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PORTADA: L’església romànica de Sant Llorenç Dosmunts, a l’antic terme de Pruit. Foto: Germans Juvanten

Semi-quantitative assessment of right ventricular function in comparison to a 3D volumetric approach: A cardiovascular magnetic resonance study

Right ventricular (RV) volume measurements with cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) is considered the gold standard, but acquisition and analysis remain timeconsuming. The aim of our study was therefore to investigate the accuracy and performance of a semi-quantitative assessment of RV function in CMR, compared to the standard quantitative approach. Seventy-five subjects with pulmonary hypertension (15), anterior myocardial infarction (15), inferior myocardial infarction (15), Brugada syndrome (15) and normal subjects (15) underwent cine CMR. RV end-systolic and enddiastolic volumes were determined to calculate RV ejection fraction (EF). Four-chamber cine images were used to measure tricuspid annular plane systolic excursion (TAPSE). RV fractional shortening (RVFS) was calculated by dividing TAPSE by the RV end-diastolic length. RV EF correlated significantly with TAPSE (r = 0.62, p < 0.01) and RVFS (r = 0.67, p < 0.01). Sensitivity to predict RV dysfunction was comparable between TAPSE and RVFS, with higher specificity for RVFS, but comparable areas under the ROC curve. Intra- and inter-observer variability of RV EF was better than TAPSE (3%/4% versus 7%/15%, respectively). For routine screening in clinical practice, TAPSE and RVFS seem reliable and easy methods to identify patients with RV dysfunction. The 3D volumetric approach is preferred to assess RV function for research purposes or to evaluate treatment response

Vacuna per escurçar el tractament contra la tuberculosi

Un grup d'investigadors de la Unitat de Tuberculosi Experimental de la Fundació Institut Germans Trias i Pujol ha creat una vacuna que permet reduir la durada del tractament de la infecció latent que provoca la tuberculosi de nou mesos a només un.Un grupo de investigadores de la Unitat de Tuberculosi Experimental dela Fundación Institut Germans Trias i Pujol ha creado una vacuna quepermite reducir la duración del tratamiento de la infección latente queprovoca la tuberculosis de nueves meses a tan sólo uno.A group of research scientists at the Experimental Tuberculosis Unit ofthe Fundació Institut Germans Trias i Pujol have created a vaccinationthat reduces the length of treatment of the latent infection which causestuberculosis from nine months to only one month

A Sustainable West? Analyzing Clusters of Public Opinion in Sustainability Western Discourses in a Collection of Multilingual Newspapers (1999-2018)

In this article, we analyze the temporal and geographic evolution of sustainability-related discourses over a time frame of twenty years (1999-2018). We use a collection of multilingual newspapers in English, French, German, Spanish, and Italian, as a proxy. We filter documents using four key terms: sustainable development, climate change, environment, and pollution, seeking to explore how different newspapers encode the same message, aiming to detect points of contact (agreement) and rupture (polarity). Our methodology includes Topic Modelling (Pachinko Allocation [1]), word embeddings [2], Ward’s hierarchical cluster analysis [3], and network analysis [4]. Our results show a progressive simplification of semantic fields over time, reflecting less polarizing views across countries and, therefore, showing an increasing agreement on sustainability-related discourses in our contemporary societies. Moreover, we also notice little variation of newspapers rhetorics over time. Therefore, this article also contributes with a meta-reflection about newspapers behaviour as information containers

Towards Unconstrained Audio Splicing Detection and Localization with Neural Networks

Freely available and easy-to-use audio editing tools make it straightforward to perform audio splicing. Convincing forgeries can be created by combining various speech samples from the same person. Detection of such splices is important both in the public sector when considering misinformation, and in a legal context to verify the integrity of evidence. Unfortunately, most existing detection algorithms for audio splicing use handcrafted features and make specific assumptions. However, criminal investigators are often faced with audio samples from unconstrained sources with unknown characteristics, which raises the need for more generally applicable methods. With this work, we aim to take a first step towards unconstrained audio splicing detection to address this need. We simulate various attack scenarios in the form of post-processing operations that may disguise splicing. We propose a Transformer sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) network for splicing detection and localization. Our extensive evaluation shows that the proposed method outperforms existing dedicated approaches for splicing detection [3, 10] as well as the general-purpose networks EfficientNet [28] and RegNet [25].Comment: Accepted at MMFORWILD 2022, ICPR Workshops - Code: https://faui1-gitlab.cs.fau.de/denise.moussa/audio-splicing-localizatio

COMPARISON OF COMPETITIVE ACTIVITY INDICATORS AT 100 M DISTANCES OF LATVIAN AND EUROPEAN SWIMMERS

The research aimed to study the performance characteristics of male and female finalists at a 100m distance when swimming at the Latvian swimming championships in a period from 2018 to 2020 (in the 50m pool).262 final heats got analyzed. The results of the 3 best Latvian swimmers, males=36, and females-36, at each 100m distance (freestyle, breaststroke, backstroke, and butterfly) at championships in 2018, 2019, and 2020 have been analysed. The parameters for overcoming competitive distance:competitive result in the 100-meter distance; the start reaction time; time forthe 15 meters mark; speed to the 15 meters mark; the time of the turn 5 meters up to the wall and 15 meters after the turn; underwater distance and time after the start and after turning; time of “clear” swimming. The obtained results were compared to the characteristics of overcoming the same competitive distance by the finalists of the European Championship 2016. As a result of comparative analysis, statistically, significant differences were found in such parameters of competitive activity as the overall result, overcoming of starting and turning parts, and the distance covered under water after the turn and start. Statistically significant differences were not found in the reaction time to the start signal and in the speed of “clear” swimming. The comparative analysis of the performance characteristics of the European Championships finalists showed possibilities for further improvements of Latvian swimmers.The aim: is to determine the performance parameters of the Latvian best swimmers and compare them with the same parameters of the finalists of the European Championship 2016.Peer reviewe