Chlamydia psittaci genotype B in a pigeon (Columba livia) inhabiting a public place in San José, Costa Rica

Human chlamydiosis is a zoonotic disease of avian origin caused by Chlamydia psittaci. The highest infection rates have been detected in parrots (Psittacidae) and pigeons (Columbiformes), the latter most frequently carry the genotypes B and E. These genotypes have been shown to also infect humans. Because pigeons (Columba livia) cohabit with humans in urban areas, C. psittaci present in the dust from dry feces of infected pigeons may be transmitted by inhalation and represent a significant public health problem. Between 2012 and 2013 a total of 120 fecal samples were collected from pigeons at four public places (Plaza de la Cultura, Parque Morazán, Parque Central de Guadalupe, Plaza de las Garantías Sociales) in San José, Costa Rica. A nested polymerase chain reaction (PCR) was used to amplify a region of the outer membrane protein A gene of C. psittaci. Only one sample was positive in PCR and the positive sample was further subjected to sequencing and genotyping. Sequencing identified this sample as C. psittaci genotype B. This study is the first report to show the presence of this organism in pigeons of Costa Rica, and shows that the infected pigeons may represent a significant risk for humans who visit public places that are inhabited by pigeons

Quadratic Model Predictive Control Including Input Cardinality Constraints

© 2017 IEEE. This note addresses the problem of feedback control with a constrained number of active inputs. This problem is known as sparse control. Specifically, we describe a novel quadratic model predictive control strategy that guarantees sparsity by bounding directly the l0-norm of the control input vector at each control horizon instant. Besides this sparsity constraint, bounded constraints are also imposed on both control input and system state. Under this scenario, we provide sufficient conditions for guaranteeing practical stability of the closed-loop. We transform the combinatorial optimization problem into an equivalent optimization problem that does not consider relaxation in the cardinality constraints. The equivalent optimization problem can be solved utilizing standard nonlinear programming toolboxes that provides the input control sequence corresponding to the global optimum

Anti-retinal IgG antibodies in patients with early and advanced type 2 macular telangiectasia

Type 2 idiopathic macular telangiectasia (MacTel-2) is a progressive adult-onset macular disease associated with bilateral perifoveal vascular changes, Muller cell degeneration and increased blood-retinal barrier permeability. The pathophysiological mechanisms of MacTel-2 remain unclear, however it was previously reported that anti-retinal antibodies in MacTel-2 patients are a significant feature of the disease. In this study, we aimed to compare the prevalence of anti-retinal antibodies in patients MacTel-2, healthy controls and patients with other retinal diseases. MacTel-2 patients diagnosed with multimodal imaging were enrolled and their disease severities were graded using spectral-domain optical coherence tomography. For comparison, patients with age-related macular degeneration (AMD), inherited retinal diseases (IRDs) or no retinal disease (healthy controls) were recruited as controls. Blood serum samples were screened for immunoglobulin G anti-retinal antibodies by western blotting, followed by densitometry analysis. Odds ratios (OR) with 95% confidence intervals (CI) were calculated and p < 0.05 considered statistically significant. Overall, anti-retinal antibody-positive cases were older (64 ± 15 vs 53 ± 17 years, p < 0.001) and females were more likely to develop anti-retinal antibodies (OR: 2.41, CI: 1.12–5.18). The frequency of anti-retinal antibody detection in MacTel-2 patients (n = 42, 36%) was not significantly different from healthy controls (n = 52, 25%) or IRD patients (n = 18, 25%) and the majority of MacTel-2 patients had no anti-retinal antibodies. In contrast, the frequency of anti-retinal antibody detection was significantly higher in patients with AMD (n = 15, 73%, p < 0.001). The lack of a greater anti-retinal antibody frequency or specificity in the MacTel-2 cohort suggests that antibody mediated immunological mechanisms may play a less significant role in MacTel-2 disease pathogenesis. © 2022 The Author

ATP synthase subunit alpha and LV mass in ischaemic human hearts

Mitochondrial dysfunction plays a critical role in the development of ischaemic cardiomyopathy (ICM). In this study, the mitochondrial proteome in the cardiac tissue of ICM patients was analysed by quantitative differential electrophoresis (2D‐DIGE) and mass spectrometry (MS) for the first time to provide new insights into cardiac dysfunction in this cardiomyopathy. We isolated mitochondria from LV samples of explanted hearts of ICM patients (n = 8) and control donors (n = 8) and used a proteomic approach to investigate the variations in mitochondrial protein expression. We found that most of the altered proteins were involved in cardiac energy metabolism (82%). We focused on ATPA, which is involved in energy production, and dihydrolipoyl dehydrogenase, implicated in substrate utilization, and observed that these molecules were overexpressed and that the changes detected in the processes mediated by these proteins were closely related. Notably, we found that ATPA overexpression was associated with reduction in LV mass (r = −0.74, P < 0.01). We also found a substantial increase in the expression of elongation factor Tu, a molecule implicated in protein synthesis, and PRDX3, involved in the stress response. All of these changes were validated using classical techniques and by using novel and precise selected reaction monitoring analysis and an RNA sequencing approach, with the total heart samples being increased to 24. This study provides key insights that enhance our understanding of the cellular mechanisms related to the pathophysiology of ICM and could lead to the development of aetiology‐specific heart failure therapies. ATPA could serve as a molecular target suitable for new therapeutic interventions

Fluid as a critical biomarker in neovascular age-related macular degeneration management: literature review and consensus recommendations.

