as an effective help in deciding about license investments, in regulation of research works, for production of technical field development prognosis and in many problems relating to economics in which a knowledge of supposed development of the technical field is important.     

PIZnet, the joint Internet site for German patent information centres

The objective of the Arbeitsgemeinschaft Deutscher Patentinformationszentren e.V. (The Association of German Patent Information Centres) is to encourage the ongoing development of the centres and to achieve broader public dissemination of industrial property rights information. Since use of the Internet has steadily increased amongst wide sections of the public in recent years, and since patent offices have taken steps to give the public free access to patent information, the association has set up a Germany-wide network known as PIZnet (“PIZ” standing for “patent information centres” in German) in co-operation with the Federal Printing Office. This network includes a presentation on all German patent information centres and the services they provide, it answers questions on the patent system, publishes offers of licences, and covers much else besides.     

Patent information services in India with special reference to drugs and pharmaceuticals

Patent information is useful to a wide spectrum of users. Chemical patent information is particularly useful to those concerned with innovations in this area, as the chemical patent literature is almost of the same size as the chemical journal literature. National and International patent laws and treaties greatly influence the size of patent literature, its dissemination and exploitation for economic development. Paris Convention, WIPO and PCT programmes have all played an important role in the field of patent information. In India, patent information has a very significant role to play because the country's present law offers wide-ranging opportunities from adaptive development on a foreign patent to its commercialization. Patent information services in India are provided by several organisations which include the Patent Office Headquarters at Calcutta and its branches at New Delhi, Bombay and Madras; Patent Information System, Nagpur; National Informatics Centre, New Delhi; Patent Unit, Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, New Delhi; Technical Information Cell, Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited, Hyderabad; National Chemical Laboratory, Pune and National Information Centre for Drugs and Pharmaceuticals, Lucknow. Many of these organisations cover all areas of technology whereas others are restricted to particular disciplines. National Information Centre for Drugs and Pharmaceuticals is one such specialised centre restricted to only drugs and pharmaceutical. Its services such as patent bulletin and patent searches on selected drugs have been well accepted by the users. The Centre's holdings of foreign patent literature are meagre and need to be strengthened by acquiring them mainly from the U.S.A., France, F.R.G., Japan, Italy and Switzerland which are the top six nations responsible for introducing new drug substances. With a computer now installed at the Centre, the Centre should acquire INPADOC database and collaborate with existing Patent Information System, Nagpur and National Informatics Centre, New Delhi for better services. A survey of the patent information services in the countries of Asia and the Pacific carried out by the International Bureau of WIPO has put India in the first category because here information services are rendered by both the Industrial property organisation and other outside agencies.     

Patent information in a changing world: Perspectives from a major patent office

The patent information field is in a state of flux, caused by new tools and changing habits and philosophies. In this article a number of major issues arising from this situation are discussed, some ways in which the EPO is responding are described, and some ideas on future developments provided.Patents are increasingly rated as valuable assets, but is patent information, and especially bibliographic patent information, being treated with the same meticulousness as in the past? More people are searching than ever before. But are they squeezing out the information professional? What effect will the IPC reform, the arrival of XML and other developments have? By focussing on completeness, timeliness and correctness, can patent offices make a contribution to alleviate the situation?The author concludes that, more than ever before, it is important that expert patent information professionals ensure that their views and needs are communicated to both initial data suppliers, mainly patent offices, and to commercial database suppliers and hosts.     

Management of acute kidney injury in neurotrauma

Fortunately, the incidence of acute kidney injury (AKI) in neurotrauma is low and decreasing. Whereas the majority of AKI occurs in older patients with pre-existing chronic kidney disease, neurotrauma typically occurs in children and young adults with normal renal function. The development of outreach trauma teams has improved initial resuscitation, reducing both volume responsive and volume unresponsive cases of AKI. Most cases occur in the setting of multiple organ trauma with muscle injury, or patients who subsequently develop multiple organ failure. Once AKI has developed and renal replacement therapy is required, continuous modalities of renal replacement therapy offer an advantage to the patient with compromised cerebral perfusion and intracranial hypertension, by reducing the rate of change in serum urea, compared with standard intermittent therapies of hemodialysis and hemofiltration, thus minimizing abrupt changes in serum osmolality. Continuous hemodialysis and hemofiltration are better suited to maintain a normal or high serum sodium and thermal losses through the extracorporeal circuit, than peritoneal dialysis. Dialyzers should preferably be minimally bioincompatible and of a small surface area. In patients at risk of intracranial hemorrhage and those with invasive intracranial monitoring, systemic anticoagulants should either be avoided or regional anticoagulants should be used.     

