Closed-Loop Control of an Anesthesia Delivery System: Development and Animal Testing

An anesthesia system which integrates closed-loop control of ventilation, oxygen, nitrous oxide, and anesthetic agent delivery into a closed breathing circuit is described. Breathing circuit volume is regulated by controlling the sum of oxygen and nitrous oxide flow, and oxygen concentration in the breathing circuit is regulated by controlling the ratio of oxygen flow to the sum of oxygen and nitrous oxide flow. End-tidal anesthetic agent concentration is regulated by controlling the agent delivery, and end-tidal carbon dioxide concentration is regulated by controlling the ventilation. After tuning the ventilation and anesthetic delivery controllers in preliminary trials in ten dogs, the system was tested and evaluated in five dogs. All control loops were stable and exhibited time responses to step changes in setpoint or external disturbances which were clinically acceptable. The system makes available the advantages of closed-system anesthesia without encumbering the anesthesiologist with the control tasks associated with the technique.     

Temporal integration between visual images and visual percepts.

Using a temporal integration task, subjects in 5 experiments were expected to combine information from temporally separated visual presentations. Evidence from these experiments indicated that perceptual information can be integrated with previously generated and currently maintained visual images to form a representation that contains information from each source. Properties and limitations of this integration process were also explored, including the time required to generated the image, the speed at which percepts were integrated with images, and the capacity of the representation. Implications for theories of visual processing and memory are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Weight suppression predicts weight gain over treatment but not treatment completion or outcome in bulimia nervosa.

The authors attempted to replicate previous findings that weight suppression is a significant predictor of treatment completion and treatment outcome (M. L. Butryn, M. R. Lowe, D. L. Safer, & W. S. Agras, 2006) and weight gain over treatment (M. R. Lowe, W. Davis, D. Lucks, R. A. Annunziato, & M. L. Butryn, 2006) among women with bulimic disorders. The authors also examined 2 alternative measures of weight variability. Participants were 132 women with bulimia nervosa treated with cognitive-behavioral therapy. Participants who dropped out of treatment did not have significantly higher levels of weight suppression than did treatment completers. Among those who completed treatment, weight suppression did not significantly predict binge eating and purging at post-treatment. Weight suppression did significantly predict weight change and, in particular, weight gain (≥5 kg) over treatment. Alternative measures of weight variability did not significantly predict treatment completion or treatment outcome, but 1 measure significantly predicted weight gain over treatment. In conclusion, the authors failed to replicate the previous finding that weight suppression predicts treatment compliance and treatment outcome, but they did replicate the finding that weight suppression predicts weight gain over treatment. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Packet video

The 1990s will see a large increase in the use of video for many purposes, made possible through the use of new optical storage and transmission methods, as well as radio and satellite communication. HDTV, new broadcast services and 64 kbit/s ISDN video are all at an advanced stage of development. Digital methods of transmission and storage feature prominently in future scenarios of video usage. To avoid long delays in transmission, packet video techniques for storage of high-quality material on optical discs are being considered. Coded video signals can be transmitted in packet form at variable bit rate. The author discusses the principles of packet video. Packet loss, queueing delay and layered coding are discussed. The future developments are also discussed     

A new generation scheduling program at Ontario Hydro

The new daily generation scheduling model for the Ontario Hydro system is presented. The model is capable of considering the thermal and hydraulic systems together with system reserve requirement and transmission losses. The hydraulic system is considered in a detailed formulation that can handle river couplings in a complete manner. Inability to do this was a major weakness in the peak shaving technique used since early 1970s. A special network programming technique has been used to solve the problem. This method has proved to be very efficient from a computational point of view. Test results from application of the new technique are presented and compared to the peak shaving method. The user has estimated 1.4 million dollars per year of savings from the new computer package     

Nuclear Power Plant Control beyond the 1980s

Designers of nuclear power plant control and instrumentation systems are being pushed by an electronics technology that currently passes through several generations of development during the time taken to design and bring a plant into production. Despite the success of existing designs and the pressure to stick to them, the rapidity with which new components become available and others drop from the suppliers' shelves, require that we give attention to system architectures that are more tolerant of this situation. A distributed data base, containing both on-line and archival information, made available to all systems of a nuclear power plant by means of a highly reliable communications medium, could form the basis for such an architecture. It could not only solve this problem of rapid component development but also provide for complete and comprehensive plant control and surveillance. The possibility of implementing such schemes in an operating plant is probably ten years away but development must begin now if the new electronics technology is to have a planned place in the architectures of the future. At the Chalk River Nuclear Laboratories a long range program is underway. It is exploiting extensive additions that were needed in the data acquisition and processing capability associated with engineering experiments in the large research reactors NRU and NRX.     

Differences in preschool children's conceptual strategies when thinking about animate entities and artifacts.

Two-, 3-, and 4-year-old children viewed 10 stimulus sets. Each set contained a sample picture (e.g., a dog), a basic-level taxonomic match (e.g., another dog), a thematic match (e.g., a bone), and an irrelevant match (e.g., a pen). The children were asked to choose a match that "goes with" each sample. Sample pictures were either animate entities or artifacts. The children's choice behavior indicated that a shift occurs between 3 and 4 years of age from a taxonomic bias to a thematic bias and that, at both ages, animate sample stimuli enhance the children's tendency to adopt thematic conceptual strategies. These data are consistent with recent suggestions that thematic thinking presupposes basic-level taxonomic thinking during early conceptual development and that this developmental progression occurs more rapidly in some domains of knowledge than in others. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Expression and stabilization of galactose oxidase in Escherichia coli by directed evolution

We have used directed evolution methods to express a fungalenzyme, galactose oxidase (GOase), in functional form in Escherichiacoli. The evolved enzymes retain the activity and substratespecificity of the native fungal oxidase, but are more thermostable,are expressed at a much higher level (up to 10.8 mg/l of purifiedGOase), and have reduced negative charge compared to wild type,all properties which are expected to facilitate applicationsand further evolution of the enzyme. Spectroscopic characterizationof the recombinant enzymes reveals a tyrosyl radical of comparablestability to the native GOase from Fusarium.     

PARSEC-process analysis with recipe support for etcher control

The authors describe PARSEC, a system developed to automate processing, perform endpoint signal analysis, and monitor wafer movement within the plasma area. The system provides automatic downloading of process recipes, detection of defined process problems by the automated analysis of endpoint signals, automatic archiving of these signals, and automated data logging for increased lot-tracking efficiency. The system hardware, software, support tools, implementation, performance and results are described