Use of a MS-electronic nose for prediction of early fungal spoilage of bakery products

A MS-based electronic nose was used to detect fungal spoilage (measured as ergosterol concentration) in samples of bakery products. Bakery products were inoculated with different Eurotium, Aspergillus and Penicillium species, incubated in sealed vials and their headspace sampled after 2, 4 and 7 days. Once the headspace was sampled, ergosterol content was determined in each sample. Different electronic nose signals were recorded depending on incubation time. Both the e-nose signals and ergosterol levels were used to build models for prediction of ergosterol content using e-nose measurements. Accuracy on prediction of those models was between 87 and 96%, except for samples inoculated with Penicillium corylophilum where the best predictions only reached 46%.     

Aromatic Compounds in Wines Produced During Fermentation: Effect of Three Red Cultivars

The aromatic compounds produced during the fermentation of the red grape cultivars Caiño Tinto, Caiño Longo, and Caiño Bravo were analysed by gas chromatography (FID) on the wines of 2002 and 2003 vintages. In both years, significant differences (p < 0.001) were observed between the wines with respect to the concentrations of aromatic compounds. Caiño Longo wines had the highest concentrations of acetates and esters. The concentrations of ethyl ester and acetates in Caíño Bravo wines were comparatively very low. Principal components analysis confirmed these results: the wines made from the different cultivars and the vintages were clearly different.     

OPTIMALITY CHARACTERISTICS OF PI/PID CONTROLLERS: A COMBINED MIN-MAX/ISE INTERPRETATION

This communication addresses the tuning of PI and PID controllers on the basis of the IMC approach. The tuning is based upon a first order plus time delay (FOPTD) model and aims to achieve a step response specification. Through analysis it has been found that by using the IMC approach we get a PI or a PID depending on the rational approximation used for the time delay term. This article raises the question that the use of a PID instead of a PI controller should be based on another reason more related to the control objectives rather than the use of a better approximation for the time delay. An alternative tuning is presented here, from within the IMC formulation, based on a min-max optimization. From the tuning rule provided by this approach the optimum settings from an integral squared error criterion point of view are derived. The optimal controller results in being a PI controller. From this optimal controller as the starting point, the introduction of the derivative action can be seen as a detuning procedure that can increase the robustness of the controller. This approach provides further insight into the tuning of PI and PID controllers giving the (alternative) parameters a precise engineering meaning.     

FlexEvent: going beyond Case-Centric Exploration and Analysis of Multivariate Event Sequences

In many domains, multivariate event sequence data is collected focused around an entity (the case). Typically, each event has multiple attributes, for example, in healthcare a patient has events such as hospitalization, medication, and surgery. In addition to the multivariate events, also the case (a specific attribute, e.g., patient) has associated multivariate data (e.g., age, gender, weight). Current work typically only visualizes one attribute per event (label) in the event sequences. As a consequence, events can only be explored from a predefined case-centric perspective. However, to find complex relations from multiple perspectives (e.g., from different case definitions, such as doctor), users also need an event- and attribute-centric perspective. In addition, support is needed to effortlessly switch between and within perspectives. To support such a rich exploration, we present FlexEvent: an exploration and analysis method that enables investigation beyond a fixed case-centric perspective. Based on an adaptation of existing visualization techniques, such as scatterplots and juxtaposed small multiples, we enable flexible switching between different perspectives to explore the multivariate event sequence data needed to answer multi-perspective hypotheses. We evaluated FlexEvent with three domain experts in two use cases with sleep disorder and neonatal ICU data that show our method facilitates experts in exploring and analyzing real-world multivariate sequence data from different perspectives.     

Purification, and biochemical and biological characterization of an immunosuppressive and lymphocyte mitogenic protein secreted by Streptococcus sobrinus

An immunosuppressive/mitogenic (ISM) protein was purified from the supernatants of cultures of Streptococcus sobrinus with an isoelectric point of 4.75 and a relative molecular mass of 38 kDa (p38). Treatment of C57BL/6 mice with p38 induced an increase in the numbers of non-specific splenic Ig-secreting plaque-forming cells (PFC) with peak responses on day 3 for IgM-secreting PFC and on day 5 for IgG-secreting PFC, with an isotype pattern consisting predominantly of IgG2a and IgG2b. This increase was accompanied by a lymphocyte blastogenic response of both T and B lymphocytes. The in vitro effects of p38 on pure B, T and total splenic lymphocytes indicated that this ISM protein was primarily a B cell mitogen, being T cells activated subsequently by the generation of B blasts. Suppression of the murine primary immune response against sheep red blood cells was observed in C57BL/6 mice treated 4 days before with p38. The amino acid sequence of the N-terminus of p38 has a significant similarity with several enolases, particularly with rabbit enolase. However, the biological effects ascribed to p38 have not been detected after in vivo treatment with that enolase. The immunosuppressive effect of p38 was abrogated by depletion of IL-10 but not of IL-4. In agreement with this observation IL-10 was the only cytokine detected in serum of C57BL/6 mice after p38 treatment and the peak of serum levels was observed as soon as 2 h after treatment.     

