Providing the right stuff: feeding children with chronic renal failure

The progressive loss of renal function in children with chronic renal failure (CRF) has a negative influence on their nutritional status and statural growth. Supportive therapies with 1-25 dihydroxy-vitamin D3, recombinant erythropoietin and growth hormone have significantly improved the biochemical and clinical features but the success of these therapies is largely related to an appropriate diet, with adequate protein/caloric intakes. Children more than adults have minimal protein requirements to avoid malnutrition and growth impairment FAO/WHO and RDA recommendations save as guidelines for a correct diet in children with CRF. Following these allowances leads to a "normoproteic" diet, with a protein intake which is often half the unrestricted one in Western European countries, but which is still likely to be not enough to protect against renal deterioration. Indeed the European Study Group for Nutritional Treatment of CRF in children failed to show a significant effect of diet on the mean decline of glomerular filtration rate over two years.     

Experimental Design Applied for Cost and Efficiency of Antioxidants in Biodiesel

Oxidation stability is a parameter of great importance for biodiesel quality control to both producers and subsequent consumers. To maintain the quality of biodiesel, currently the most effective and economical method is the addition of antioxidants that prevent or retard the biofuel oxidation reaction. In this study, efficiency and cost of synthetic antioxidants added to B100 biodiesel from soybean oil and pork fat were evaluated, using butylhydroxyanisole (BHA), butylhydroxytoluene (BHT) and tert-butylhydroquinone (TBHQ), in pure form or in mixtures, according to a simplex-centroid mixture experimental design. Results demonstrate an increased induction period (IP) in all trials when compared to the control sample, and TBHQ was the only antioxidant alone that met all the specification standards, while BHT and BHA alone met only the American standard specifications. The antioxidant mixture that presented the highest synergistic effect was that of TBHQ and BHA. Multi-response optimization indicated an optimum formulation containing 75 % TBHQ and 25 % BHA with an IP of 7.27 h at 110 °C and the antioxidant mixture cost of 31.31 USD, to be added for a ton of biodiesel. This simplex-centroid mixture experimental design shows an ability to be applied in the biodiesel, oils and fats industry to evaluate the oxidation stability and the occurrence of synergism between different mixtures of synthetic or natural antioxidants and their costs.     

Correct shielding gas selection in dual wire GMAW

K-type thermocouples are fabricated using a chromel wire and an alumel wire of 50 m by the non-contact discharge welding method. The welding is carried out at six different butt angles. The size of the hot junction tends to decrease with an increase in butt angle, when the butt angle is larger than 1.4 rad. The response rate is measured and it is almost proportional to the reciprocal of the size of the hot junction. It is shown that the size of the hot junction is an important factor for the response rate. Wire diameter is another important factor for temperature measurement of small objects. When temperature is measured at the same point by a thermocouple under the conditions that only the hot junction and its vicinity are heated, the output of electromotive force, i.e. indicated temperature, will depend on the wire diameter. As the metal wire is a good thermal conductor and the rate of heat transport is proportional to the area of the wire cross section, deviation from the true value increases with an increase in wire diameter. Our experiments showed that the indicated temperature decreased linearly with the wire diameter. Furthermore, we measured the discharge voltage and current at various setting currents and discharge gaps.     

Optimal cost/performance design of ATM switches

This paper proposes a methodology for performing an evaluation and optimization of the cost of an ATM switching architecture under performance constraints given in terms of virtual connection blocking probability. An analysis of blocking networks is developed, and combined with known results concerning nonblocking networks, provides a theoretical model which relates traffic characteristics, network topology and blocking probability in a multirate/multiservice broadband environment. An analysis of the characteristics determining the cost of a generic ATM switch implementation follows. The model is oriented to optimize both the topological parameters and the speed advantage, with respect to the main cost factors of VLSI-based switching networks i.e., components count and complexity, interconnection costs     

Microprocessor-Based CAMAC Data Acquisition and Processing System

The peculiar characteristics of an autonomous CAMAC system based on the use of an Intel 8080 microprocessor are described. The system memory for program store, scratch work and data acquisition is contained in the autonomous CAMAC controller. Memory can be accessed in DMA mode with 24-bit data utilizing three bytes with a unique address. Suitable 3-byte floating point mathematical subroutines have been developed for general use and in particular for the requirements of the system. Details on hardware and software of the system are illustrated together with a brief mention of the generalizations.     

Respiratory optimized data selection for more resilient self-navigated whole-heart coronary MR angiography

Objectives

Our objective was to test a data-exclusion strategy for respiratory motion suppression by retrospectively eliminating data acquired at extreme respiratory positions for improved coronary vessel sharpness (VS) of 1-D self-navigated 3-D radial whole-heart coronary angiography acquisitions.

Materials and methods

3-D radial self-navigated acquisitions were performed on a 1.5T scanner in volunteers during free-breathing (n = 8), in coached volunteers (n = 13) who were asked to breathe in a controlled manner to mimic cardiovascular patients presenting with Cheyne-Stokes breathing, and in free-breathing patients (n = 20). Data collected during large respiratory excursions were gradually excluded retrospectively from the reconstruction yielding 14 data sets per subject on average. The impact on VS, blood and myocardium signal-to-noise and contrast-to-noise was measured. From these results, two retrospective gating strategies were defined for the k-line elimination procedure and tested in all groups.

Results

Maximum right coronary artery VS improvement was +7.4 and +2.7% in coached volunteers and patients (P < 0.0001 for both), respectively, and 1.6% for the free-breathing volunteers (P = 0.13). The first gating strategy was defined as a fixed undersampling factor of 5 compared to a fully sampled 3-D radial acquisition, yielding significant VS improvement in coached volunteers and patients while myocardial signal-to-noise decreased in these. The second strategy was defined as a fixed gating window of 5.7 mm, leading to similar improvements.

Conclusion

The presented strategies improve image quality of self-navigated acquisitions by retrospectively excluding data collected during end-inspiration.

     

Sensitivity to microwave measurements to vegetation biomass andsoil moisture content: a case study

A comparative evaluation of the potential of active and passive microwave sensors in estimating vegetation biomass and soil moisture content is carried out. For this purpose, experimental data collected on an agricultural area by airborne scatterometers and radiometers during the AGRISCATT and AGRIRAD 1988 campaigns have been used. The results show that both microwave backscattering and emission are sensitive to vegetation biomass over a wide frequency range. Multifrequency observations seem to offer good probabilities for separating wide leaf from small leaf herbaceous crops, and for detecting different growth stages. Low frequency data (L band) at a steep incidence angle (10°) confirm that both the backscattering coefficient and the normalized temperature are correlated and sensitive to soil moisture content