Sub-pleural lipoma: apropos of a case]

The pyomyositis is still being a rare disease in our environment. A review of this illness is made as a result of a new case, which shows some peculiarities that differ it from others published previously: the patient showed a basic medullary carcynoma of thyroid with cerebral metastasis and the responsible germ was a Streptococcus pneumoniae. The immunodepressor factors which are presented at most patients who suffer a pyomyositis, the clinic picture so suggestive and the image methods we dispose nowadays, should serve to suspect its diagnostic in an earlier way, proceeding to its bacteriological confirmation before illness evolves to stages as advanced as in the shown case.     

Disseminated tuberculosis in non-immunocompromised host: three case reports

INTRODUCTION: Disseminated tuberculosis, i.e., tuberculosis involving lung, liver, spleen, bone marrow and lymph nodes is rare (2.8%), particularly when immunocompromised diathesis is lacking. EXEGESIS: We report three cases of disseminated tuberculosis confirmed by bacteriology or histology, which occurred in non-immunocompromised patients. Disease evolution under antituberculous treatment was favorable in two cases and fatal in the third one. CONCLUSION: Disseminated tuberculosis must be suspected when miliary pulmonary lesions are associated with hematologic abnormalities, even in non-immunocompromised host. Early treatment is mandatory to avoid fatal outcome.     

Parameters extraction of PEMFC's model using manta rays foraging optimizer

In this article, a recently developed bio-inspired based manta rays foraging optimizer (MRFO) is attempted for reliable and accurate extraction of the model uncertain parameters of proton exchange membrane fuel cells (PEMFCs). The parameter estimation is formulated as a non-linear optimization problem subject to set of restrictions. The great development and tremendous revolution of computation heuristic-based algorithms are the impetus of the authors to apply the MRFO to solve this constrained optimization problem resulting in a precise PEMFC model. Three case studies of typical field PEMFC stacks namely Ballard type Mark V, NedStack type PS6, and Horizon type H-12. Various I to V datasets are demonstrated to appraise the performance of MRFO among other recent optimizers available in the literature. To be objective and for sake of quantifications, the best scores of minimum fitness values are 0.8533, 2.1360, and 0.0966 for the later said PEMFC stacks, correspondingly. At a later stage, production of various characteristics under varying operating conditions such as changeable cell temperature and regulating pressures are established using the generated best values of PEMFCs model. Further calculations of statistical indices are performed to validate the robustness of obtained results by the MRFO. Through comprehensive performance assessments, it can be confirmed that MRFO is very promising tool for the effective extraction of PEMFCs' model and suggested to be applied for solving other engineering problems.     

Evaluating Experimental Measurements of the IEEE 802.11p Communication Using ARADA LocoMate OBU Device Compared to the Theoretical Simulation Results

Wireless Personal Communications - Research interest has been focused on vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication systems, known as V2X technologies, namely in...     

Real-time unequal error protection algorithms for progressive image transmission

We consider unequal error protection strategies for the efficient progressive transmission of embedded image codes over noisy channels. In progressive transmission, the reconstruction quality is important not only at the target transmission rate but also at the intermediate rates. An adequate error protection strategy may, thus, consist of optimizing the average performance over the set of intermediate rates. The performance can be the expected number of correctly decoded source bits or the expected distortion. For the rate-based performance, we prove some interesting properties of an optimal solution and give an optimal linear-time algorithm to compute it. For the distortion-based performance, we propose an efficient linear-time local search algorithm. For a binary symmetric channel, two state-of-the-art source coders (SPIHT and JPEG2000), we compare the progressive ability of our proposed solutions to that of the strategies that optimize the end-to-end performance of the system. Experimental results showed that the proposed solutions had a slightly worse performance at the target transmission rate and a better performance at most of the intermediate rates, especially at the lowest ones.     

Widgets Dedicated to User Interface Evaluation

In this article, evaluation-based widgets are proposed as a contribution to assist evaluators for early evaluation of user interfaces. This contribution imbricates the ergonomic quality evaluation process into widgets used for user-interface graphical composition. In other words, these widgets evaluate themselves according to a defined set of ergonomic guidelines. The proposed widgets indicate the possible interface design ergonomic inconsistencies as a notification to the designer. The guidelines set can be modified through an interface dedicated to guidelines definition into XML files. The proposed widgets are intended for the evaluation of different kind of user interfaces: WIMP, web, and mobile. An experimental evaluation, involving these evaluation-based widgets, is proposed to illustrate and to validate the approach.     

AO4BPEL: An Aspect-oriented Extension to BPEL

Process-oriented composition languages such as BPEL allow Web Services to be composed into more sophisticated services using a workflow process. However, such languages exhibit some limitations with respect to modularity and flexibility. They do not provide means for a well-modularized specification of crosscutting concerns such as logging, persistence, auditing, and security. They also do not support the dynamic adaptation of composition at runtime. In this paper, we advocate an aspect-oriented approach to Web Service composition and present the design and implementation of AO4BPEL, an aspect-oriented extension to BPEL. We illustrate through examples how AO4BPEL makes the composition specification more modular and the composition itself more flexible and adaptable.     

Fermented beverage emulsion based on donkey milk with sunflower oil

Sunflower oil was added to donkey milk to increase the low energetic intake and improve both texture and healthy characteristics. This milk‐based emulsion was fermented using a binary association of two strains of Streptococcus thermophilus showing distinctive abilities. One strain (St 907) produced ropy exopolysaccharide (EPS), whereas the other strain (St 563) produced folic acid. Fermentation was stopped at pH 5.0 to prevent whey separation. The refrigerated product was stable at least for 20 days and showed improved viscoelastic properties due to the EPS combined with the oil droplets. The volatile profile was constituted of ketones, aldehydes, alcohols and fatty acids, mainly originated from microbial fermentation, whereas few other compounds suggested the presence of oxidative processes. The folic acid content in the fermented beverage was increased by more than 10 times (2.03 ± 0.17 μg/100 mL) with respect to that found in donkey milk (0.16 ± 0.03 μg/100 mL).