Isolated hepatic tuberculosis mimicking liver tumors in a dialysis patient

Cases of isolated hepatic tuberculosis (TB) are rare. The diagnosis is often delayed or missed because of nonspecific symptoms and laboratory findings. Besides, the disease is extremely rare even in a country where TB is an alarming public health problem. This report demonstrates the difficulty in correctly diagnosing local hepatic TB. We report the case of a 62‐year‐old male patient with end‐stage renal disease treated with hemodialysis, who developed 2 months of abdominal distension and general anorexia, with hyperechoic hepatic lesions on ultrasound. Computed tomography suspected multiple liver tumors. The liver biopsy finally led to the diagnosis of TB of the liver without other involvements. We conclude that isolated hepatic TB is one of the rare forms of extrapulmonary TB in dialysis patients. A greater awareness of this rare clinical entity may prevent needless surgical interventions.     

Piperacillin/tazobactam‐induced neurotoxicity in a hemodialysis patient: A case report

Antibiotics are potentially a cause of neurotoxicity in dialysis patients, the most common are the beta‐lactams as ceftazidime and cefepime, and few cases have been reported after piperacillin/tazobactam use. This report presents a case of a hypertensive and diabetic 67‐year‐old woman in regular hemodialysis, which previously had a stroke. She was hospitalized presenting pneumonia, which was initially treated with cefepime. Two days after treatment, she presented dysarthria, left hemiparesis, ataxia, and IX and X cranial nerves paresis. Computed tomography showed no acute lesions and cefepime neurotoxicity was hypothesized, and the antibiotic was replaced by piperacillin/tazobactam. The neurologic signs disappeared; however, 4 days after with piperacillin/tazobactam treatment, the neurological manifestations returned. A new computed tomography showed no new lesions, and the second antibiotic regimen withdrawn. After two hemodialysis sessions, the patient completely recovered from neurological manifestations. The patient presented sequentially neurotoxicity caused by two beta‐lactams antibiotics. This report meant to alert clinicians that these antibiotics have dangerous neurological effects in chronic kidney disease patients.     

一种基于Spark的不确定数据集频繁模式挖掘算法

如何在海量不确定数据集中提高频繁模式挖掘性能是目前研究的热点.传统算法大多是以期望、概率或者权重等单一指标为数据项集支持度，在大数据背景下，同时考虑概率和权重支持度的算法难以兼顾其执行效率.为此，本文提出一种基于Spark的不确定数据集频繁模式挖掘算法（UWEFP），首先，为了同时兼顾数据项的概率和权重，计算一项集的最大概率权重值并进行剪枝；然后，为了减少对数据集的多次扫描，结合Spark框架的优点，设计了一种具有FP-tree特征的新颖的UWEFP-tree结构进行模式树的构建及挖掘；最后在Spark环境下，以UCI数据集进行实验验证.实验结果表明本文的方法在保证挖掘结果的同时，提高了效率.     

Experience With Nocturnal Hemodialysis

In order to provide a highly efficient, long-duration form of hemodialysis, we developed nocturnal hemodialysis. Patients were dialyzed nightly at home for 8 – 10 hours, 6 – 7 nights/week. We kept the dialysate flow at 100 mL/min and the blood flow at 250 – 300 mL/min. Patients were monitored remotely from the hospital through a computer connection. An internal jugular line was used as an access. We have trained 12 patients over 30 months and have accumulated 160 patient-months worth of data. The patients tolerated the dialysis very well and slept through the night. There was a significant improvement in their sense of well-being. Nightly Kt/V was 0.99. Weekly removal of phosphate was two times as high and β ₂ -microglobulin four times as high as conventional hemodialysis. All patients have discontinued their phosphate binders and have increased their dietary phosphate and protein intake. Hypertension was controlled with fewer medications, and erythropoietin dosages decreased. Complications were infrequent and included catheter occlusion and infections. Reusing the dialyzers decreased the cost of the treatment to levels similar to continuous ambulatory peritoneal dialysis. Nocturnal hemodialysis represents a viable dialysis modality that combines high quality, low cost, and excellent tolerance.     