Metallothionein, zinc and copper levels: relationship with acute myocardial infarction

BACKGROUND: Laparoscopy is increasingly used in patients with intraabdominal bacterial infection although pneumoperitoneum may increase bacteremia by elevated intraabdominal pressure. METHODS: The influence of laparotomy and laparoscopy on bacteremia, endotoxemia, and postoperative abscess formation was investigated in a rat model. Rats received intraperitoneally a standardized fecal inoculum and underwent laparotomy (n = 20), or laparoscopy (n = 20), or no further manipulation in the control group (n = 20). RESULTS: Bacteremia and endotoxemia were higher after laparotomy and laparoscopy compared to the control group (p = 0.01) 1 h after intervention. One hour after intervention, aerobic and anaerobic bacterial species were detected in the laparotomy group while only anaerobic bacteria were found in the other two groups. Although bacteremia and endotoxemia did not differ among the three groups after 1 week, the mean number of intraperitoneal abscesses was significantly higher (p < 0.05) after laparotomy (n = 10) compared with laparoscopy (n = 6) and control group (n = 5). CONCLUSION: Laparoscopy does not increase bacteremia and intraperitoneal abscess formation compared to laparotomy in an animal model of peritonitis.     

Multiscale Visualization and Exploration of Large Bipartite Graphs

A bipartite graph is a powerful abstraction for modeling relationships between two collections. Visualizations of bipartite graphs allow users to understand the mutual relationships between the elements in the two collections, e.g., by identifying clusters of similarly connected elements. However, commonly‐used visual representations do not scale for the analysis of large bipartite graphs containing tens of millions of vertices, often resorting to an a‐priori clustering of the sets. To address this issue, we present the Who's‐Active‐On‐What‐Visualization (WAOW‐Vis) that allows for multiscale exploration of a bipartite social‐network without imposing an a‐priori clustering. To this end, we propose to treat a bipartite graph as a high‐dimensional space and we create the WAOW‐Vis adapting the multiscale dimensionality‐reduction technique HSNE. The application of HSNE for bipartite graph requires several modifications that form the contributions of this work. Given the nature of the problem, a set‐based similarity is proposed. For efficient and scalable computations, we use compressed bitmaps to represent sets and we present a novel space partitioning tree to efficiently compute similarities; the Sets Intersection Tree. Finally, we validate WAOW‐Vis on several datasets connecting Twitter‐users and ‐streams in different domains: news, computer science and politics. We show how WAOW‐Vis is particularly effective in identifying hierarchies of communities among social‐media users.     

MARGA: Multispectral Adaptive Region Growing Algorithm for brain extraction on axial MRI

Brain extraction, also known as skull stripping, is one of the most important preprocessing steps for many automatic brain image analysis. In this paper we present a new approach called Multispectral Adaptive Region Growing Algorithm (MARGA) to perform the skull stripping process. MARGA is based on a region growing (RG) algorithm which uses the complementary information provided by conventional magnetic resonance images (MRI) such as T1-weighted and T2-weighted to perform the brain segmentation. MARGA can be seen as an extension of the skull stripping method proposed by Park and Lee (2009) [1], enabling their use in both axial views and low quality images. Following the same idea, we first obtain seed regions that are then spread using a 2D RG algorithm which behaves differently in specific zones of the brain. This adaptation allows to deal with the fact that middle MRI slices have better image contrast between the brain and non-brain regions than superior and inferior brain slices where the contrast is smaller. MARGA is validated using three different databases: 10 simulated brains from the BrainWeb database; 2 data sets from the National Alliance for Medical Image Computing (NAMIC) database, the first one consisting in 10 normal brains and 10 brains of schizophrenic patients acquired with a 3 T GE scanner, and the second one consisting in 5 brains from lupus patients acquired with a 3 T Siemens scanner; and 10 brains of multiple sclerosis patients acquired with a 1.5 T scanner. We have qualitatively and quantitatively compared MARGA with the well-known Brain Extraction Tool (BET), Brain Surface Extractor (BSE) and Statistical Parametric Mapping (SPM) approaches. The obtained results demonstrate the validity of MARGA, outperforming the results of those standard techniques.