A fever workup guideline

Fever is a common clinical problem in patients hospitalized with trauma. When an infection is suspected, it is important to identify the source of fever and begin definitive care before more severe morbidity occurs. An undirected approach with "pan cultures" has resulted in a high rate of negative cultures obtained and has increased patient care costs. By developing and using an evidence-based fever workup guideline, this institution was able to evaluate and identify infections and reduce costs.     

Closed-loop Live Marked Graphs under Generalized Mutual Exclusion Constraint Enforcement

Enforcing a supervisory control policy to avoid forbidden states on a discrete event system modeled by a Petri net may result in a non live system. This may happen even if the admissible states are specified by Generalized Mutual Exclusion Constraints (GMECs). This leads to the problem of synthesizing a maximally permissive control policy preserving liveness of the system under a GMEC. This problem is very interesting in practice, but difficult even for a restricted class of systems. In this paper, we focus on systems which can be modeled as live and safe Marked Graphs (MGs). On such systems, when some of the transitions are uncontrollable, a GMEC can be forced by a monitor place if a not maximally permissive policy is accepted, otherwise a more complex control has to be adopted. Anyway, liveness of the closed-loop system (plant plus control) is not guaranteed. Two sufficient conditions to verify the closed-loop liveness of a live and safe MG plant controlled by a monitor are derived. A sufficient condition for closed loop liveness of MGs where a GMEC has been enforced on is derived. In addition, a set of predicates is provided that enforces, in a maximally permissive way, a GMEC while preserving closed-loop liveness on live and safe MG systems under some restrictions.

Correlation between functional and radiographic data, and broncho-alveolar cytology in patients with diffuse interstitial lung disease

BACKGROUND: "Interstitial Lung Disease" is a term that includes a heterogeneous group of disorders characterized by variable degrees of parenchymal inflammation (alveolitis) and fibrosis. Alveolitis represents one of the most important aspects of ILD and its characterization by broncho-alveolar lavage (BAL) can give explanations of the different clinical features, in association with the evaluation of physiological changes and High Resolution Computed Tomography (HRCT). The aim of this study was to establish a correlation between variations in broncho-alveolar cells and anatomical-functional alterations in patients affected by ILD before and after corticoid therapy. METHODS: Thirty-one patients (14 males 17 females) were introduced in the study and were evaluated for clinical signs, functional parameters, HRCT and cyto-immunological aspects of BAL fluid. All data were acquired at the admission in the study, after 60 and 180 days. Patients had received prednisone 1 mg/kg/die for 60 days and, then, 0.25 mg/kg/die for 120 days. RESULTS: In lymphocyte alveolitis, a clinical-radiological improvement was frequently observed after therapy while in those with neutrophilic and eosinophilic components, no improvement was detected. CONCLUSIONS: In conclusion, BAL represents a useful tool in qualifying ILD which can be easily monitored by clinical, functional and radiological data. Therefore, a new method for the diagnosis and monitoring of ILD is suggested. This method has the marked advantage to reach a reliable diagnosis even in a high percentage of patients who refuse or can not undergo the biopsy assay.     

évaluation économique de la thérapie cognitivo-comportementale des troubles anxieux.

This literature review examines the results of cost-effectiveness studies of cognitive-behaviour therapies published up to June 2003. Cost offsets likely to be derived from effective treatment of anxiety problems are also examined. A summary of results suggests the following: 1) cognitive-behaviour therapy is cost-effective compared to drug therapy for the treatment of panic disorder and social phobia; 2) group treatments and short courses as well as new technologies are promising alternatives to conventional therapy; 3) the existence of cost offsets for anxiety disorders has yet to be ascertained. Research approaches are suggested to cover significant shortcomings in the methodologies of studies conducted to date. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Exploiting Kondo spin chains for generating long range distance independent entanglement

We investigate the entanglement properties of the Kondo spin chain when it is prepared in its ground state as well as its dynamics following a single bond quench. We show that a true measure of entanglement such as negativity enables to characterize the unique features of the gapless Kondo regime. We determine the spatial extent of the Kondo screening cloud and propose an ansatz for the ground state in the Kondo regime accessible to this spin chain; we also demonstrate that the impurity spin is indeed maximally entangled with the Kondo cloud. We exploit these features of the entanglement in the gapless Kondo regime to show that a single local quench at one end of a Kondo spin chain may always induce a fast and long lived oscillatory dynamics, which establishes a high quality entanglement between the individual spins at the opposite ends of the chain. This entanglement is a footprint of the presence of the Kondo cloud and may be engineered so as to attain—even for very large chains—a constant high value independent of the length; in addition, it is thermally robust. Moreover, we show that high entanglement between very distant boundary spins is generated by suddenly connecting two long Kondo spin chains. We show that this procedure provides an efficient way to route entanglement between multiple distant sites. To better evidence the remarkable peculiarities of the Kondo regime, we carry a parallel analysis of the entanglement properties of the Kondo spin chain model in the gapped dimerised regime where these remarkable features are absent.     

