Three cases of tuberculosis after heart transplantation in Spain

The fibrinolytic capacity of patients with acute myocardial infarction (AMI) is known to be impaired. The primary regulatory element of the fibrinolytic system is plasminogen activator inhibitor (PAI). It has been previously observed that there are 2 peaks in the plasma PAI level of AMI patients at 4h and 16h after thrombolytic therapy with recombinant tissue plasminogen activator (rtPA). Lanoteplase/SUN9216 is a mutant tPA with a biological half-life longer than that of rtPA. Thrombolytic therapy with mutant tPA or rtPA was carried out consecutively in 21 patients with AMI (8 patients as the mutant tPA group, and 13 patients as the rtPA group). The recanalization time of the mutant tPA group was significantly faster than that of the rtPA group (16.1 +/- 3.9 min vs 39.6 +/- 4.8 min, p<0.01). The PAI activity at 4h after the initiation of thrombolysis was significantly lower in the mutant tPA group than in the rtPA group (8.74 +/- 5.46IU/L vs 26.74 +/- 3.35 IU/L, p<0.01). There was a one mild peak in serial plasma PAI activity levels 24h after the initiation of thrombolysis. The results suggest that thrombolytic therapy with mutant tPA reduced the impairment of fibrinolytic capacity. The mutant tPA gives faster recanalization and lower PAI activity after successful thrombolysis, compared with rtPA.     

A genetic analysis of aromatic amino acid hydroxylases involvement in DOPA synthesis during Drosophila adult development

This study was designed to examine whether cyclosporine (CyA) acts on the endocrine system by modifying the pulsatile secretion pattern of prolactin and LH. Both pituitary-grafted and sham-operated rats were submitted to a subcutaneous vehicle or CyA (5 mg/kg) treatment daily for 10 days beginning on the day of surgery. Pituitary grafting and/or CyA administration changed the pulsatile pattern of prolactin observed in sham-operated animals. The mean values of serum prolactin were significantly increased by pituitary grafting and the treatment with CyA further increased them. The mean half-life of prolactin was significantly increased in pituitary-grafted rats and was not changed by CyA administration, although it was decreased in sham-operated rats. The frequency of prolactin pulses was significantly decreased in pituitary-grafted as compared to sham-operated controls and was not further modified by CyA administration. However, in sham-operated rats a significant decrease of this parameter was observed. Duration of the prolactin peaks was significantly increased by pituitary grafting, and was not modified by CyA administration in any of the groups studied. The absolute amplitude of the prolactin peaks was significantly increased in pituitary-grafted as compared to sham-operated animals, and the treatment with CyA further increased this parameter in both groups. Mean values of LH were significantly increased in pituitary-grafted as compared to control rats. CyA administration significantly increased LH levels in sham-operated rats and decreased them in pituitary-grafted animals. The mean half-life, the pulse frequency and the duration of LH peaks were not modified by either pituitary grafting or CyA administration.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)     

30th Anniversary of Applied Intelligence: A combination of bibliometrics and thematic analysis using SciMAT

Applied Intelligence - Applied Intelligence is one of the most important international scientific journals in the field of artificial intelligence. From 1991, Applied Intelligence has been oriented...     

A panoramic view and swot analysis of artificial intelligence for achieving the sustainable development goals by 2030: progress and prospects

Applied Intelligence - The17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) established by the United Nations Agenda 2030 constitute a global blueprint agenda and instrument for peace and prosperity...     

Taking advantage of collective knowledge in emergency response systems

When large groups work on a theme, they have the potential to produce a lot of useful knowledge, regardless of whether they are acting in a coordinated manner or individually. Spontaneously generated information has received much attention in recent years, as organizations and businesses discover the power of crowds. New technologies, such as blogs, Twitter, wikis, photo sharing, collaborative tagging and social networking sites, enable the creation and dissemination of content in a relatively simple way. As a result, the aggregate body of knowledge is growing at an accelerated rate. Many organizations are looking for ways to harness this power, which is being called collective intelligence. Research has shown that it is possible to obtain high quality results from collectively produced work.In this paper, we consider the domain of emergency response. Research has shown that individuals respond quickly and massively to emergencies, and that they try to help with the situation. Thus, it seems like a logical step to attempt to harness collective knowledge for emergency management. Disaster relief groups and field command frequently suffer from lack of up to date information, which may be critical in a rapidly evolving situation. Some of this information could be generated by the crowd at large, enabling more effective response to the situation. In this paper, we discuss the possibilities for the introduction of collective knowledge in disaster relief and present architecture and examples of how this could be accomplished.     

