Review essays

Peter Singer, Ethics into Action: Henry Spira and the Animal Rights Movement, 222pp., Melbourne University Press, Melbourne 1999 / Randy Malamud, Reading Zoos: Representations of Animals and Captivity, xi + 377pp., New York University Press, Washington Square 1998 / Hugh LaFollette and Niall Shanks, Brute Science: Dilemmas of animal experimentation, 286 pp., Routledge, London and New York 1996 / Jonica Newby, The Pact for Survival: Humans and their Animal Companions, 280pp., Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Sydney 1997

JFML: A Java Library to Design Fuzzy Logic Systems According to the IEEE Std 1855-2016

Fuzzy logic systems are useful for solving problems in many application fields. However, these systems are usually stored in specific formats and researchers need to rewrite them to use in new problems. Recently, the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society has sponsored the publication of the IEEE Standard 1855-2016 to provide a unified and well-defined representation of fuzzy systems for problems of classification, regression, and control. The main aim of this standard is to facilitate the exchange of fuzzy systems across different programming systems in order to avoid the need to rewrite available pieces of code or to develop new software tools to replicate functionalities that are already provided by other software. In order to make the standard operative and useful for the research community, this paper presents JFML, an open source Java library that offers a complete implementation of the new IEEE standard and capability to import/export fuzzy systems in accordance with other standards and software. Moreover, the new library has associated a Website with complementary material, documentation, and examples in order to facilitate its use. In this paper, we present three case studies that illustrate the potential of JFML and the advantages of exchanging fuzzy systems among available softwareThis work was supported in part by the XXII Own Research Program (2017) of the University of Córdoba, in part by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under Grants RYC-2016-19802 (Ramón y Cajal contract), TIN2017-84796-C2-1-R, TIN2014-56633-C3-3-R, TIN2014-57251-P, and TIN2015-68454-R, in part by the Andalusian Government under Grant P11-TIC-7765, in part by the Xunta de Galicia (accreditation 2016-2019), and in part by the European Union (European Regional Development Fund)

Analytical and pharmacological aspects of therapeutic drug monitoring of mTOR inhibitors

Mammalian Target Of Rapamycin (mTOR) inhibitors represent a new class of immunosuppressant drugs extensively used for the prevention and the treatment of graft rejection in organ transplant recipients. Their current use is due to referred low nephrotoxic effects, particularly important in kidney transplanted and/or patients with renal failure. The most representative drugs of such class are Sirolimus (Siro) and Everolimus (Rad). Both drugs show a narrow therapeutic window, therefore, monitoring of whole-blood drug levels is recommended in order to optimize the therapy. Among the available assays, Liquid Chromatography coupled with UltraViolet or Electrospray Tandem Mass Spectrometry methods (LC/UV or LC/ESI-MSMS) are the most accurate and specific ones. A reliable alternative is represented by immunoassays, which offer the opportunity to minimize sample pre-treatment, thus reducing the time between drawing blood sample and measuring the drug concentration, an important aspect in high-throughput analyses. Despite this, a limitation in the use of immunoassays for therapeutic drug monitoring is the lower specifity compared with the chromatographic methods when analysing structurally-related drugs. New insights to optimize mTOR inhibitors regimens seem to be offered by the evaluation of CYP450 3A activity by using the probe drug approach. To such purpose, there are a number of major probe drugs used for in vivo studies including: midazolam, cortisol, lidocaine, nifedipine, dextromethorphan, erythromycin, dapsone and alfentanil. The aim of the present paper is to report the most recent knowledge concerning this issue, supplying a critical and comprehensive review for whom are involved both in the clinical and analytical areas

