Screening Models for Cardiac Risk Evaluation in Emergency Abdominal Surgery. I. Evaluation of the Intraoperative Period Risk based on Data from the Preoperative Period

A classification of intraoperative cardio-vascular complications (CVC) was performed, based on data from 466 patients subjected to emergency surgery, due to severe abdominal surgical diseases or traumas, in accordance with the severe criteria of ACC/AHA for CVC in noncardiac surgery. There were 370 intraoperative CVC registered, distributed as follows: groups with low risk (148), moderate risk (200), and high risk (22). Patient groups were formed, according to the CVC risk level, during the intraoperative period, for which the determinant factor for the group distribution of patients was the complication with the highest risk. Individual data was collected for each patient, based on 65 indices: age, physical status, diseases, surgical interventions, anaesthesiological information, intra and postoperative cardio-vascular complications, disease outcome, causes of death, cardiovascular disease anamnesis, anamnesis of all other nonsurgical diseases present, laboratory results, results from all imaging and instrumental examinations, etc. On the basis of these indices, a new distribution of the risk factors was implemented, into groups with different levels of risk of CVC during intraoperative period. This result is a solid argument, substantiating the proposal to introduce these adjustments for determining the severity of CVC in the specific conditions of emergency abdominal surgery

Screening Models for Cardiac Risk Evaluation in Emergency Abdominal Surgery. II. Evaluation of the Postoperative Period Risk based on Data from the Pre- and Intraoperative Period

A classification of intraoperative (IO) and postoperative (PO) cardio-vascular complications (CVC) was performed, based on data from 466 patients subjected to emergency surgery, due to severe abdominal surgical diseases or traumas, in accordance with the severe criteria of ACC/AHA in CVC for non-cardiac surgery. There were 370 intra and 405 postoperative (IO; PO) CVC registered, distributed as follows: groups with low risk (IO: 148; PO: 87), moderate risk (IO: 200; PO: 225), and high risk (IO: 22; PO: 93). Patient groups were formed, according to the CVC risk level, during the intra- and postoperative periods, for which the determinant factor for the group distribution of patients was the complication with the highest risk. Individual data was collected for each patient, based on 65 indices: age, physical status, diseases, surgical interventions, anaesthesiological information, intra and postoperative cardio-vascular complications, disease outcome, causes of death, cardio-vascular disease anamnesis, anamnesis of all other nonsurgical diseases present, laboratory results, results from all imaging and instrumental examinations, etc. The trend toward increase or decrease of the CVC risk was studied during the transition from intra- to the postoperative period. On the basis of these indices, a new distribution of the patients was implemented, into groups with different levels of risk of CVC during intra- and postoperative. This result is a solid argument, substantiating the proposal to introduce these adjustments to the ACC/AHA criteria for determining the severity of CVC in the specific conditions of emergency abdominal surgery

Structure control of silica-supported mono and bimetallic Au–Pt catalysts via mercapto capping synthesis

Cataloged from PDF version of article.SiO2-supported monometallic and bimetallic platinum-gold catalysts are prepared by deposition of metal nanoparticles stabilized by mercaptopropyltriethoxysilane (MPTES) after different aging time of the solution containing metal ions and MPTES. The materials are tested in the hydrodesulfurization (HDS) reaction of thiophene and compared with corresponding catalysts prepared by the conventional deposition-precipitation (DP) method. The monometallic Pt and the bimetallic Au-Pt prepared by DP have comparable activity. With respect to the platinum catalyst prepared by DP, the corresponding platinum catalyst prepared by MPTES particle stabilization exhibits a substantial enhancement of the activity regardless the solution aging time. On the contrary, the MPTES-assisted Au-Pt catalysts have different activities, depending on the solution aging time, with the most active being the one obtained with the 5-day-aged solution. In accord with XRD, XPS, and FTIR, the aging time of the solution, through the different interaction of Pt or Au precursors with the mercapto groups, has a crucial effect on the structure and on the surface of the catalysts. The observed differences in the catalytic activity are related to the structural and compositional changes of the bimetallic particles. (C) 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved

Linux kernel compaction through cold code swapping

There is a growing trend to use general-purpose operating systems like Linux in embedded systems. Previous research focused on using compaction and specialization techniques to adapt a general-purpose OS to the memory-constrained environment, presented by most, embedded systems. However, there is still room for improvement: it has been shown that even after application of the aforementioned techniques more than 50% of the kernel code remains unexecuted under normal system operation. We introduce a new technique that reduces the Linux kernel code memory footprint, through on-demand code loading of infrequently executed code, for systems that support virtual memory. In this paper, we describe our general approach, and we study code placement algorithms to minimize the performance impact of the code loading. A code, size reduction of 68% is achieved, with a 2.2% execution speedup of the system-mode execution time, for a case study based on the MediaBench II benchmark suite

Electrostatic Charge Polarity Effect on Respiratory Deposition in the Glass Bead Tracheobronchial Airways Model

The effects of unipolar and bipolar electrostatic charges on the deposition efficiency of therapeutic aerosols in the physical model of human tracheobronchial (TB) airways have been investigated. Respirable size aerosol particles were generated by a commonly prescribed and commercially available nebulizer and charged by a corona charger and then their size and charge distributions were characterized by an Electronic Single Particle Aerodynamic Relaxation Time analyzer to study the drug aerosol particles\u27 deposition pattern. The experiments were performed with a glass bead tracheobronchial model (GBTBM) (physical model) which was designed and developed based upon widely used and adopted dichotomous lung morphometric data presented in the Ewald R. Weibel model. The model was validated with the respiratory deposition data predicted by the International Commission on Radiological Protection and the United States Pharmacopeia (USP) approved Andersen Cascade Impactor (ACI). Unipolarly and bipolarly charged particles were characterized for two configurations: a) without TB model in place and b) with TB model in place. Findings showed that the deposition of unipolarly charged particles was about 3 times of the bipolarly charged particles. It was also found that bioengineered therapeutic aerosols with good combinations of aerodynamic size and electrostatic charge are good candidates for the administration of respiratory medicinal drugs

An enhanced CRISPR repressor for targeted mammalian gene regulation.

The RNA-guided endonuclease Cas9 can be converted into a programmable transcriptional repressor, but inefficiencies in target-gene silencing have limited its utility. Here we describe an improved Cas9 repressor based on the C-terminal fusion of a rationally designed bipartite repressor domain, KRAB-MeCP2, to nuclease-dead Cas9. We demonstrate the system's superiority in silencing coding and noncoding genes, simultaneously repressing a series of target genes, improving the results of single and dual guide RNA library screens, and enabling new architectures of synthetic genetic circuits

Associations of cytokines genetic polymorphisms with hypertension progress

The article presents results of comparative analysis of cytokines genes polymorphous variants occurrence among hypertension patients with burdened familial history regarding this disease and in a control grou