A new bronchoscopic technique for the diagnosis of bacterial pneumonia in HIV-positive patients

The aim of the present study was to evaluate in HIV-positive patients with bacterial pneumonia, the diagnostic value of a new endoscopic technique that uses a single catheter to perform a telescopic plugged catheter (TPC) followed by a modified protected bronchoalveolar lavage (mpBAL). Fifty-eight HIV-positive patients with respiratory infection were included in the study. Samples from TPC and mpBAL were cultured quantitatively. Standard bronchoalveolar lavage was performed to rule out opportunistic infections. According to the clinical and microbiological results, patients were classified in the study group (27 with bacterial pneumonia) or the control group (31 without bacterial pneumonia). Sensitivity of TPC was 56% [95% confidence intervals (CI) 37-75%] and its specificity was 100%; these figures were 56% (CI, 37-75%) and 94% (CI, 86-100%) for mpBAL. When both techniques were assessed together, sensitivity increased to 70% (CI, 53-87%). The use of a single catheter reduced the cost of the originally described pBAL procedure by approximately 50%. The use of a single catheter to perform a TPC followed by a mpBAL can improve the diagnostic yield in HIV-positive patients with bacterial pneumonia, and reduces its cost.     

Synthesis and Sintering of Large Batches of Barium Zirconate Nanopowders

The acrylamide gelification process is a fast, inexpensive, reproducible, and easily scaled up chemical method for obtaining nanopowders of BaZrO₃ that can be used for sintering crucibles and many electronic applications. This method enables the production of 100 g of high-purity powders in one run, using simple laboratory equipment and low-cost raw materials. The gelification process, synthesis temperature, and gas conditions required for obtaining high-quality powders were the subjects of the present study. Fine powders were sintered to full density at 1450°C, making the fabrication of BaZrO₃ crucibles possible for many laboratories.     

Automatic rate adaptation and energy-saving mechanisms based on cross-layer information for packet-switched data networks

A set of novel PHY-MAC mechanisms based on a cross layer dialogue have been proposed, and their performance has been analyzed. System efficiency improvement is achieved by means of automatic transmission rate adaptation, trading off bit rate for power, with resulting energy saving features in a generic packet-switched CDMA access network. The rate adaptation mechanism improves spectrum efficiency while keeping packet delay minimized. On the other hand, power dependent strategies reduce power consumption and intercell interference. Simulation results show that the benefits obtained are very encouraging, so the proposed schemes could be used in future communication systems.     

The use of coding and diversity combining for mitigating fadingeffects in a DS/CDMA system

Spatial diversity is an attractive technology to cope with the fading channel encountered in mobile communications. This paper presents novel closed analytical expressions of the bit-error rate (BER) achievable in a coherent binary phase-shift-keying (CBPSK) direct-sequence code-division multiple-access (DS/CDMA) system for any power delay profile and for either postdetection selection or maximal ratio combining (MRC). In particular, expressions for the cutoff rate R _o and for its related parameter D are also formulated in order to assess the system performance under the consideration of some channel coding schemes. Finally, an exemplary study is carried out in order to illustrate the behavior of a realistic space-diversity code-division multiple-access (CDMA) system according to the analytical expressions that have been derived     

Electrical properties of the DGEBA/PANI-Ag composites

The metallopolymer polyaniline-silver (PANI-Ag) was synthesized and used as conductive filler in crosslinked diglycidyl ether of bisphenol A (DGEBA) epoxy network. The hybrid organic/inorganic PANI-Ag powders were successfully synthesized via in situ chemical oxidation of polyaniline-emeraldine base (PANI-EB) by the capped Ag⁺ on the polyaniline-emeraldine base (PANI-EB) surface. The UV–Vis and FT-IR spectra confirmed the pernigraniline structure (PN) of PANI in the hybrid PANI-Ag. The PANI-Ag dispersion in epoxidic matrix was analyzed by optical microscopy (OM). The images analysis from OM showed that the particle agglomerate size of the metallopolymer increased with increasing PANI-Ag concentration in the DGEBA composite, owing to the aggregation effect. The dc conductivity and impedance spectroscopy of the DGEBA/PANI-Ag composite was measured at different PANI-Ag concentrations in the DGEBA network. The electrical dc conductivity of the PANI-Ag was 35.1 S cm⁻¹ and was dependent of the PANI-Ag concentration in DGEBA matrix. The real and imaginary part of impedance complex measurements indicates a strong interfacial polarization at low frequency for both PANI-Ag and DGEBA/PANI-Ag, respectively. The imaginary part of impedance complex Im(Z) data decrease with the PANI-Ag hybrid concentration in the frequencies range of 10²–10⁶ Hz. The dependence of the Im(Z) on the frequency exhibited a relaxation process in both, PANI-Ag and DGEBA/PANI-Ag composite with 10 phr of PANI-Ag powder.     

