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