The effect of thrombolytic therapy on QT dispersion in acute myocardial infarction and its role in the prediction of reperfusion arrhythmias

Purpose: We aimed to determine the effect of intravenous thrombolytic therapy on QT dispersion (QTd) and its role in the prediction of reperfusion arrhythmias.Materials and Methods: Twenty patients with acute myocardial infarction (MI) were enrolled in the study. Measurements of QTd were carried out  prior to thrombolytic therapy and before discharge. The patients were examined for ventricular arrhythmias with 24‑h Holter electrocardiography monitoring after treatment and the relationship between ventricular arrhythmias and the QTd values in the early phase of MI was investigated.Results: The values of QTd were significantly higher during the early phase of MI (60 ± 5.32 ms) than those in the late phase (53.35 ± 4.07 ms) (P = 0.032). There was no correlation between isolated, bigeminal, trigeminal and total ventricular premature beats, accelerated idioventricular rhythm (AIVR) with QTd values. However, the patients with sustained ventricular tachycardia (VT), prolonged VT and sustained AIVR had higher corrected QTd (92 ms1/2, 97.8 ms1/2, 81.7 ms1/2, respectively) than the patients without these arrhythmias (74 ms1/2, 56.3 ms1/2, 58.28 ms1/2,  respectively) (P = 0.022, 0.013, 0.018).Conclusion: The values of QTd may be significantly reduced in the 1st week of acute MI and measurement of QTd in the early phase of MI may have a correlation with the following reperfusion arrhythmias: Sustained VT, prolonged VT and AIVR.Key words: Arrhythmia, myocardial infarction, QT dispersion, reperfusion, thrombolytic therap

Modeling of evaporation from a sessile constant shape droplet

In this study, a computational model for the evaporation from a sessile liquid droplet fed from the center to keep the diameter of the droplet constant is presented. The continuity, momentum and energy equations are solved with temperature dependent thermo-physical properties using COMSOL Multi-physics. At the surface of the droplet, convective heat and evaporative mass fluxes are assigned. Since the flow field is affected by evaporative flux, an iterative scheme is built and the computation is automated using COMSOL-MATLAB interface. Correlations are implemented to predict the convective heat transfer coefficients and evaporative flux. Three different wall temperatures are used in simulations. The results show that the flow inside the droplet is dominated by buoyancy when the effect of the thermo-capillarity is neglected. The resulting flow generates a circulation pattern emerging from the entrance to the apex, along the surface of the droplet to the bottom heated wall and back to the entrance. © 2017 ASME The American Society of Mechanical Engineers

A parallel boundary element formulation for tracking multiple particle trajectories in Stoke's flow for microfluidic applications

A new formulation for tracking multiple particles in slow viscous flow for microfluidic applications is presented. The method employs the manipulation of the boundary element matrices so that finally a system of equations is obtained relating the rigid body velocities of the particle to the forces applied on the particle. The formulation is specially designed for particle trajectory tracking and involves successive matrix multiplications for which SMP (Symmetric multiprocessing) parallelisation is applied. It is observed that present formulation offers an efficient numerical model to be used for particle tracking and can easily be extended for multiphysics simulations in which several physics involved. Copyright © 2015 Tech Science Press

Two-dimensional computational modeling of thin film evaporation

A considerable amount of the evaporation originates from the close vicinity the three-phase contact line in an evaporating extended meniscus due to the low thermal resistance across the ultra thin film. Evaporation taking place within the thin film region is commonly modeled using the uni-directional flow assumption of the liquid following the lubrication approximation. Although the uni-directional flow based models may yield practically reasonable results in terms of the cumulative quantities such as total evaporation rate, the underlying physics of the problem cannot be explained solely by uni-directional flow, especially when the dominant transverse liquid motion is considered near the close proximity of the contact line. The present study develops a solution methodology to enable the solution of steady, incompressible, 2-D conservation of mass and linear momentum equations for the liquid flow in an evaporating thin film. Solution methodology includes the coupling of an uni-directional solver with high precision numerics, a higher order bi-directional spectral element solver and a finite element solver. The novelty of the present study is that steady, 2-D conservation of mass and linear momentum equations are considered in the modeling of thin film evaporation without the exclusion of any terms in the conservation equations. © 2017 Elsevier Masson SA

Data and model driven hybrid approach to activity scoring of cyclic pathways

Analysis of large scale -omics data based on a single tool remains inefficient to reveal molecular basis of cellular events. Therefore, data integration from multiple heterogeneous sources is highly desirable and required. In this study, we developed a data- and model-driven hybrid approach to evaluate biological activity of cellular processes. Biological pathway models were taken as graphs and gene scores were transferred through neighbouring nodes of these graphs. An activity score describes the behaviour of a specific biological process was computed by owing of converged gene scores until reaching a target process. Biological pathway model based approach that we describe in this study is a novel approach in which converged scores are calculated for the cellular processes of a cyclic pathway. The convergence of the activity scores for cyclic graphs were demonstrated on the KEGG pathways. © 2011 Springer Science+Business Media B.V

Linear Depth Integer-Wise Homomorphic Division

Part 3: CryptographyInternational audienceWe propose a secure integer-wise homomorphic division algorithm on fully homomorphic encryption schemes (FHE). For integer-wise algorithms, we encrypt plaintexts as integers without encoding them into bit values, while in bit-wise algorithms, plaintexts are encoded into binary and bit values are encrypted one by one. All the publicly available division algorithms are constructed in bit-wise style, and to the best of our knowledge there are no known integer-wise algorithm for secure division. We derive some empirical results on the FHE library HElib and show that our algorithm is 2.45x faster than the fastest bit-wise algorithm. We also show that the multiplicative depth of our algorithm is O(l), where l is the integer bit length, while that of existing division algorithms is $$O(l^2)$$. Furthermore, we generalise our secure division algorithm and propose a method for secure calculation of a general 2-variable function. The order of multiplicative depth of the algorithm, which is a main factor of the complexity of a FHE algorithm, is exactly the same as our secure division algorithm

Flexible test-bed for unusual behavior detection

Visual surveillance and activity analysis is an active research field of computer vision. As a result, there are several different algorithms produced for this purpose. To obtain more robust systems it is desirable to integrate the different algorithms. To help achieve this goal, we propose a flexible, distributed software collaboration framework and present a prototype system for automatic event analysis. Copyright 2007 ACM

Adolescents' involvement in cyber bullying and perceptions of school: the importance of perceived peer acceptance for female adolescents

Young people are spending increasing amounts of time using digital technology and, as such, are at great risk of being involved in cyber bullying as a victim, bully, or bully/victim. Despite cyber bullying typically occurring outside the school environment, the impact of being involved in cyber bullying is likely to spill over to school. Fully 285 11- to 15-year-olds (125 male and 160 female, M age = 12.19 years, SD = 1.03) completed measures of cyber bullying involvement, self-esteem, trust, perceived peer acceptance, and perceptions of the value of learning and the importance of school. For young women, involvement in cyber bullying as a victim, bully, or bully/victim negatively predicted perceptions of learning and school, and perceived peer acceptance mediated this relationship. The results indicated that involvement in cyber bullying negatively predicted perceived peer acceptance which, in turn, positively predicted perceptions of learning and school. For young men, fulfilling the bully/victim role negatively predicted perceptions of learning and school. Consequently, for young women in particular, involvement in cyber bullying spills over to impact perceptions of learning. The findings of the current study highlight how stressors external to the school environment can adversely impact young women's perceptions of school and also have implications for the development of interventions designed to ameliorate the effects of cyber bullying