Heart Rate Turbulence Denoising Using Support Vector Machines

Heart rate turbulence (HRT) is a transient acceleration and subsequent deceleration of the heart rate after a premature ventricular complex (PVC), and it has been shown to be a strong risk stratification criterion in patients with cardiac disease. In order to reduce the noise level of the HRT signal, conventional measurements of HRT use a patient-averaged template of post-PVC tachogram (PPT), hence providing with long-term HRT indexes. We hypothesize that the reduction of the noise level at each isolated PPT, using signal processing techniques, will allow us to estimate short-term HRT indexes. Accordingly, its application could be extended to patients with reduced number of available PPT. In this paper, several HRT denoising procedures are proposed and tested, with special attention to support vector machine (SVM) estimation, as this is a robust algorithm that allows us to deal with few available time samples in the PPT. Pacing-stimulated HRT during electrophysiological study are used as a low-noise gold standard. Measurements in a 24-h Holter patient database reveal a significant reduction in the bias and the variance of HRT measurements. We conclude that SVM denoising yields short-term HRT measurements and improves the signal-to-noise level of long-term HRT measurements.     

Simultaneous determination of species-specific isotopic composition of Hg by gas chromatography coupled to multicollector ICPMS

This work presents the simultaneous online determination of the isotopic composition of different Hg species in a single sample by the hyphenation of gas chromatography (GC) with multicollector-inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (MC-ICPMS). With the use of commercially available instrumentation, precise and accurate species-specific Hg isotope delta values (per mil deviation of the Hg isotope ratio in the sample relative to a reference standard) have been obtained online from consecutive GC transient signals. The use of isothermal temperature programs to extend the elution of the Hg species, the proper selection of the peak integration window, as well as the preconcentration of real samples are critical to provide optimal counting statistics. Also, isotope ratio drift during transient signal elution was overcome by introducing a mixed Hg(II) and MeHg standard bracketing scheme and expressing all results using the delta-notation relative to SRM NIST-3133. Using the proposed methodology, we have obtained an external 2SD precision of 0.56 per thousand for delta (202)Hg that is more than 10 times smaller than the overall Hg stable isotope variation thus far observed in terrestrial samples. The measurement of species-specific Hg isotopic composition relative to SRM NIST-3133 has been validated versus two other analytical techniques, i.e., conventional nebulization (CN) of Hg(II) solution and cold vapor (CV) generation of Hg (0) vapor. A good agreement between the species-specific delta values obtained by the different techniques has been obtained in secondary fractionated reference standard (UM-Almaden) and environmental matrixes, i.e., BCR-CRM 464 (tuna fish) and IAEA-085 (human hair). The results show mass-dependent and mass-independent fractionation in environmental samples, i.e., mass-independent fractionation of odd isotopes (199)Hg and (201)Hg in tuna fish was observed. This methodology provides new possibilities for the future study of species-specific stable isotope geochemistry of Hg and other trace metals.     

A simple colorimetric determination of the free amino groups in water soluble chitin derivatives using genipin

A colorimetric method for quantitative measurement of free amino groups of water soluble chitin derivatives is described. The method utilizes genipin as a natural and specific reagent for determining the concentration of free amino groups in samples of water soluble chitin derivatives. The blue color adduct (complex) formed during genipin reaction with free amino groups was measured at about 589 nm and Beer-Lambert’s law obeyed over the concentration range of 50 to 300 mg/L. Parameters of analytical conditions were considered and kept constant during the experimental procedure. Highly acetylated water soluble chitin derivatives can be differentiated from water soluble chitosan using this genipin method. The colorimetric method with genipin was proved to be a rapid and efficient technique to determine the free amino groups in water soluble chitin derivatives. This method can also be applied for the detection of the enzymatic activity of chitindeacetylase.     