A Composite Index of Compliance for Chronic In‐Center Hemodialysis Patients

We developed a composite compliance index as the sum of the compliance scores for interdialytic weight gain (IDWG), pre‐dialysis serum potassium and phosphorus concentrations (each scored from zero to 3, with 3 indicating the poorest compliance), and skipping hemodialysis sessions (scored from zero to 9, with 9 indicating the poorest compliance). We used this composite score to prospectively evaluate compliance in 25 prevalent hemodialysis patients over a period of 1 year. We then followed these patients for another 3.5 years. The patients studied were divided into two groups: group A (poor compliance) consisted of 9 subjects with composite score ≥ 9 (13.2 ± 3.2); group B (better compliance) consisted of 16 subjects with composite score < 9 (4.7 ± 1.8). Age, duration of hemodialysis, and frequency of diabetes mellitus did not differ between the groups. Group A contained higher fractions of subjects with history of alcoholism (66.7% vs 12.5%, p = 0.010), other substance addiction (44.4% vs 0%, p = 0.010), and severe psychosocial problems (88.9% vs 18.8%, p = 0.002). Mean survival from the beginning of observation, estimated by actuarial life‐table survival analysis, was 1.19 years in group A and 2.60 years in group B (p = 0.0265). A composite compliance index incorporating domains indicating adherence to diet, medications, and dialysis schedule identified other behavioral problems in poorly compliant patients. Hemodialysis patients characterized by this composite index as poorly compliant had shortened survival.     

Alternatives to standard hemodialysis

Survival of patients on hemodialysis remains poor, but the benefits of increasing urea clearance have probably been maximized within our current treatment schedules. Long dialysis sessions (8 hr) produce impressive outcomes, with mortality 53% to 55% lower than conventional schedules. Even increasing from 4 to 5 hr may improve survival. Increased frequency of dialysis (6 times weekly) produces impressive reductions in left ventricular mass and could conceivably be implemented in‐center. Preliminary data suggest a 61% reduction in mortality with increased frequency. Nightly dialysis combines longer sessions with increased frequency and has produced remarkable clinical gains in blood pressure, left ventricular mass, serum phosphate, and sleep apnea. However, the data are mainly from case series and impact on mortality remains unknown. Expansion of home hemodialysis would be necessary for this modality to grow. Convective therapies remove middle molecules more effectively, and observational data suggest hemodiafiltration has the potential to improve mortality by 35% to 36%. Hemodiafiltration has the advantage of being relatively easy to implement. The uremic milieu is complex and further investigation of the underlying pathophysiology is needed to inform future dialysis interventions. The survival data above are from observational studies, and hence benefits are likely to be exaggerated. Randomized trials of dialysis interventions are desperately needed. They remain difficult to perform, because of the complexity of both the patient population and the interventions, and because of limited available funding.     

F150交换机告警关联规则的研究

为了提高电信网络运营效率，降低维护成本，电信运营企业在网络告警管理系统中需要引入数据挖掘技术。本文主要研究利用数据挖掘技术来进行故障的管理，即对告警进行关联性分析，详细分析了告警序列数据的关联规则挖掘算法，并在南昌本地网F150交换机的告警数据库中予以实现，同时对实际挖掘结果进行分析和整理，推导出一些实用的关联规则。     

Effect of Additives on Magnetic Properties of High Frequency MnZn Power Ferrite

In keeping with the advance of more compact and more power-saving electronic equipment, the demand is increasing for smaller and more efficient switching power supply. Therefore, it is necessary to provide the adequate magnetic power ferrite materials to satisfy the demand. Such ferrite materials have to meet the following main requirement: 1) high initial permeability (μ i ); 2) high saturation magnetic induction (Bs); 3) high Curie temperature (Tc); 4) high electrical resistivity (ρ ); 5)…     

A new algorithm for fast mining frequent itemsets using N-lists

Mining frequent itemsets has emerged as a fundamental problem in data mining and plays an essential role in many important data mining tasks.In this paper,we propose a novel vertical data representation called N-list,which originates from an FP-tree-like coding prefix tree called PPC-tree that stores crucial information about frequent itemsets.Based on the N-list data structure,we develop an efficient mining algorithm,PrePost,for mining all frequent itemsets.Efficiency of PrePost is achieved by the following three reasons.First,N-list is compact since transactions with common prefixes share the same nodes of the PPC-tree.Second,the counting of itemsets’ supports is transformed into the intersection of N-lists and the complexity of intersecting two N-lists can be reduced to O(m + n) by an efficient strategy,where m and n are the cardinalities of the two N-lists respectively.Third,PrePost can directly find frequent itemsets without generating candidate itemsets in some cases by making use of the single path property of N-list.We have experimentally evaluated PrePost against four state-of-the-art algorithms for mining frequent itemsets on a variety of real and synthetic datasets.The experimental results show that the PrePost algorithm is the fastest in most cases.Even though the algorithm consumes more memory when the datasets are sparse,it is still the fastest one.