The Efficacy of Fibrinogen Concentrates in Relation to Cryoprecipitate in Restoring Clot Integrity and Stability against Lysis

Loss of fibrinogen is a feature of trauma-induced coagulopathy (TIC), and restoring this clotting factor is protective against hemorrhages. We compared the efficacy of cryoprecipitate, and of the fibrinogen concentrates RiaSTAP^® and FibCLOT^® in restoring the clot integrity in models of TIC. Cryoprecipitate and FibCLOT^® produced clots with higher maximal absorbance and enhanced resistance to lysis relative to RiaSTAP^®. The fibrin structure of clots, comprising cryoprecipitate and FibCLOT^®, mirrored those of normal plasma, whereas those with RiaSTAP^® showed stunted fibers and reduced porosity. The hemodilution of whole blood reduced the maximum clot firmness (MCF) as assessed by thromboelastography. MCF could be restored with the inclusion of 1 mg/mL of fibrinogen, but only FibCLOT^® was effective at stabilizing against lysis. The overall clot strength, measured using the Quantra^® hemostasis analyzer, was restored with both fibrinogen concentrates but not cryoprecipitate. α₂antiplasmin and plasminogen activator inhibitor-1 (PAI-1) were constituents of cryoprecipitate but were negligible in RiaSTAP^® and FibCLOT^®. Interestingly, cryoprecipitate and FibCLOT^® contained significantly higher factor XIII (FXIII) levels, approximately three-fold higher than RiaSTAP^®. Our data show that 1 mg/mL fibrinogen, a clinically achievable concentration, can restore adequate clot integrity. However, FibCLOT^®, which contained more FXIII, was superior in normalizing the clot structure and in stabilizing hemodiluted clots against mechanical and fibrinolytic degradation.     

Properties of Dried and Intermediate Moisture Honey Products: A Review

This review discusses the processing techniques proposed for the production of dried and intermediate moisture honey products, as well as their properties. Stickiness is the major problem in the drying of sugar rich products like honey, that depend on the type of sugar and temperature of operation, which are related to the glass transition temperature. Some additives are usually added to the sugary feed to increase the glass transition temperature and concurrently the sticky point temperature. In the case of honey-fruit spreads, nutritional and sensory characteristics can be enhanced by replacing part of sugar with honey. Co-crystallization of honey with sucrose could be used to preserve the honey flavor. These diversified honey products provide better taste and nutrition to the consumer besides enhancing the utilization of honey.     

A Holographic Technique Featuring Broad Range Sensitivity to Contour Diffuse Objects

Abstract

We have shown that the performances available from a two-source relief sensing interferometer are improved substantially by combining an innovative way of managing the phase resources inherent in the interferometer. The approach gives rise to the emergence of a flexible and versatile holographic contouring method capable of addressing surfaces of broadly varying depths. Experimental results are presented to support the proposal.     

Extraction of alcohol using emulsion liquid membrane consisting of paraffin oil as an organic phase and lecithin as a surfactant

BACKGROUND: This paper reports on the use of a liquid emulsion membrane involving paraffin light oil as membrane phase and lecithin as surfactant for the extraction of alcohol from anthocyanin extract and simulated pineapple wine. RESULTS: The extraction of alcohol was found to depend on the many factors such as surfactant concentration, contact time, stirring speed, stirring time, and ratio of membrane emulsion to feed volume. Results showed that optimum conditions for maximum alcohol extraction (25%) were lecithin concentration 3%, contact time 20 min, stirring speed 250 rpm and ratio of membrane emulsion to feed volume 1:2. Multistage extraction using this liquid emulsion membrane was found to completely remove alcohol from anthocyanin extract and from simulated pineapple wine in seven stages and five stages, respectively. CONCLUSION: This liquid emulsion membrane was found to be a useful method for the extraction of alcohol from aqueous feed. Copyright © 2009 Society of Chemical Industry     

A comparative evaluation of harmonic reduction techniques inthree-phase utility interface of power electronic loads