Optimal filtering for linear state delay systems

In this note, the optimal filtering problem for linear systems with state delay over linear observations is treated proceeding from the general expression for the stochastic Ito differential of the optimal estimate and the error variance. As a result, the optimal estimate equation similar to the traditional Kalman-Bucy one is derived; however, it is impossible to obtain a system of the filtering equations, that is closed with respect to the only two variables, the optimal estimate and the error variance, as in the Kalman-Bucy filter. The resulting system of equations for determining the error variance consists of a set of equations, whose number is specified by the ratio between the current filtering horizon and the delay value in the state equation and increases as the filtering horizon tends to infinity. In the example, performance of the designed optimal filter for linear systems with state delay is verified against the best Kalman-Bucy filter available for linear systems without delays and two versions of the extended Kalman-Bucy filter for time-delay systems.     

Very fast method to synthesise conformal arrays

Avery fast technique that allows the synthesising of arbitrary footprint patterns by using conformal arrays with many radiating elements is described. This method is based on a combination of Woodward-Lawson and Elliott-Stern techniques, and it was applied to the synthesis of a triangular footprint generated by 657 axial dipoles placed on a cylindrical surface, obtaining acceptable ripple and sidelobe levels.     

Genetic algorithms in the design and optimization of antenna arraypatterns

This paper demonstrates the application of genetic algorithms (GAs) in array pattern synthesis. GAs have the ability to escape from local minima and maxima and are ideally suited for problems where the number of variables is very high. We present three examples: two for linear arrays and one involving linear and planar arrays     

A closed-form optimal control for linear systems with equal state and input delays

This paper presents the optimal regulator for a linear system with equal delays in state and input and a quadratic criterion. The optimal regulator equations are obtained using the maximum principle. Performance of the obtained optimal regulator is verified in the illustrative example against the best linear regulators available for the linear system without delays and for a rational approximation of the original time delay system. Simulation graphs demonstrating better performance of the obtained optimal regulator are included.     

A heuristic approach to minimize expected makespan in open shops subject to stochastic processing times and failures

Many real world situations exist where job scheduling is required. This is the case of some entities, machines, or workers who have to execute certain jobs as soon as possible. Frequently what happens is that several workers or machines are not available to perform their activities during some time periods, due to different circumstances. This paper deals with these situations, and considers stochastic scheduling models to study these problems. When scheduling models are used in practice, they have to take into account that some machines may not be working. That temporal lack of machine availability is known as breakdowns, which happen randomly at any time. The times required to repair those machines are also random variables. The jobs have operations with stochastic processing times, their own release times, and there is no precedence between them. Each job is divided into operations and each operation is performed on the corresponding specialized machine. In addition, in the problems considered, the order in which the operations of each job are done is irrelevant. We develop a heuristic approach to solve these stochastic open-shop scheduling problems where random machine breakdowns can happen. The proposed approach is general and it does not depend on the distribution types of the considered random input data. It provides solutions to minimize the expected makespan. Computational experiences are also reported. The results show that the proposed approach gives a solid performance, finding suitable solutions with short CPU times.     

RESYGEN: A Recommendation System Generator using domain-based heuristics

Recommender systems provide personalized recommendations on products or services to user. The amount information handled by this type of systems is steadily growing. Furthermore, the development of recommendation systems is a difficult task due to the implementation of complex algorithms and metrics. For this reason, the success of recommendation systems depends on preliminary design decisions such as the most adequate similarity metric, the right process to infer proactive recommendations, for mentioning a few. This decision determines the process for generating recommendations and also impacts quality and user’s satisfaction. In this paper, we propose RESYGEN, a Recommendation System Generator. RESYGEN allows the user to generate such kind of systems in an easy and friendly way. Furthermore, RESYGEN allows the generation of multi-domain systems such as music, video, books, travel, hardware, software, and food to mention a few. RESYGEN is based in the selection of the best distance metrics for nominal, ordinal, numeric and binary attributes, with the aim to reduce complexity for non-expert users and also to facilitate the selection of the metric which best fits to the data type. A system generated through RESYGEN has several interesting elements such as ratings, recommendations, cloud tag, among others. We performed a qualitative evaluation with the aim of comparing other recommender systems against systems generated by RESYGEN. The results shows that generated systems by RESYGEN, comprise the basic elements of a recommendation system.