Design of Fuzzy Controllers for Embedded Systems With JFML

Fuzzy rule-based systems (FRBSs) have been successfully applied to a wide range of real-world problems. However, they suffer from some design issues related to the difficulty to implement them on different hardware platforms without additional efforts. To bridge this gap, recently, the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society has sponsored the publication of the standard IEEE Std 1855-2016 which is aimed at providing the fuzzy community with a well-defined approach to model FRBSs in a hardwareindependent way. In order to provide a runnable version of an FRBS that is designed in accordance with the IEEE Std 1855-2016, the open source library Java Fuzzy Markup Language (JFML) has been developed. However, due to hardware and/or software limitations of embedded systems, it is not always possible to run an IEEE Std 1855-2016 FRBS on this kind of systems. The aim of this paper is to overcome this drawback by developing a new JFML module that assists developers in the design and implementation of FRBSs for open hardware–embedded systems. In detail, the module supports several connection types (WiFi, Bluetooth, and USB) in order to make feasible running FRBSs in a remote computer when, due to hardware limitations, it is not possible that they run locally in the embedded systems. The new JFML module is ready for ArduinoTM and Raspberry Pi, but it can be easily extended to other hardware architectures. Moreover, the new JFML module allows to automatically generate runnable files on ArduinoTM or Raspberry Pi in order to support nonexpert users, that is, users without specific knowledge about embedded systems or without strong programming skills. The use of the new JFML module is illustrated in two case studies.This paper has been supported in part by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (Projects TIN2017-89517-P, TIN2015-68454-R, TIN2017-84796-C2-1-R, and TIN2017-90773-REDT) and the Andalusian Government. In addition, Jose M. Alonso is Ramon y Cajal Researcher (RYC-2016-19802). Financial support from the Galician Ministry of Education (grants ED431F 2018/02, GRC2014/030 and accreditation 2016-2019, ED431G/08), co-funded by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF/FEDER program), is also gratefully acknowledged

A review of the legislation of direct-to-consumer genetic testing in EU member states

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Increased carotid intima-media thickness and stiffness in obese children

Summary (Abstract not available):Obesity in childhood increases the risk of atherosclerotic disease and death in adulthood. We studied 100 children with obesity and 47 healthy age-mathced control subjects, mean age 10 years of both groups. Biochemical parameters describing lipoprotein and glucose metabolism were measured. Quantitative B-mode ultrasound examination of common carotid arteries was performed. Carotid thickness and stiffness were significantly increased in obese children as compared to nonobese ones, independently of traditional cardiovascular risk factors. Obesity should be regarded as a disease with vascular implications even in young age

Evaluation by environmental monitoring of pesticide absorption in farm workers of 18 Italian tomato cultivations

Tornato cultivation farms of Soutbern Italy were investigated in order to evaluate tbe generai working conditions and tbe levels of exposure of farm workers to pesticides, during tbe mixinglloading and tbe application of pesticides on fields. Information on working modalities, personal protective equipment, etc. was collected using a questionnaire. Inbaling and cutaneous exposure levels were measured, and tbe estimated pesticide total absorbed dose was compared witb Admissible Daily Intakes (ADIs). Field treatments were mainly carried out by using sprayers witb open cab tractors, and, in 57 ~9% of cases, tbe pesticide mixture was manually prepared by mixing pesticides in a paU, often witbout using gloves (59.5%). Tbe estimated pesticides absorbed doses varied in tbe range 0.56-2630.31 mg (mean value, 46.9 mg), and 20% of tbe measured absorbed doses exceeded ADIs. Tbe findings obtained in tbe 18 examined farms sbow a worrying situation, suggesting tbe investigation of many more farms, so tbat a statistically significant picture of tornato cultivations in Soutbern Italy could be formed. Besides, tbe planning of training courses aimed to increase workers consciousness about bealtb risks and bow tbey can be prevented is advisable

A Real-Time intelligent system for tracking patient condition

Hospitals have multiple data sources, such as embedded systems, monitors and sensors. The number of data available is increasing and the information are used not only to care the patient but also to assist the decision processes. The introduction of intelligent environments in health care institutions has been adopted due their ability to provide useful information for health professionals, either in helping to identify prognosis or also to understand patient condition. Behind of this concept arises this Intelligent System to track patient condition (e.g. critic events) in health care. This system has the great advantage of being adaptable to the environment and user needs. The system is focused in identifying critic events from data streaming (e.g. vital signs and ventilation) which is particularly valuable for understanding the patient’s condition. This work aims to demonstrate the process of creating an intelligent system capable of operating in a real environment using streaming data provided by ventilators and vital signs monitors. Its development is important to the physician because becomes possible crossing multiple variables in real-time by analyzing if a value is critic or not and if their variation has or not clinical importance

Spontaneous parity violation and minimal Higgs models

In this paper we present a model for the spontaneous breaking of parity with two Higgs doublets and two neutral Higgs singlets which are even and odd under D-parity. The condition $v_R >>v_L$ can be satisfied without introducing bidoublets and it is induced by the breaking of D-parity through the vacuum expectation value of the odd Higgs singlet. Examples of left-right symmetric and mirror fermions models in grand unified theories are presented.Comment: Revised version. Accepted in Eur. Phys. Journal