Infrequent association: massive inguinoscrotal bladder hernia, multiple scrotal lithiasis, and bilateral obstructive uropathy]

BACKGROUND AND AIMS OF THE STUDY: Surgical treatment of functional tricuspid regurgitation associated with advanced valvular disease remains controversial, mainly due to the difficulty in choosing between valve replacement or reconstructive surgery. Failure to correct tricuspid regurgitation during valvular surgery carries a poor prognosis, as reoperation may represent a significant risk to the patient. Thus correct tricuspid valve surgery is vital to achieve improved early and long-term clinical results. METHODS: A total of 142 patients underwent concomitant tricuspid annuloplasty with mitral valve replacement and their clinical outcome was assessed. RESULTS: Overall hospital mortality rate was 11.3%. Seven patients died during follow up. The overall actuarial survival rate for 10 years was 74.1 +/- 14.2%. Postoperatively, 75.8% of the patients had no residual tricuspid insufficiency, while 24.2% had first- or second-degree tricuspid insufficiency and were treated medically. All patients were in NHYA functional class I or II postoperatively. CONCLUSION: Clinically, it is important to assess the severity of functional tricuspid insufficiency before and/or during the operation. Bicuspidalization annuloplasty for functional tricuspid insufficiency has provided good results, with a low incidence of reoperation and significant clinical improvement. The technique could be used in most patients with functional tricuspid regurgitation.     

Benchmarking Fluvial Dynamics for Process‐Based River Restoration: the Upper Rhine River (1816–2014)

Multi‐temporal analysis of river‐floodplain processes is a key tool for the identification of reference conditions or benchmarks and for the evaluation of deviations or deficits as a basis for process‐based river restoration in large modified rivers. This study developed a methodology for benchmarking fluvial processes at river segment level, focusing on those interrelations between morphodynamics (aggradation, erosion, channel shift) and vegetation succession (initial, colonization, transition) that condition habitat structure. Habitat maps of the free‐flowing Upper Rhine River downstream from Iffezheim dam (France–Germany border) were intersected with a geographic information system‐based approach. Patches showing trajectories of anthropization, changeless, progression and regression allowed for the identification of natural and human‐induced processes over almost 200 years. Before channelization, the riverine system was characterized by a shifting habitat mosaic with natural heterogeneity, high degree of surface water connectivity and equilibrium between progression and regression processes. On the other hand, the following 175 years of human interventions led to severe biogeomorphologic deficits evidenced by loss of natural processes and habitat heterogeneity, hydrological disconnection between the river and its floodplain and imbalance of progression versus regression dynamics. The main driving forces of change are found in hydromorphological impacts (channelization, regulation and hydropower plant construction). Regression processes are now almost absent and have to be the objective of process‐based river restoration measures for the studied river‐floodplain system. A sustainable view on water management and river restoration should aim at a more resilient riverine system by balancing the recovery of natural processes with societal needs. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Event-driven,pattern-based methodology for cost-effective development of standardized personal health devices

Experiences applying standards in personal health devices (PHDs) show an inherent trade-off between interoperability and costs (in terms of processing load and development time). Therefore, reducing hardware and software costs as well as time-to-market is crucial for standards adoption. The ISO/IEEE11073 PHD family of standards (also referred to as X73PHD) provides interoperable communication between PHDs and aggregators. Nevertheless, the responsibility of achieving inexpensive implementations of X73PHD in limited resource microcontrollers falls directly on the developer. Hence, the authors previously presented a methodology based on patterns to implement X73-compliant PHDs into devices with low-voltage low-power constraints. That version was based on multitasking, which required additional features and resources. This paper therefore presents an event-driven evolution of the patterns-based methodology for cost-effective development of standardized PHDs. The results of comparing between the two versions showed that the mean values of decrease in memory consumption and cycles of latency are 11.59% and 45.95%, respectively. In addition, several enhancements in terms of cost-effectiveness and development time can be derived from the new version of the methodology. Therefore, the new approach could help in producing cost-effective X73-compliant PHDs, which in turn could foster the adoption of standards.     

Modeling collaboration protocols for collaborative modeling tools: Experiences and applications

Over the last two decades, Collaborative Systems have become increasingly popular thanks to the many advances made in networks, communications and software tools. Within this field, Collaborative Modeling Systems apply the collaborative paradigm to the construction of (often visual) models, where users build diagrams from building blocks and the relationships between them. In these kinds of applications, the work is usually arranged into sessions, with the definition of some kind of time organization between those sessions. This organization is known as a collaboration protocol. Unfortunately, it is not usually easy to define these protocols, and many applications do not allow users to make any use of them.In an effort to overcome these difficulties, in this paper we propose a visual language for defining collaboration protocols for these systems. As such, in our language, sessions, artifacts and the transformations between them can be specified visually, and different coordination relationships (such as fork and join) can be defined. The visual language is included in a development method for collaborative systems that take advantage of the Eclipse platform in order to develop model-driven graphical editors that are enhanced with collaboration capabilities.     

