In vivo effects of activated H-ras oncogene expressed in the liver and in urogenital tissues

PURPOSE: The clinical significance of isolated calf vein thrombosis (CVT), particularly with respect to development of the postthrombotic syndrome, remains controversial. The purpose of this study was to define the early natural history of CVT in relation to persistent lower extremity symptoms, propagation, recanalization, and the development of valvular incompetence. METHODS: Over a 116-month period, 499 patients with acute deep venous thrombosis (DVT) were referred to our research laboratory, of whom 58 (12%) had thrombosis confined to the calf veins of at least one extremity. The lower extremities of 268 patients (29 with isolated CVT) were followed-up clinically and with duplex ultrasonography at intervals of 1 day, 7 days, 1 month, every 3 months for the first year, and yearly thereafter. RESULTS: Seventy percent of extremities with CVT were symptomatic at presentation. Although the prevalence of clinical signs and symptoms decreased to 29% by 1 month, 23% of patients had persistent pain, edema, or both at 12 months. In contrast, 9% of uninvolved extremities contralateral to a CVT and 54% of extremities with proximal DVT remained symptomatic at 1 year (p = 0.004). Recanalization proceeded rapidly such that the mean thrombus load was reduced by 50% at 1 month and to zero at 1 year. The prevalence of valvular incompetence progressively increased such that reflux was present in 24% of extremities at 1 year. Although its investigation was not a primary goal of this study, pulmonary embolism was diagnosed at presentation and during follow-up in 11% and 3% of patients, respectively. CONCLUSIONS: The natural history of CVT is complicated by persistent symptoms and the development of valvular incompetence in approximately one-quarter of patients. This potential for persistent lower extremity symptoms should be considered in evaluating the clinical relevance of isolated calf vein DVT.     

Reperfusion injury delays healing of intestinal anastomosis in a rat

This SAEM position paper clarifies the role of emergency medicine in health care delivery. It builds upon the working definition of emergency medicine developed by the American College of Emergency Physicians in 1994 by describing the health care role of emergency physicians (EPs). EPs are first-contact providers who care for all patients regardless of age, gender, time of presentation, or ability to pay. They remain the only continuously accessible specialty for patients seeking help and solace in the health care system. They are an essential link in the health care continuum between primary care physicians, specialists, the out-of-hospital system, the patient, inpatient services, and communication services. The EP's role is in organizing and monitoring the emergency care delivery system. Part of this role is to better align the health care provider training and ability with the specific medical needs of a patient. The emergency health care system remains the essential medical safety net for all individuals needing care in this country.     

A Measurement‐Based Approach for Designing Fixed‐Order Controllers for Unknown Closed‐Loop Architecture

This paper presents a new technique to design fixed‐structure controllers for linear unknown systems using a set of measurements. In model‐based approaches, the measured data are used to identify a model of the plant for which a suitable controller can be designed. Due to the fact that real processes cannot be described perfectly by mathematical models, designing controllers using such models to guarantee some desired closed‐loop performance is a challenging task. Hence, a possible alternative to model‐based methods is to directly utilize the measured data in the design process. We propose an approach to designing structured controllers using a set of closed‐loop frequency‐domain data. The principle of such an approach is based on computing the parameters of a fixed‐order controller for which the closed‐loop frequency response fits a desired frequency response that describes some desired performance indices. This problem is formulated as an error minimization problem, which can be solved to find suitable values of the controller parameters. The main feature of the proposed control methodology is that it can be applied to stable and unstable plants. Additionally, the design process depends on a pre‐selected controller structure, which allows for the selection of low‐order controllers. An application of the proposed method to a DC servomotor system is presented to experimentally validate and demonstrate its efficacy.     

The design of a collision avoidance system for use by Pilots operating on the airport ramp and in taxiway areas

Ground collisions have serious implications from both a safety and a commercial perspective. This paper reports on human computer interaction (HCI) research related to the advancement of a collision avoidance system, for use by Pilots operating on the airport ramp and in taxiway areas. Primarily, this paper focuses on the key findings of this research and the emerging HCI design solution.     

Blind spatial unmixing of multispectral images: New methods combining sparse component analysis,clustering and non-negativity constraints