The present and future use of patent literature

The result are based on investigation in the Federal Republic of Germany, France and Ireland. Three different ways of data collection were applied : 1 — written questionnaires to collect representative information, 2 — expert interviews to obtain in-depth knowledge on more complex questions, 3 — expert discussion to test the results of the data evaluation. The production and use of patent literature are described. The users of patent literature are classified as follows: Patent professionals, patent-minded users and potential users. The size of the different user groups was estimated and their present and future information behaviour was analysed.     

Patents as potential indicators of the utility of EC research programmes

In the framework of the MONITOR-SPEAR programme of the Commission of the European Communities a critical review of the literature with regard to the utility of patent indicators being in use for evaluation world-wide has been undertaken. Availability, scope and complementarity of these indicators are discussed. A practical tool to use patent indicators for evaluation committees of EC programmes is designed and recommendations for EC procedures are given.The suggested procedures will be implemented alongside three sample exercises. One of the exercise programmes is science-led (BEP and BAP), one industry-led (BRITE I) and one interphase (MHR). In this paper only selected examples with respect to the MHR programme are outlined and discussed.The project is not completed yet and only preliminary findings will be given in this paper. From the viewpoint of its present state it is concluded that patent indicators may play a very useful role within a mixed set of evaluation procedures. The intersection with other methods is not very large, that is, patent indicators may provide supplementary information to a large extent. However, their use is limited to those types of programmes which are relevant for intellectual property rights mostly in the commercial realm. Patent indicators share with other evaluation tools the problem of best adjustment of time windows between observation and execution of the programme. Despite of these limitations, patent indicators may be employed properly as output indicators related to ongoing EC programmes, but as well for propective analysis of applied fields of R & D and may thus help in the definition phase of new R & D programmes.This work has been sponsored by the MONITOR programme of the Commission of the European Communities.     

Patent search and information in the nineties

A reflection is made on the ways and means in which patent search and information could, and may well have to, be conducted in the nineties. New ideas for international cooperation in the field of patent documentation, information and classification are outlined.     

Identifying technological competition trends for R&D planning using dynamic patent maps: SAO-based content analysis

Patent maps showing competition trends in technological development can provide valuable input for decision support on research and development (R&D) strategies. By introducing semantic patent analysis with advantages in representing technological objectives and structures, this paper constructs dynamic patent maps to show technological competition trends and describes the strategic functions of the dynamic maps. The proposed maps are based on subject-action-object (SAO) structures that are syntactically ordered sentences extracted using the natural language processing of the patent text; the structures of a patent encode the key findings of the invention and expertise of its inventors. Therefore, this paper introduces a method of constructing dynamic patent maps using SAO-based content analysis of patents and presents several types of dynamic patent maps by combining patent bibliographic information and patent mapping and clustering techniques. Building on the maps, this paper provides further analyses to identify technological areas in which patents have not been granted (“patent vacuums”), areas in which many patents have actively appeared (“technological hot spots”), R&D overlap of technological competitors, and characteristics of patent clusters. The proposed analyses of dynamic patent maps are illustrated using patents related to the synthesis of carbon nanotubes. We expect that the proposed method will aid experts in understanding technological competition trends in the process of formulating R&D strategies.     

A survey on deep learning for patent analysis

Patent document collections are an immense source of knowledge for research and innovation communities worldwide. The rapid growth of the number of patent documents poses an enormous challenge for retrieving and analyzing information from this source in an effective manner. Based on deep learning methods for natural language processing, novel approaches have been developed in the field of patent analysis. The goal of these approaches is to reduce costs by automating tasks that previously only domain experts could solve. In this article, we provide a comprehensive survey of the application of deep learning for patent analysis. We summarize the state-of-the-art techniques and describe how they are applied to various tasks in the patent domain. In a detailed discussion, we categorize 40 papers based on the dataset, the representation, and the deep learning architecture that were used, as well as the patent analysis task that was targeted. With our survey, we aim to foster future research at the intersection of patent analysis and deep learning and we conclude by listing promising paths for future work.     

Route to profitable European PATLIB centres with a process orientated business model in intellectual property services

Patent information centres in Europe (PATLIB) have to reorganise their business model because of the changing market situation for information services in Europe. It is shown, that the present approach only covers a small segment of the information service market and results in low accessible market volumes for PATLIB centres. Furthermore free-of-charge web-based patent information tends to result in difficulties to achieve cost covering prices for PATLIB services. The future PATLIB market situation can be summarised as expecting danger of reduced economic viability. Based on the specific PATLIB centre characteristics a redesign of business model is described. To generate a profitable future perspective it is necessary to focus on customer relationship marketing (CRM) for the main customer, respectively the business potential of small and medium enterprise (SME) environment. Six steps are proposed for the reorganisation into IP service centres. The first two steps are the orientation along the SME-customers IP value chain and a process oriented marketing approach. The next two steps are basic business models to meet the new process orientation. Finally the necessity and the arrangement of a tight European service network to offer top quality customer services and redesigned marketing activities is described.     