Power electronic loads inject harmonic currents into the utility system. This paper presents a comparative evaluation of harmonic reduction techniques which satisfy the current harmonic limits specified by the IEEE Standard 519, and at the same time provide a regulated DC output voltage. The techniques considered include active and hybrid filters, and various current waveshaping approaches for a three-phase utility interface. These techniques are compared in terms of their complexity (number of switches) and their component ratings. Based on the application requirements and the cost of active and passive components, this paper enables the estimation of the minimum cost topology     

Tracking set-expression cardinalities over continuous update streams

There is growing interest in algorithms for processing and querying continuous data streams (i.e., data seen only once in a fixed order) with limited memory resources. In its most general form, a data stream is actually an update stream, i.e., comprising data-item deletions as well as insertions. Such massive update streams arise naturally in several application domains (e.g., monitoring of large IP network installations or processing of retail-chain transactions). Estimating the cardinality of set expressions defined over several (possibly distributed) update streams is perhaps one of the most fundamental query classes of interest; as an example, such a query may ask what is the number of distinct IP source addresses seen in passing packets from both router R ₁ and R ₂ but not router R ₃?. Earlier work only addressed very restricted forms of this problem, focusing solely on the special case of insert-only streams and specific operators (e.g., union). In this paper, we propose the first space-efficient algorithmic solution for estimating the cardinality of full-fledged set expressions over general update streams. Our estimation algorithms are probabilistic in nature and rely on a novel, hash-based synopsis data structure, termed 2-level hash sketch. We demonstrate how our 2-level hash sketch synopses can be used to provide low-error, high-confidence estimates for the cardinality of set expressions (including operators such as set union, intersection, and difference) over continuous update streams, using only space that is significantly sublinear in the sizes of the streaming input (multi-)sets. Furthermore, our estimators never require rescanning or resampling of past stream items, regardless of the number of deletions in the stream. We also present lower bounds for the problem, demonstrating that the space usage of our estimation algorithms is within small factors of the optimal. Finally, we propose an optimized, time-efficient stream synopsis (based on 2-level hash sketches) that provides similar, strong accuracy-space guarantees while requiring only guaranteed logarithmic maintenance time per update, thus making our methods applicable for truly rapid-rate data streams. Our results from an empirical study of our synopsis and estimation techniques verify the effectiveness of our approach.Received: 20 October 2003, Accepted: 16 April 2004, Published online: 14 September 2004Edited by: J. Gehrke and J. Hellerstein.Sumit Ganguly: sganguly@cse.iitk.ac.in Current affiliation: Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, India     

RE-tree: an efficient index structure for regular expressions

Due to their expressive power, regular expressions (REs) are quickly becoming an integral part of language specifications for several important application scenarios. Many of these applications have to manage huge databases of RE specifications and need to provide an effective matching mechanism that, given an input string, quickly identifies the REs in the database that match it. In this paper, we propose the RE-tree, a novel index structure for large databases of RE specifications. Given an input query string, the RE-tree speeds up the retrieval of matching REs by focusing the search and comparing the input string with only a small fraction of REs in the database. Even though the RE-tree is similar in spirit to other tree-based structures that have been proposed for indexing multidimensional data, RE indexing is significantly more challenging since REs typically represent infinite sets of strings with no well-defined notion of spatial locality. To address these new challenges, our RE-tree index structure relies on novel measures for comparing the relative sizes of infinite regular languages. We also propose innovative solutions for the various RE-tree operations including the effective splitting of RE-tree nodes and computing a "tight" bounding RE for a collection of REs. Finally, we demonstrate how sampling-based approximation algorithms can be used to significantly speed up the performance of RE-tree operations. Preliminary experimental results with moderately large synthetic data sets indicate that the RE-tree is effective in pruning the search space and easily outperforms naive sequential search approaches.Received: 16 September 2002, Published online: 8 July 2003Edited by R. Ramakrishnan