Poly(N-methylpyrrole) electrodeposited on copper: Corrosion protection properties

Electrochemical synthesis of poly(N-methylpyrrole) films on copper electrodes from an aqueous oxalic acid has been achieved. A potential higher than 2 V (SCE) was needed to generate the polymer, for this reason, the polymer was in the overoxidized state. The inhibiting corrosion properties of this coating on copper were investigated for the first time in aqueous 0.1 M sodium chloride solution using potentiodynamic polarization, Tafel analyses, open-circuit potential and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy. Corrosion protection properties comparable to those of polypyrrole (PPy) films were observed for these films. A physical barrier effect is the most likely protection mechanism.     

MHP‐OSGi convergence: a new model for open residential gateways

Nowadays, we are living in a time of important technological changes that affect our lives at home and our communication with the outside world. Among them, the developments in Interactive Digital TV (IDTV) and the smart home field can be considered as particularly important. Related to the former, the new Set‐Top Boxes (STBs) are not only a decoder for digital television broadcast but also an entry point to the Information Society and a suitable platform to support the execution of interactive applications. With regards to the latter, the Residential Gateways (RGs) combine different network technologies to allow the connection of different electronics devices and appliances at home, not only with each other but also with the Internet. Since there is no widespread consensus about the configurations and functions of the RGs, we propose to coordinate the two aforementioned worlds by extending the functionality of STBs to become a RG. Our proposal consists of merging the Multimedia Home Platform (MHP), one of the main standard frameworks for IDTV, with Open Service Gateway Initiative (OSGi), the most widely used open platform to set up RGs. To overcome the radically different nature of these specifications—the function‐oriented MHP middleware and the service‐oriented OSGi framework—we define a new kind of application, coined as XbundLET. This application is able to bridge the gap between the two frameworks and make their interaction feasible. We also show how this proposal has the potential to enable the production of scenarios that cannot currently be put into practice in a natural way. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A low-cost, accurate and non-intercepting continuous method for beam current measurements in a high-current ion implanter

The development of a low-cost, accurate, non-intercepting continuous method for measuring the beam current in a high-current ion implanter is described. The method, named a differential current monitor, is based on the electric charge conservation principle, applied to the currents that flow in the implanter electrical system, due to the acceleration voltage applied to the ion beam and the leakage currents to ground. This method allows for continuous measurement of the ion beam current without intercepting it. Since its installation, it is possible to accurate measure ion beam currents from tens of μA to mA, which is the normal range for this type of system.     

EUSBoost: Enhancing ensembles for highly imbalanced data-sets by evolutionary undersampling

Classification with imbalanced data-sets has become one of the most challenging problems in Data Mining. Being one class much more represented than the other produces undesirable effects in both the learning and classification processes, mainly regarding the minority class. Such a problem needs accurate tools to be undertaken; lately, ensembles of classifiers have emerged as a possible solution. Among ensemble proposals, the combination of Bagging and Boosting with preprocessing techniques has proved its ability to enhance the classification of the minority class.In this paper, we develop a new ensemble construction algorithm (EUSBoost) based on RUSBoost, one of the simplest and most accurate ensemble, which combines random undersampling with Boosting algorithm. Our methodology aims to improve the existing proposals enhancing the performance of the base classifiers by the usage of the evolutionary undersampling approach. Besides, we promote diversity favoring the usage of different subsets of majority class instances to train each base classifier. Centered on two-class highly imbalanced problems, we will prove, supported by the proper statistical analysis, that EUSBoost is able to outperform the state-of-the-art methods based on ensembles. We will also analyze its advantages using kappa-error diagrams, which we adapt to the imbalanced scenario.     

Dynamic classifier selection for One-vs-One strategy: Avoiding non-competent classifiers

The One-vs-One strategy is one of the most commonly used decomposition technique to overcome multi-class classification problems; this way, multi-class problems are divided into easier-to-solve binary classification problems considering pairs of classes from the original problem, which are then learned by independent base classifiers.The way of performing the division produces the so-called non-competence. This problem occurs whenever an instance is classified, since it is submitted to all the base classifiers although the outputs of some of them are not meaningful (they were not trained using the instances from the class of the instance to be classified). This issue may lead to erroneous classifications, because in spite of their incompetence, all classifiers' decisions are usually considered in the aggregation phase.In this paper, we propose a dynamic classifier selection strategy for One-vs-One scheme that tries to avoid the non-competent classifiers when their output is probably not of interest. We consider the neighborhood of each instance to decide whether a classifier may be competent or not. In order to verify the validity of the proposed method, we will carry out a thorough experimental study considering different base classifiers and comparing our proposal with the best performer state-of-the-art aggregation within each base classifier from the five Machine Learning paradigms selected. The findings drawn from the empirical analysis are supported by the appropriate statistical analysis.