Assessment of the Effects of Dietary Vitamin D Levels on Olanzapine-Induced Metabolic Side Effects: Focus on the Endocannabinoidome-Gut Microbiome Axis

Vitamin D deficiency is associated with poor mental health and dysmetabolism. Several metabolic abnormalities are associated with psychotic diseases, which can be compounded by atypical antipsychotics that induce weight gain and insulin resistance. These side-effects may be affected by vitamin D levels. The gut microbiota and endocannabinoidome (eCBome) are significant regulators of both metabolism and mental health, but their role in the development of atypical antipsychotic drug metabolic side-effects and their interaction with vitamin D status is unknown. We studied the effects of different combinations of vitamin D levels and atypical antipsychotic drug (olanzapine) exposure on whole-body metabolism and the eCBome-gut microbiota axis in female C57BL/6J mice under a high fat/high sucrose (HFHS) diet in an attempt to identify a link between the latter and the different metabolic outputs induced by the treatments. Olanzapine exerted a protective effect against diet-induced obesity and insulin resistance, largely independent of dietary vitamin D status. These changes were concomitant with olanzapine-mediated decreases in Trpv1 expression and increases in the levels of its agonists, including various N-acylethanolamines and 2-monoacylglycerols, which are consistent with the observed improvement in adiposity and metabolic status. Furthermore, while global gut bacteria community architecture was not altered by olanzapine, we identified changes in the relative abundances of various commensal bacterial families. Taken together, changes of eCBome and gut microbiota families under our experimental conditions might contribute to olanzapine and vitamin D-mediated inhibition of weight gain in mice on a HFHS diet.     

A new diamine as the hole-transporting material for organic light-emitting diodes

A new diamine, N,N′-diphenyl-N,N′-bis-biphenyl-(1,1′-biphenyl)-4,4′-diamine (PTPD), has been synthesised to be applied as a hole-transporting material for multilayer organic light-emitting diodes (LEDs). Electrical and optical characteristics of a series of double-layer (DL) LEDs using PTPD as hole-transporting layers (HTL) and Alq₃ and Znq₂ as electron-transporting layers have been measured and compared with those for DL LEDs based on other HTLs (TPD and NTPD). The differences are discussed in terms of charge injection at the electrodes and electron–hole recombination processes at the organic interfaces. The prerequisites based on the molecular structure of the compound, confirmed by preliminary experimental observations, suggest PTPD to be a stable hole-transporting material for high-durability organic LEDs. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A dynamic error model for integrating analog-to-digital converters

Integrating analog-to-digital converters (IADCs) basically include an analog signal processing section for conditioning and integrating the input signal, and a quantizing section for obtaining the digital converted signal. The main dynamic errors arise from the analog signal processing section. In this paper, the resulting dynamic integral nonlinearity of IADCs is analytically derived and a model based on a low-order polynomial function of the input signal slope and the output code is proposed. The analytical model is useful for reducing experimental burden related to dynamic metrological characterisation. Experimental validation results highlight the model effectiveness in describing integral nonlinearity of an actual dual-slope IADC.     

Promising Treatment for Multiple Sclerosis: Mitochondrial Transplantation

In recent years, several studies have examined the multifaceted role of mitochondria in Multiple Sclerosis (MS), suggesting that, besides inflammation and demyelination, mitochondrial aberration is a crucial factor in mediating axonal degeneration, the latter being responsible for persistent disabilities in MS patients. Therefore, mitochondria have been recognized as a possible multiple sclerosis therapeutic target. Recently, mitochondrial transplantation has become a new term for the transfer of live mitochondria into damaged cells for the treatment of various diseases, including neurodegenerative diseases. In this hypothesis, we propose mitochondrial transplantation as a new, potentially applicable approach to counteract axonal degeneration in multiple sclerosis.