Nuevas aportaciones a la obra de Santiago Ramón y Cajal que aparecen publicadas en la revista "La Veterinaria Española"

Presentamos la ampliación y actualización del trabajo presentado en el congreso de la AEHV del 2005 sobre publicaciones de SANTIAGO RAMÓN Y CAJAL, (1852-1934) en la revista "La Veterinaria Española". Hemos continuado con el estudio del contenido de los artículos ya localizados y la búsqueda de nuevas publicaciones, con resultado positivo. Una primicia es el trabajo titulado "La significación probable de las células nerviosas de cilindro-eje corto" el cual, además, presenta ilustraciones. Hemos localizado debates entre el ya premio Nobel y otros científicos del momento acerca del cuestionamiento de la doctrina neuronal por parte de los reticularistas. También incluimos el curioso debate entre la utilización de "el/la neurona" entre los científicos del momento. Hemos rescatado, para su difusión, una relación mucho más completa de la colaboración científica de la Veterinaria y el propio Cajal, la cual no aparece reflejada aún en estudios biográficos publicados.We present the extension and update of our previous work presented at the 2005 AEHV congress about publications of SANTIAGO RAMÓN Y CAJAL, (1852-1934) in the magazine "La Veterinaria Española". We have continued with the study of the content of the articles already localized and the search for new publications, with positive results. A scoop is the work entitled "The probable significance of nerve cells of short axis" which, in addition, presents illustrations. We have located debates between the Nobel Prize winner and other scientists of the moment about the questioning of neural doctrine by reticularists. We also include the curious debate between the use of gender on "the neuron" among the scientists of the moment. We have rescued, for its diffusion, a much more complete information of the scientific collaboration between Veterinary and Cajal, which has not been considered in the biographical studies published up to date

Software timing analysis for complex hardware with survivability and risk analysis

The increasing automation of safety-critical real-time systems, such as those in cars and planes, leads, to more complex and performance-demanding on-board software and the subsequent adoption of multicores and accelerators. This causes software's execution time dispersion to increase due to variable-latency resources such as caches, NoCs, advanced memory controllers and the like. Statistical analysis has been proposed to model the Worst-Case Execution Time (WCET) of software running such complex systems by providing reliable probabilistic WCET (pWCET) estimates. However, statistical models used so far, which are based on risk analysis, are overly pessimistic by construction. In this paper we prove that statistical survivability and risk analyses are equivalent in terms of tail analysis and, building upon survivability analysis theory, we show that Weibull tail models can be used to estimate pWCET distributions reliably and tightly. In particular, our methodology proves the correctness-by-construction of the approach, and our evaluation provides evidence about the tightness of the pWCET estimates obtained, which allow decreasing them reliably by 40% for a railway case study w.r.t. state-of-the-art exponential tails.This work is a collaboration between Argonne National Laboratory and the Barcelona Supercomputing Center within the Joint Laboratory for Extreme-Scale Computing. This research is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research, under contract number DE-AC02- 06CH11357, program manager Laura Biven, and by the Spanish Government (SEV2015-0493), by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (contract TIN2015-65316-P), by Generalitat de Catalunya (contract 2014-SGR-1051).Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Modelling and predicting extreme behavior in critical real-time systems with advanced statistics

In the last decade, the market for Critical Real-Time Embedded Systems (CRTES) has increased significantly. According to Global Markets Insight [1], the embedded systems market will reach a total size of US $258 billion in 2023 at an average annual growth rate of 5.6%. Their extensive use in domains such as automotive, aerospace and avionics industry demands ever increasing performance requirements [2]. To satisfy those requirements the CRTES industry has implemented more complex processors, a higher number of memory modules, and accelerators units. Thus the demanding performance requirements have led to a merge of CRTES with High Performance systems. All of these industries work within the framework of CRTES, which puts several restrictions in their design and implementation. Real Time systems require to deliver a response to an event in a restricted time frame or deadline. Real-time systems where missing a deadline provokes a total system failure (hard real-time systems) need satisfy certain guidelines and standards to show that they comply with test for functional and timing behaviour. These standards change depending on the industry, for instance the automotive industry follows ISO 26262 [3] and the aerospace industry follows DO-178C [4]. Researches have developed techniques to analyse the timing correctness in a CRTES. Here, we will expose how they perform on the estimation of the Worst-Case Execution Time (WCET). The WCET is the maximum time that a particular software takes to execute. Estimating its value is crucial from a timing analysis point of view. However there is still not a generalised precise and safe method to produce estimates of WCET [5]. In the CRTES the estimations of the WCET cannot be lower than the true WCET, as they are deemed unsafe; but they cannot exceed it by a significant margin, as they will be deemed pessimistic and impractical