Remote sensing has become an unavoidable tool for better managing our environment, generally by realizing maps of land cover using classification techniques. Traditional classification techniques assign only one class (e.g., water, soil, grass) to each pixel of remote sensing images. However, the area covered by one pixel contains more than one surface component and results in the mixture of these surface components. In such situations, classical classification is not acceptable for many major applications, such as environmental monitoring, agriculture, mineral exploration and mining, etc. Most methods proposed for treating this problem have been developed for hyperspectral images. On the contrary, there are very few automatic techniques suited to multispectral images. In this paper, we propose new unsupervised spatial methods (called 2D-Corr-NLS and 2D-Corr-NMF) in order to unmix each pixel of a multispectral image for better recognizing the surface components constituting the observed scene. These methods are related to the blind source separation (BSS) problem, and are based on sparse component analysis (SCA), clustering and non-negativity constraints. Our approach consists in first identifying the mixing matrix involved in this BSS problem, by using the first stage of a spatial correlation-based SCA method with very limited source sparsity constraints, combined with clustering. Non-negative least squares (NLS) or non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) methods are then used to extract spatial sources. An important advantage of our proposed methods is their applicability to the possibly globally underdetermined, but locally (over)determined BSS model in multispectral remote sensing images. Experiments based on realistic synthetic mixtures and real multispectral images collected by the Landsat ETM+ and the Formosat-2 sensors are performed to evaluate the performance of the proposed approach. We also show that our methods significantly outperform the sequential maximum angle convex cone (SMACC) method.     

Artificial intelligence implementation in the APS process diagnostic

Thermal spray process is a technique of coating manufacturing implementing a wide variety of materials and processes. This technique is characterized by up to 150 processing parameters influencing the coating properties. The control of the coating quality is needed through the consideration of a robust methodology that takes into account the parameter interdependencies, the process variability and offers the ability to quantify the processing parameter-process response relationships. The aim of this work is to introduce a new approach based on artificial intelligence responding to these requirements. A detailed procedure is presented considering an artificial neural network (ANN) structure which encodes implicitly the physical phenomena governing the process. The implementation of such a structure was coupled to experimental results of an optic sensor controlling the powder particle fusion state before the coating formation. The optimization steps were discussed and the predicted results were compared to the experimental ones allowing the identification of the control factors.     

Constrained model predictive control for time-varying delay systems: Application to an active car suspension

This study investigates the problem of robust model predictive control (RMPC) for active suspension systems with time-varying delays and input constraints. The uncertainty is of convex polytopic type. Based on the Lyapunov-Krasovskii functional method, sufficient stability conditions of the time-varying delays systems are derived by linear matrix inequalities (LMIs) terms. At each time set, a feasible state feedback is obtained by minimizing an upper bound of the ‘worst-case’ quadratic objective function over an infinite horizon subject to constraints on inputs. Finally, a quarter-vehicle model is exploited to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.     

Planning maintenance works on pavements through ant colony optimization

Pavements constructed for the purpose of meeting the demand of highways which were emerged with the improving technological developments increased. And consequently, more resources were demanded to be directed to pavement maintenance and rehabilitation. Hereby, the concept of pavement management emerged. Although project-level analyses were found adequate previously, network-level evaluations were needed in order to do detailed planning as a result of resource allocation and transfer problems that were emerged later. Therefore, pavement management system has become compulsory for all pavements to be controlled together. In this framework, programming is needed in order to schedule maintenance–rehabilitation and develop costs with respect to budget. In the study carried out, a mode was developed in order to program the routine network maintenance activities in terms of Pavement Maintenance and Management Systems, and it was concluded that this problem can be solved through ant colony, using Visual Basic.     

Real-time wrist localization in color images based on corner analysis

Hand detection and gestures recognition have become very popular in recent human-computer interaction systems. Although several methods of hand detection have been proposed in the literature, they exist few methods that use the wrist as a factor of detection, others impose constraints on the length of the sleeves and on the orientation of the hand. In this work, we present a new two-stage algorithm of wrist localization designed for hand detection and gestures recognition systems. The first stage of the algorithm consists in separating the skin region containing the hand from the background, and in the second stage, the wrist is localized from the resulted skin mask. The main contribution of the proposed method is based on the analysis of corners along the contour of the skin masks to localize the wrist emplacement. Based on an evaluation on 437 color images with their ground-truth and three sets of skin masks, we compared our method with other efficient methods of literature and the results obtained were very satisfactory.     

A linear 60 GHz 65 nm-CMOS power amplifier realization and characterization for OFDM signal

A millimeter-wave Power Amplifier (PA) based on a 65nm CMOS technology from STMicroelectronics has been designed. The targeted feature is the unlicensed band around 60 GHz suitable for wireless personal area network application (WPAN). To optimize the linearity, the PA is designed under class A biasing to have an output compression point (OCP₁) close to its saturated Power (P _sat). S-parameters and large signal measurement results are demonstrated and compared with electromagnetic simulations. The PA offers a P _sat of 8.3 dBm, an OCP₁ of 6 dBm and a gain of 6.7 dB. The die area is 0.29 mm² with pads. Considering those results, one-tone simulations are not sufficient to characterize the linearity performances of the PA in its real conditions of use. Consequently, two-tone simulations are firstly performed. After, linearity figures of merit (FoM) are discussed applying an orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) modulated signal. The PA offers an adjacent channel power ratio (ACPR) of 15 dB and an error vector magnitude (EVM) of 20% at PA compression operating mode.