Treatment of Stress Urinary Incontinence with Muscle Stem Cells and Stem Cell Components: Chances,Challenges and Future Prospects

Urinary incontinence (UI) is a major problem in health care and more than 400 million people worldwide suffer from involuntary loss of urine. With an increase in the aging population, UI is likely to become even more prominent over the next decades and the economic burden is substantial. Among the different subtypes of UI, stress urinary incontinence (SUI) is the most prevalent and focus of this review. The main underlying causes for SUI are pregnancy and childbirth, accidents with direct trauma to the pelvis or medical treatments that affect the pelvic floor, such as surgery or irradiation. Conservative approaches for the treatment of SUI are pelvic physiotherapy, behavioral and lifestyle changes, and the use of pessaries. Current surgical treatment options include slings, colposuspensions, bulking agents and artificial urinary sphincters. These treatments have limitations with effectiveness and bear the risk of long-term side effects. Furthermore, surgical options do not treat the underlying pathophysiological causes of SUI. Thus, there is an urgent need for alternative treatments, which are effective, minimally invasive and have only a limited risk for adverse effects. Regenerative medicine is an emerging field, focusing on the repair, replacement or regeneration of human tissues and organs using precursor cells and their components. This article critically reviews recent advances in the therapeutic strategies for the management of SUI and outlines future possibilities and challenges.     

PI control based on fuzzy set-point weighting tracking for hydraulic crane boom system

A PI control strategy based on fuzzy set-point weighting following was proposed for the active damping control of a hydraulic crane boom system （HCBS）. Two valve-controlled PI controllers, which include a proportional feedforward controller based on fuzzy set-point weighting following and a limited semi-integrator（LSI）, are designed respectively. LSI is used to limit output signal and to prevent wind up at the low frequency of the spectrum. By using a range camera and an electronic feedback control, the tip damping on the HCBS can be adjusted artificially. A collaborative control simulation technique of HOPSAN and MATLAB/SIMULINK is applied to the controller design. Simulation results show that the proposed PI control system has less overshoot as well as faster response. The tip damping on the HCBS during operation is improved.     

Time stepping finite element analysis of a variable speed synchronous generator with rectifier

Several applications for renewable energy conversion make use of variable speed generators. A conversion from variable frequency to grid frequency is therefore essential. One part of the converter is a rectifier. A rectifier model is presented, which is integrated in a time stepping finite element simulation environment where the generator and circuit equations are solved simultaneously. The model handles bidirectional alternator speeds as the application is a linear generator for ocean wave energy conversion. The rectifier model is extended with a load model, consisting of R, L and E, and simulations show what impact the rectifier has on the generator’s behaviour.     

Peroral anticoagulant therapy--are the TT-values reliable?

As part of the Norwegian Medical Association's quality assurance programme for the primary health care sector we have investigated the lasting quality of the specimens drawn for determination of Thrombotest. Blood drawn into siliconated glass tubes resulted in varying Thrombotest values, depending on the time of analysis after specimen collection. Reliable Thrombotest values are needed to be able to administer the correct dosage of warfarin. Thrombotest analysis should therefore be performed within two hours, or after 48 hours of specimen collection.     

Plant quality and harvest in old meadows grazed by reindeer in spring

Dry matter (DM) production and nutritional quality of plants were recorded on an old meadow before, during and after it was grazed by reindeer (Rangifer tarandus tarandus; 15 reindeer ha⁻¹) in the spring of 1996 and 1997 in northern Norway. Mean herbage harvest after 54 and 50 days of growth including 25 and 24 days of reindeer grazing was 1217 ± 320 kg DM ha⁻¹ in 1996 and 2297 ± 495 kg DM ha⁻¹ in 1997 respectively. On ungrazed old meadow, in contrast (P < 0.05), mean herbage harvest after 54 and 50 days of growth was 4159 ± 1164 kg DM ha⁻¹ in 1996 and 3791 ± 275 kg DM ha⁻¹ in 1997 respectively. In 1997, mean herbage harvest after 50 days of growth including 7 days of grazing by reindeer was as high as 3441 ± 180 kg DM ha⁻¹ (P > 0.05). Crude protein content (% of DM) was 25% early in the growing season in both 1996 and 1997. After 54 and 50 days of growth including 25 and 24 days of reindeer grazing, crude protein content was about 17% of DM in both 1996 and 1997 respectively, compared with about 12% of DM in ungrazed old meadow in both years. In 1997, crude protein content was 13.3% of DM after 50 days of growth including 7 days of reindeer grazing. The grazed and ungrazed old meadow contained about 20% (of DM) water‐soluble carbohydrates throughout the summer in both years. Mean plant cell wall content in ungrazed plants harvested after about 50 days was higher (51.5 and 49.1% of DM; P > 0.05) compared with plant cell wall content in grazed meadow (49.0 and 46.4% of DM) in 1996 and 1997 respectively. In vitro dry matter digestibility (%) of herbage harvest using rumen fluid from domestic ruminants was about 10% higher (73.4 ± 0.30 and 75.7 ± 0.28) in samples from grazed meadow compared with ungrazed meadow (66.2 ± 0.93 and 65.4 ± 1.19) in 1996 and 1997 respectively. Reindeer grazing of old meadow in spring maintains the vegetation at a younger phenological stage during the growing season when compared with ungrazed meadow. Therefore grazing increased the quality of the herbage, but decreased herbage harvest under conditions of high grazing intensity. © 2000 Society of Chemical Industry     