Complicaciones vasculares tras cateterismo cardíaco

Objetivos: Establecer la incidencia de complicaciones vasculares tras un cateterismo cardíaco y determinar los factores que influyen en la aparición de los mismos. Material y métodos: Revisión retrospectiva de los 3723 cateterismos cardíacos realizados en nuestro hospital durante un período de 50 meses. Se recogieron 32 traumatismos vasculares, distribuidos entre pseudoaneurismas, hematomas o hemorragias incoercibles, fístulas arteriovenosas e isquemias agudas por trombosis arterial. Se realizó un analisis estadístico mediante tablas de contingencia (método de Jicuadrado, con corrección de Yates). Resultados: La incidencia anual de traumatismos vasculares se encuentra alrededor del 1 %. La incidencia de traumatismos tras un cateterismo terapéutico es ligeramente superior a la incidencia tras un cateterismo diagnóstico, sin presentar diferencias significativas. La edad media del grupo de pacientes con traumatismo vascular (grupo estudio) es de 64'2 ± 1 '9 años, ligeramente superior a la edad media del grupo sin traumatismo vascular (grupo control) (61 '1 - 0'2 años). En ambos grupos predominaban los varones, pero en el grupo estudio dicho predominio es sensi blemente inferior (p 0'012) . En el grupo estudio la incidencia de pacientes obesos es superior con respecto al grupo control (p 0'024). El abordaje por vía humeral (p 0'03), el diametro de cateter mayor al 8F (p 0'001) Y la anticoagulación tras el cateterismo (p<0'001) son factores favorecedores par la aparición de un traumatismo vascular tras un cateterismo cardíaco

Using Markov’s inequality with power-of-k function for probabilistic WCET estimation

Deriving WCET estimates for software programs with probabilistic means (a.k.a. pWCET estimation) has received significant attention during last years as a way to deal with the increased complexity of the processors used in real-time systems. Many works build on Extreme Value Theory (EVT) that is fed with a sample of the collected data (execution times). In its application, EVT carries two sources of uncertainty: the first one that is intrinsic to the EVT model and relates to determining the subset of the sample that belongs to the (upper) tail, and hence, is actually used by EVT for prediction; and the second one that is induced by the sampling process and hence is inherent to all sample-based methods. In this work, we show that Markov’s inequality can be used to obtain provable trustworthy probabilistic bounds to the tail of a distribution without incurring any model-intrinsic uncertainty. Yet, it produces pessimistic estimates that we shave substantially by proposing the use of a power-of-k function instead of the default identity function used by Markov’s inequality. Lastly, we propose a method to deal with sampling uncertainty for Markov’s inequality that consistently improves EVT estimates on synthetic and real data obtained from a railway application.This work has been partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO) under grant PID2019-110854RB-I00 / AEI / 10.13039/501100011033 and the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 772773).Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

HRM: merging hardware event monitors for improved timing analysis of complex MPSoCs

