764 research outputs found
Open-Source Telemedicine Platform for Wireless Medical Video Communication
An m-health system for real-time wireless communication of medical video based on open-source software is presented. The objective is to deliver a low-cost telemedicine platform which will allow for reliable remote diagnosis m-health applications such as emergency incidents, mass population screening, and medical education purposes. The performance of the proposed system is demonstrated using five atherosclerotic plaque ultrasound videos. The videos are encoded at the clinically acquired resolution, in addition to lower, QCIF, and CIF resolutions, at different bitrates, and four different encoding structures. Commercially available wireless local area network (WLAN) and 3.5G high-speed packet access (HSPA) wireless channels are used to validate the developed platform. Objective video quality assessment is based on PSNR ratings, following calibration using the variable frame delay (VFD) algorithm that removes temporal mismatch between original and received videos. Clinical evaluation is based on atherosclerotic plaque ultrasound video assessment protocol. Experimental results show that adequate diagnostic quality wireless medical video communications are realized using the designed telemedicine platform. HSPA cellular networks provide for ultrasound video transmission at the acquired resolution, while VFD algorithm utilization bridges objective and subjective ratings
The radical left's turn towards civil society in Greece: One strategy, two paths
The Communist Party of Greece (KKE) and the Coalition of the Radical Left (SYRIZA) made remarkable ‘turns towards civil society’ over the last decade. It is argued that this was primarily a response aimed at strengthening their social legitimacy, which had reached its lowest point in the early 1990s. Differences in the way the two parties attempted to stabilise and engage their membership and re-establish links to trade unions and new social movements can be attributed to their distinct ideological and organisational legacies. Despite those differences, their respective linkage strategies were both successful until the game-changing 2012 Greek national elections, which brought about the remarkable rise of SYRIZA and the electoral demise of the KKE
Takayasu arteritis in childhood: retrospective experience from a tertiary referral centre in the United Kingdom.
Takayasu arteritis (TA) is an idiopathic large-vessel vasculitis affecting the aorta and its major branches. Although the disease rarely affects children, it does occur, even in infants. The objective of this study was to evaluate the clinical features, disease activity, treatment and outcome of childhood TA in a tertiary UK centre
Symplectic quaternion scheme for biophysical molecular dynamics
Massively parallel biophysical molecular dynamics simulations, coupled with efficient methods, promise to open biologically significant time scales for study. In order to promote efficient fine-grained parallel algorithms with low communication overhead, the fast degrees of freedom in these complex systems can be divided into sets of rigid bodies. Here, a novel Hamiltonian form of a minimal, nonsingular representation of rigid body rotations, the unit quaternion, is derived, and a corresponding reversible, symplectic integrator is presented. The novel technique performs very well on both model and biophysical problems in accord with a formal theoretical analysis given within, which gives an explicit condition for an integrator to possess a conserved quantity, an explicit expression for the conserved quantity of a symplectic integrator, the latter following and in accord with Calvo and Sanz-Sarna, Numerical Hamiltonian Problems (1994), and extension of the explicit expression to general systems with a flat phase space
Magnetoinductive breathers in magnetic metamaterials
The existence and stability of discrete breathers (DBs) in one-dimensional
and two-dimensional magnetic metamaterials (MMs), which consist of periodic
arrangem ents (arrays) of split-ring resonators (SRRs), is investigated
numerically. We consider different configurations of the SRR arrays, which are
related to the relative orientation of the SRRs in the MM, both in one and two
spatial dimensions. In the latter case we also consider anisotropic MMs. Using
standard numerical methods we construct several types of linearly stable
breather excitations both in Hamiltonian and dissipative MMs (dissipative
breathers). The study of stability in both cases is performed using standard
Floquet analysi s. In both cases we found that the increase of dimensionality
from one to two spatial dimensions does not destroy the DBs, which may also
exist in the case of moderate anisotropy (in two dimensions). In dissipative
MMs, the dynamics is governed by a power balance between the mainly Ohmic
dissipation and driving by an alternating magnetic field. In that case it is
demonstrated that DB excitation locally alters the magnetic response of MMs
from paramagnetic to diamagnetic. Moreover, when the frequency of the applied
field approaches the SRR resonance frequency, the magnetic response of the MM
in the region of the DB excitation may even become negative (extreme
diamagnetic).Comment: 12 pages 15 figure
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