The GPU on the simulation of cellular computing models

Membrane Computing is a discipline aiming to abstract formal computing models, called membrane systems or P systems, from the structure and functioning of the living cells as well as from the cooperation of cells in tissues, organs, and other higher order structures. This framework provides polynomial time solutions to NP-complete problems by trading space for time, and whose efficient simulation poses challenges in three different aspects: an intrinsic massively parallelism of P systems, an exponential computational workspace, and a non-intensive floating point nature. In this paper, we analyze the simulation of a family of recognizer P systems with active membranes that solves the Satisfiability problem in linear time on different instances of Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). For an efficient handling of the exponential workspace created by the P systems computation, we enable different data policies to increase memory bandwidth and exploit data locality through tiling and dynamic queues. Parallelism inherent to the target P system is also managed to demonstrate that GPUs offer a valid alternative for high-performance computing at a considerably lower cost. Furthermore, scalability is demonstrated on the way to the largest problem size we were able to run, and considering the new hardware generation from Nvidia, Fermi, for a total speed-up exceeding four orders of magnitude when running our simulations on the Tesla S2050 server.     

A multi-objective approach for the motion planning of redundant manipulators

Kinematic redundancy occurs when a manipulator possesses more degrees of freedom than those required to execute a given task. Several kinematic techniques for redundant manipulators control the gripper through the pseudo-inverse of the Jacobian, but lead to a kind of chaotic inner motion with unpredictable arm configurations. Such algorithms are not easy to adapt to optimization schemes and, moreover, often there are multiple optimization objectives that can conflict between them. Unlike single optimization, where one attempts to find the best solution, in multi-objective optimization there is no single solution that is optimum with respect to all indices. Therefore, trajectory planning of redundant robots remains an important area of research and more efficient optimization algorithms are needed. This paper presents a new technique to solve the inverse kinematics of redundant manipulators, using a multi-objective genetic algorithm. This scheme combines the closed-loop pseudo-inverse method with a multi-objective genetic algorithm to control the joint positions. Simulations for manipulators with three or four rotational joints, considering the optimization of two objectives in a workspace without and with obstacles are developed. The results reveal that it is possible to choose several solutions from the Pareto optimal front according to the importance of each individual objective.     

Strong accumulators from collision-resistant hashing

Accumulator schemes were introduced in order to represent a large set of values as one short value called the accumulator. These schemes allow one to generate membership proofs, that is, short witnesses that a certain value belongs to the set. In universal accumulator schemes, efficient proofs of non-membership can also be created. Li et?al. (Proceedings of applied cryptography and network security—ACNS ’07, LNCS, vol 4521, 2007), building on the work of Camenisch and Lysyanskaya (Advances in cryptology—proceedings of Crypto ’02, LNCS, vol 2442. Springer, Berlin, pp 61–76, 2002), proposed an efficient accumulator scheme, which relies on a trusted accumulator manager. Specifically, a manager that correctly performs accumulator updates. In this work, we introduce the notion of strong universal accumulator schemes, which are similar in functionality to universal accumulator schemes, but do not assume the accumulator manager is trusted. We also formalize the security requirements for such schemes. We then give a simple construction of a strong universal accumulator scheme, which is provably secure under the assumption that collision-resistant hash functions exist. The weaker requirement on the accumulator manager comes at a price; our scheme is less efficient than known universal accumulator schemes—the size of (non)membership witnesses is logarithmic in the size of the accumulated set in contrast to constant in the scheme of Camenisch and Lysyanskaya. Finally, we show how to use strong universal accumulators to solve a problem of practical relevance, the so-called e-Invoice Factoring Problem.