The Performance Monitoring Unit (PMU) in MPSoCs is at the heart of the latest measurement-based timing analysis techniques in Critical Embedded Systems. In particular, hardware event monitors (HEMs) in the PMU are used as building blocks in the process of budgeting and verifying software timing by tracking and controlling access counts to shared resources. While the number of HEMs in current MPSoCs reaches hundreds, they are read via Performance Monitoring Counters whose number is usually limited to 4-8, thus requiring multiple runs of each experiment in order to collect all desired HEMs. Despite the effort of engineers in controlling the execution conditions of each experiment, the complexity of current MPSoCs makes it arguably impossible to completely remove the noise affecting each run. As a result, HEMs read in different runs are subject to different variability, and hence, those HEMs captured in different runs cannot be ‘blindly’ merged. In this work, we focus on the NXP T2080 platform where we observed up to 59% variability across different runs of the same experiment for some relevant HEMs (e.g. processor cycles). We develop a HEM reading and merging (HRM) approach to join reliably HEMs across different runs as a fundamental element of any measurement-based timing budgeting and verification technique. Our method builds on order statistics and the selection of an anchor HEM read in all runs to derive the most plausible combination of HEM readings that keep the distribution of each HEM and their relationship with the anchor HEM intact.This work has been partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation under grant PID2019-107255GB, the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 772773) and the HiPEAC Network of Excellence.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

WebSurvCa: web-based estimation of death and survival probabilities in a cohort

La supervivencia relativa se ha utilizado habitualmente como medida de la evolución temporal del exceso de riesgo de mortalidad en cohortes de pacientes diagnosticados de cáncer, teniendo en cuenta la mortalidad de una población de referencia. Una vez estimado el exceso de riesgo de mortalidad pueden calcularse tres probabilidades acumuladas a un tiempo T: 1) la probabilidad de fallecer asociada a la causa de diagnóstico inicial (enfermedad en estudio), 2) la probabilidad de fallecer asociada a otras causas, y 3) la probabilidad de supervivencia absoluta en la cohorte a un tiempo T. Este trabajo presenta la aplicación WebSurvCa (https://shiny.snpstats.net/WebSurvCa/), mediante la cual los registros de cáncer de base hospitalaria y poblacional, y los registros de otras enfermedades, estiman dichas probabilidades en sus cohortes seleccionando como población de referencia la mortalidad de la comunidad autónoma que consideren

The Instrument Control Unit of ARIEL

The italian team has been working on the overall design of the Instrument Control Unit (ICU) for the satellite mission ARIEL (to be launched in 2028), and in particular the design of the Power Supply Unit (PSU) and Command and Data Processing Unit (CDPU)

GATA6 Activates Wnt Signaling in Pancreatic Cancer by Negatively Regulating the Wnt Antagonist Dickkopf-1

Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is a highly lethal disease characterized by late diagnosis and treatment resistance. Recurrent genetic alterations in defined genes in association with perturbations of developmental cell signaling pathways have been associated with PDAC development and progression. Here, we show that GATA6 contributes to pancreatic carcinogenesis during the temporal progression of pancreatic intraepithelial neoplasia by virtue of Wnt pathway activation. GATA6 is recurrently amplified by both quantitative-PCR and fluorescent in-situ hybridization in human pancreatic intraepithelial neoplasia and in PDAC tissues, and GATA6 copy number is significantly correlated with overall patient survival. Forced overexpression of GATA6 in cancer cell lines enhanced cell proliferation and colony formation in soft agar in vitro and growth in vivo, as well as increased Wnt signaling. By contrast siRNA mediated knockdown of GATA6 led to corresponding decreases in these same parameters. The effects of GATA6 were found to be due to its ability to bind DNA, as forced overexpression of a DNA-binding mutant of GATA6 had no effects on cell growth in vitro or in vivo, nor did they affect Wnt signaling levels in these same cells. A microarray analysis revealed the Wnt antagonist Dickopf-1 (DKK1) as a dysregulated gene in association with GATA6 knockdown, and direct binding of GATA6 to the DKK1 promoter was confirmed by chromatin immunoprecipitation and electrophoretic mobility shift assays. Transient transfection of GATA6, but not mutant GATA6, into cancer cell lines led to decreased DKK1 mRNA expression and secretion of DKK1 protein into culture media. Forced overexpression of DKK1 antagonized the effects of GATA6 on Wnt signaling in pancreatic cancer cells. These findings illustrate that one mechanism by which GATA6 promotes pancreatic carcinogenesis is by virtue of its activation of canonical Wnt signaling via regulation of DKK1