Impact of the new Spanish patent Act in patent information

The new Spanish Patent Act ("Law 24/2015, of July 24, on Patents") was passed by the Spanish Parliament in July 2015, but did not enter into force until 1st. April 2017. Among other important changes in comparison with the previous 1986 Act, the new regulation stablishes a single granting procedure with substantive examination for every patent application. Regarding patent information, some new document kind codes have been created in order to cope with the additional procedures provided for in the new Act. On the other hand, as a consequence of the implementation of substantive examination, the new Act seems to have fostered the use of patent information services as a means to ensure in advance the novelty and inventiveness of the patent applications. This communication informs about both the new types of Spanish patent documents and the apparent surge in the use of patent information services in Spain as a consequence of the implementation of the new regulation.     

Full-text prior art and chemical structure searching in e-journals and on the internet – A patent information professional’s perspective

In depth analysis of non-patent literature prior art is a crucial step in checking patentability of new inventions and validity of competitor’s patents, since by patent law relevant subject matter disclosed in non-patent literature is as important as any patent document. E-journal articles, as well as any scientific and technical information published on the web are an important source of prior art that is very often insufficiently covered and indexed by commercial databases. This article reviews search and display capabilities of e-journal search sites of different publishers and hosts, as well as their value for full-text prior art analysis to enhance retrieval from commercial databases. Moreover, current developments and future prospects of chemical structure searching both in e-journals and on the internet are discussed.     

TSUG, the Thomson Scientific User Group in the UK

The forerunner to the UK-based Thomson Scientific User Group (TSUG) was formed in 1990 as a professional interest group for patent information searchers using Derwent patent abstracts and related products. Although discussion and activities still revolve around this area, the group today also exchanges information on and searching experience with any other patent-related information products of interest and relevance to members. The group and its members maintain close links with Thomson Scientific for the purposes of product development and product evaluation.     

Qualitative and quantitative analysis of patent data in nanomedicine for bridging the gap between research activities and practical applications

Nanomedicines have made a great breakthrough in the diagnosis, treatment and prevention of disease, but there are still significant challenges to make a leap from the scientific discovery to the practical and clinical success. Herein, we contribute to establish effective strategies that can bridge the gaps by an integrated and balanced analysis of patent literatures on the nanomedicine. Since most of successful commercialization of technologies stems from patents, it is important to comprehensively analyze the patent information. Unfortunately, many previous studies of patent analyses for technological trends and strategies are dependent on only quantitative analyses using structured data such as keyword networks and indicators, thus, these studies are difficult to offer detailed technological key components and trends on scientific perspectives. To address these problems, the present study performs qualitative and quantitative analysis using both structured and unstructured patent data, and provides evolving detailed trends in nanomedicine fields from a scientific point of view. Furthermore, upcoming advances in strategies regarding clinical needs, commercial events and strategies of potential leading groups in nanomedicine could be catalogued. Our analytical method and the results of several meaningful patterns and trends were applied to forecast the future practical issue of nanomedicines.     

Continuously functioning artificial nephron system: the promise of nanotechnology

Nearly 900,000 patients worldwide have end-stage renal disease and require dialysis or kidney transplantation. Despite the availability of these forms of renal replacement therapy for nearly four decades, mortality and morbidity are high and patients often have a poor quality of life. We have developed a human nephron filter (HNF) utilizing nanotechnology that would eventually make feasible a continuously functioning, wearable or implantable artificial kidney. The device consists of two membranes operating in series within one device cartridge. The first membrane mimics the function of the glomerulus, using convective transport to generate a plasma ultrafiltrate containing all solutes approaching the molecular weight of albumin. The second membrane mimics the function of the renal tubules, selectively reclaiming designated solutes to maintain body homeostasis. No dialysis solution is used in this device. The HNF has been computer-modeled, and operating 12 hr per day, 7 days per week the HNF provides the equivalent of 30 mL/min glomerular filtration rate (compared to half that amount for conventional thrice-weekly hemodialysis). Animal studies should begin in the next 1 to 2 years, and clinical trials would then follow 1 to 2 years subsequent. The HNF system, by eliminating dialysate and utilizing a novel membrane system created through applied nanotechnology, represents a breakthrough in renal replacement therapy based on the functioning of native kidneys. The enhanced solute removal and wearable design should substantially improve patient outcomes and quality of life.