Current guidelines on the management of patients with neovascular age-related macular degeneration (nAMD) lack clear recommendations on the interpretation of fluid as seen on optical coherence tomography (OCT) imaging and the incorporation of this information into an ongoing disease treatment strategy. Our objective was to review current guidelines and scientific evidence on the role of fluid as a biomarker in the management of nAMD, and develop a clinically oriented, practical algorithm for diagnosis and management based on a consensus of expert European retinal specialists. PubMed was searched for articles published since 2006 relating to the role of fluid in nAMD. A total of 654 publications were screened for relevance and 66 publications were included for review. Of these, 14 were treatment guidelines, consensus statements and systematic reviews or meta-analyses, in which OCT was consistently recommended as an important tool in the initial diagnosis and ongoing management of nAMD. However, few guidelines distinguished between types of fluid when providing recommendations. A total of 52 publications reported primary evidence from clinical trials, studies, and chart reviews. Observations from these were sometimes inconsistent, but trends were observed with regard to features reported as being predictive of visual outcomes. Based on these findings, diagnostic recommendations and a treatment algorithm based on a treat-and-extend (T&E) regimen were developed. These provide guidance on the diagnosis of nAMD as well as a simple treatment pathway based on the T&E regimen, with treatment decisions made according to the observations of fluid as a critical biomarker for disease activity

A pipeline structure for the block QR update in digital signal processing

[EN] There exist problems in the field of digital signal processing, such as filtering of acoustic signals that require processing a large amount of data in real time. The beamforming algorithm, for instance, is a process that can be modeled by a rectangular matrix built on the input signals of an acoustic system and, thus, changes in real time. To obtain the output signals, it is required to compute its QR factorization. In this paper, we propose to organize the concurrent computational resources of a given multicore computer in a pipeline structure to perform this factorization as fast as possible. The pipeline has been implemented using both the application programming interface OpenMP and GrPPI, a library interface to design parallel applications based on parallel patterns. We tackle not only the performance challenge but also the programmability of our idea using parallel programming frameworks.This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under MINECO and FEDER projects TIN2014-53495-R and TEC2015-67387-C4-1-R.Dolz, MF.; Alventosa, FJ.; Alonso-Jordá, P.; Vidal Maciá, AM. (2019). A pipeline structure for the block QR update in digital signal processing. The Journal of Supercomputing. 75(3):1470-1482. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-018-2666-1S14701482753Huang Y, Benesty J, Chen J (2006) Acoustic MIMO signal processing (signals and communication technology). Springer, BerlinRamiro C, Vidal AM, González A (2015) MIMOPack: a high performance computing library for MIMO communication systems. J Supercomput 71:751–760Alventosa FJ, Alonso P, Piñero G, Vidal AM (2016) Implementation of the Beamformer algorithm for the NVIDIA Jetson. In: Actas de la Conferencia, Granada, Spain, pp 201–211. ISBN 978-3-319-49955-0Alventosa FJ, Alonso P, Vidal AM, Piñero G, Quintana-Ortí ES (2018) Fast block QR update in digital signal processing. J Supercomput. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-018-2298-5del Rio D, Dolz MF, Fernández J, García JD (2017) A generic parallel pattern interface for stream and data processing. Concurr Comput Pract Exp 29(24):e4175Benesty J, Chen J, Huang Y, Dmochowski J (2007) On microphone-array Beamforming from a MIMO acoustic signal processing perspective. IEEE Trans Audio Speech Lang Process 15(3):1053–1065Lorente J, Piñero G, Vidal AM, Belloch JA, González A (2011) Parallel implementations of Beamforming design and filtering for microphone array applications. In: 19th European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO), Barcelona, Spain, pp 501–505Belloch JA, Ferrer M, González A, Martínez-Zaldívar FJ, Vidal AM (2013) Headphone-based virtual spatialization of sound with a GPU accelerator. J Audio Eng Soc 61:546–561Belloch JA, González A, Martínez-Zaldívar FJ, Vidal AM (2011) Real-time massive convolution for audio applications on GPU. J Supercomput 58(3):449–457Golub GH, Van Loan CF (2013) Matrix computations. Johns Hopkins studies in the mathematical sciences. Johns Hopkins University Press, BaltimoreGunter BC, van de Geijn RA (2005) Parallel out-of-core computation and updating the QR factorization. ACM Trans Math Softw 31(1):60–78Buttari A, Langou J, Kurzak J, Dongarra J (2009) A class of parallel tiled linear algebra algorithms for multicore architectures. Parallel Comput 35(1):38–53Dolz MF, Alventosa FJ, Alonso-Jordá P, Vidal AM (2018) A pipeline for the QR update in digital signal processing. In: Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Computational and Mathematical Methods in Science and Engineering (CMMSE 2018), Rota, Cádiz, Spain, pp 1–5Quintana-Ortí G, Quintana-Ortí ES, Van De Geijn RA, Van Zee FG, Chan E (2009) Programming matrix algorithms-by-blocks for thread-level parallelism. ACM Trans Math Softw 36(3):14:1–14:2