Provisioning multimedia wireless networks for better QoS: RRM strategies for 3G W-CDMA

Third-generation mobile communication systems will bring a wide range of new services with different quality of service requirements and will open the ability to exploit radio resource management functions to guarantee a certain target QoS, to maintain the planned coverage area and to offer a high-capacity while using the radio resources in an efficient way. RRM functions impact the overall system efficiency and the operator infrastructure cost, so they will definitively play an important role in a mature 3G scenario. In order to provide some insight into radio resource management (RRM) strategies implementation, a range of representative case-studies with several innovative algorithms are presented and supported by simulation results in a realistic UMTS Terrestrial Radio Access Network scenario as devised in the 3GGP standardization forum. In particular, a decentralized uplink transmission rate selection algorithm in the short term, a congestion control mechanism to cope with overload situations, and downlink scheduling for layered streaming video packets are proposed.     

Design and implementation of a secure and trustworthy platform for privacy-aware video surveillance

Worldwide, thousands of video surveillance cameras record our daily activities. People are aware that video surveillance is deployed for the sake of security. However, the privacy of individuals would be endangered if the proper measures were not considered. Privacy-aware video surveillance has historically been addressed by proposals based on detecting individuals and other sensitive parts of the video and hiding them using a variety of techniques. In this paper, we present a comprehensive solution tackling video processing, video protection and management of the Information System. We claim that a video surveillance system can protect our safety and, at the same time, guarantee our privacy. We describe the design and implementation of a privacy-aware video surveillance platform that, in order to be trustworthy, accomplishes with the properties of high detection accuracy, real-time performance and protected video utility. We have tested the proposed platform, and we demonstrate the feasibility of our approach for privacy protection.     

An emulator framework for a new radio resource management for QoSguaranteed services in W-CDMA systems

In the context of third-generation (3G) systems a mix of services with different requirements are expected. Consequently, packet scheduling mechanisms for quality of service (QoS) guarantees will play a key role. This paper proposes a new scheduling strategy that makes consistent the target quality in the radio link with the priority level assigned to each user. The performance of such a strategy is assessed by system level simulations and, in order to gain more insight into the difficulties of this optimization problem, it is compared to other alternatives. This work is part of the Wineglass project, within the Fifth Framework Program of the European Commission (IST), where a real time demonstrator including the radio resource management tasks is being developed. Thus, an implementation approach of the proposed scheduling is also described. The implementation is based on lookup tables and this approach is validated by simulation     

Adaptive S-ALOHA CDMA as an alternative way of integrating servicesin mobile environments

Code-division multiple-access (CDMA) schemes appear to be very promising access techniques for coping with the requirements of third-generation mobile systems, mainly because of their flexibility. This paper proposes an adaptive S-ALOHA DS-CDMA access scheme as a method for integrating nonreal-time (i.e., Internet applications) and real-time (i.e., voice) services in a multicell scenario by exploiting the potentials of CDMA under time-varying channel load conditions. The adaptive component makes data terminals autonomously change their transmission rate according to the total (voice+data) channel occupancy, so that the minimum possible data delay, which can be analytically obtained by defining a birth-death process, is almost always achieved. Moreover, by means of a simplified cellular model, the proposed algorithm revealed the same behavior, i.e., it tries to select the most suitable transmission rate at any time slot, when it is affected by intercell interference and even by power control imperfections. Finally, in order to gain more insight into the potentials of such an access strategy, the adaptive S-ALOHA CDMA scheme is then compared to a reservation time-division multiple-access (TDMA)-based protocol (PRMA++), showing the benefits of the CDMA-based solution in terms of capacity, flexibility, and data delay performance     

Average block error probability in the reverse link of a packetDS/CDMA system under Rayleigh fading channel conditions

Analytic expressions have been derived for the probability density functions of the total signal-to-interference ratio when considering mixed-type interference sources in the reverse link of a DS/CDMA packet radio system with Rayleigh fading. Four different scenarios were studied, and the corresponding expressions are presented for each situation. The users are divided into two groups: those that apply a closed-loop power control and those that only use an open-loop power control. By making use of these expressions, the mean block error probability is derived as a function of the number of total interfering users in each group