High levels of glycoalkaloids in the established swedish potato variety magnum bonum

In 1986, potentially toxic levels of the glycoalkaloids α-solanine and α-chaconine were unexpectedly found in tubers of the established Swedish consumer potato variety Magnum Bonum, leading to the imposition of a conditional sales ban on such potatoes. The combined amounts of α-solanine and α-chaconine in more than 300 commercial lots of Magnum Bonum potatoes analysed as a consequence of the ban ranged from 61 to 665 mg kg^?1 fresh weight with an average of 254 mg kg^?1. Sixty-six percent of the samples exceeded a temporary maximum residue limit of 200 mg kg^?1, 8% were above 400 mg kg^?1. Peeling did not significantly remove the glycoalkaloids in tubers with a high content. The occasional glycoalkaloid elevation was initially attributed to the unusually cold and rainy conditions during the late part of the season in 1986, but subsequent investigations have failed to confirm this hypothesis. Varietal characteristics are likely to have been involved since most other common Swedish varieties seemed to have had normal glycoalkaloid levels in 1986. There were no indications of serious or widespread adverse health effects in consumers due to the high glycoalkaloid levels, although there was circumstantial evidence that a few cases of temporary gastrointestinal disturbances were caused by consumption of Magnum Bonum potatoes with glycoalkaloid concentrations in the range 310–1000 mg kg^?1.     

Feedback–Feedforward Scheduling of Control Tasks

A scheduling architecture for real-time control tasks is proposed. The scheduler uses feedback from execution-time measurements and feedforward from workload changes to adjust the sampling periods of the control tasks so that the combined performance of the controllers is optimized. The performance of each controller is described by a cost function. Based on the solution to the optimal resource allocation problem, explicit solutions are derived for linear and quadratic approximations of the cost functions. It is shown that a linear rescaling of the nominal sampling frequencies is optimal for both of these approximations. An extensive inverted pendulum example is presented, where the performance obtained with open-loop, feedback, combined feedback and feedforward scheduling, and earliest-deadline first scheduling are compared. The performance under earliest-deadline first scheduling is explained by studying the behavior of periodic tasks under overload conditions. It is shown that the average values of the sampling periods equal the nominal periods, rescaled by the processor utilization.     

Real Time Scheduling Theory: A Historical Perspective

In this 25th year anniversary paper for the IEEE Real Time Systems Symposium, we review the key results in real-time scheduling theory and the historical events that led to the establishment of the current real-time computing infrastructure. We conclude this paper by looking at the challenges ahead of us.     

Enhanced incorporation of n−3 fatty acids from fish compared with fish oils

This work was undertaken to study the impact of the source of n−3 FA on their incorporation in serum, on blood lipid composition, and on cellular activation. A clinical trial comprising 71 volunteers, divided into five groups, was performed. Three groups were given 400 g smoked salmon (n=14), cooked salmon (n=15), or cooked cod (n=13) per week for 8 wk. A fourth group was given 15 mL/d of cod liver oil (CLO) (n=15), and a fifth group served as control (n=14) without supplementation. The serum content of EPA and DHA before and after intervention revealed a higher rise in EPA and DHA in the cooked salmon group (129% rise in EPA and 45% rise in DHA) as compared with CLO (106 and 25%, respectively) despite an intake of EPA and DHA in the CLO group of 3.0 g/d compared with 1.2 g/d in the cooked salmon group. No significant changes were observed in blood lipids, fibrinogen, fibrinolysis, or lipopolysaccharide (LPS)-induced tissue factor (TF) activity, tumor necrosis factor-α (TNFα), interleukin-8 (IL-8), leukotriene B₄ (LTB₄), and thromboxane B₂ (TxB₂) in whole blood. EPA and DHA were negatively correlated with LPS-induced TNFα, IL-8, LTB₄, TxB₂, and TF in whole blood. In conclusion, fish consumption is more effective in increasing serum EPA and DHA than supplementing the diet with fish oil. Since the n−3 FA are predominantly in TAG in fish as well as CLO, it is suggested that the larger uptake from fish than CLO is due to differences in physiochemical structure of the lipids.     

An algorithm for fast adaptive image binarization with applications in radiotherapy imaging

Locally adaptive image binarization with a sliding-window threshold can be an effective tool for various image processing tasks. We have used the method for the detection of bone ridges in radiotherapy portal images. However, a straight-forward implementation of sliding-window processing is too time consuming for routine use. Therefore, we have developed a new thresholding criterion suitable for incremental update within the sliding window, and we show that our algorithm gives better results on difficult portal images than various publicly available adaptive thresholding routines. For small windows, the routine is also faster than an adaptive implementation of the Otsu algorithm that uses interpolation between fixed tiles, and the resulting images are equally good.