49 research outputs found
Electricity load profile classification using Fuzzy C-Means method
This paper presents the Fuzzy C-Means (FCM) clustering method. The FCM technique assigns a degree of membership for each data set to several clusters, thus offering the opportunity to deal with load profiles that could belong to more than one group at the same time. The FCM algorithm is based on minimising a c-means objective function to determine an optimal classification. The simulation of FCM was carried out using actual sample data from Indonesia and the results are presented. Some validity index measurements was carried out to estimate the compactness of the resulting clusters or to find the optimal number of clusters for a data set
Is prolonged infusion of piperacillin/tazobactam and meropenem in critically ill patients associated with improved pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamic and patient outcomes? An observation from the Defining Antibiotic Levels in Intensive care unit patients (DALI) cohort
Objectives:We utilized the database of the Defining Antibiotic Levels in Intensive care unit patients (DALI) study to statistically compare the pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamic and clinical outcomes between prolonged-infusion and intermittent-bolus dosing of piperacillin/tazobactam and meropenem in critically ill patients using inclusion criteria similar to those used in previous prospective studies.Methods: This was a post hoc analysis of a prospective, multicentre pharmacokinetic point-prevalence study (DALI), which recruited a large cohort of critically ill patients from 68 ICUs across 10 countries.Results: Of the 211 patients receiving piperacillin/tazobactam and meropenem in the DALI study, 182 met inclusion criteria. Overall, 89.0% (162/182) of patients achieved the most conservative target of 50% fT(> MIC) (time over which unbound or free drug concentration remains above the MIC). Decreasing creatinine clearance and the use of prolonged infusion significantly increased the PTA for most pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamic targets. In the subgroup of patients who had respiratory infection, patients receiving beta-lactams via prolonged infusion demonstrated significantly better 30 day survival when compared with intermittent-bolus patients [86.2% (25/29) versus 56.7% (17/30); P=0.012]. Additionally, in patients with a SOFA score of >= 9, administration by prolonged infusion compared with intermittent-bolus dosing demonstrated significantly better clinical cure [73.3% (11/15) versus 35.0% (7/20); P=0.035] and survival rates [73.3% (11/15) versus 25.0% (5/20); P=0.025].Conclusions: Analysis of this large dataset has provided additional data on the niche benefits of administration of piperacillin/tazobactam and meropenem by prolonged infusion in critically ill patients, particularly for patients with respiratory infections
Antimicrobial de-escalation in the critically ill patient and assessment of clinical cure: the DIANA study
Purpose: The DIANA study aimed to evaluate how often antimicrobial de-escalation (ADE) of empirical treatment is performed in the intensive care unit (ICU) and to estimate the effect of ADE on clinical cure on day 7 following treatment initiation. Methods: Adult ICU patients receiving empirical antimicrobial therapy for bacterial infection were studied in a prospective observational study from October 2016 until May 2018. ADE was defined as (1) discontinuation of an antimicrobial in case of empirical combination therapy or (2) replacement of an antimicrobial with the intention to narrow the antimicrobial spectrum, within the first 3 days of therapy. Inverse probability (IP) weighting was used to account for time-varying confounding when estimating the effect of ADE on clinical cure. Results: Overall, 1495 patients from 152 ICUs in 28 countries were studied. Combination therapy was prescribed in 50%, and carbapenems were prescribed in 26% of patients. Empirical therapy underwent ADE, no change and change other than ADE within the first 3 days in 16%, 63% and 22%, respectively. Unadjusted mortality at day 28 was 15.8% in the ADE cohort and 19.4% in patients with no change [p = 0.27; RR 0.83 (95% CI 0.60\u20131.14)]. The IP-weighted relative risk estimate for clinical cure comparing ADE with no-ADE patients (no change or change other than ADE) was 1.37 (95% CI 1.14\u20131.64). Conclusion: ADE was infrequently applied in critically ill-infected patients. The observational effect estimate on clinical cure suggested no deleterious impact of ADE compared to no-ADE. However, residual confounding is likely
Pre-breakdown electrical conductivity of nearly saturated mercury vapour at medium pressures
SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre- DSC:D38781/81 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo
An SDN-assisted system design for improving performance of SVC-DASH
Intel;Ministry of Science and Higher Education;SamsungFederated Conference on Computer Science and Information Systems, FedCSIS 2015 -- 13 September 2015 through 16 September 2015 -- 117625Today, the most of the video streaming system provides quality adaptation and prefers to send their packets over HTTP. MPEG group has standardized Dynamic Adaptive HTTP Streaming (DASH) regarding this tendency on the adaptive HTTP streaming. Besides providing quality adaptation with a non-scalable codec, DASH standard also allows Scalable Video Coding (SVC) to adapt quality. Software Defined Networks (SDN) is a recently emerged networking paradigm. SDN enables to separate control and data plane of computer networks and hence provides flexibility to network operators to implement their own routing approaches. In this paper, we propose a system for increasing Quality of Experience (QoE) of SVC-DASH clients by utilizing SDN. Our experimental results show that the proposed system provides an increase in received video quality and decrease in outage duration and startup delay when compared to the performance of the client running over todays Internet implementing shortest path routing. © 2015, IEEE