Cardiotoxicity and cancer therapy

A fundamental concept of treatment is to do no harm. However, with cancer treatment this is not always possible. Chemotherapy is associated with cardiovascular (CV) complications.1,2 This risk is even greater in the elderly patients and patients with established CV disease. More specifically, tachyarrhythmias (eg, cisplatin), bradyarrythmias (eg, paclitaxel), or QT prolongation (eg, dasatinib) have been reported. Furthermore, myocardial necrosis, coronary vaso-occlusion or vasospasm, pericardial disease (eg, cytarabine), endocardial fibrosis (eg, busulfan), and heart failure can occur. Hypotension (eg, fludarabine) or hypertension (eg, vinca alkaloids) has also been reported.1,2 Cardiotoxicity, endothelial injury, and Takotsubo syndrome have been reported in patients treated with 5-fluorouracil (5-FU).3⇓–5 Cardiotoxicity to 5-FU was reported 35 years ago.3⇓–5 Cardiotoxicity of chemotherapy has been reported in patients ranging from children through adults (eg, with anthracyclines or cisplatin).6 Adriamycin-induced myocyte damage has been attributed to the production of toxic oxygen free radicals.7 This can cause lipid peroxidation of membranes resulting in vacuolation, irreversible damage, and myocyte replacement by fibrous tissue.7 The use of angiogenesis inhibitors in cancer therapy is expanding as are the associated adverse CV effects (eg, hypertension, thromboembolism, left ventricular dysfunction, and QTc prolongation).2,8 Vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) plays a role in maintaining vascular homeostasis via the production of the vasodilator nitric oxide (NO) and decreased vascular resistance through the generation of new blood vessels.2,8 Therefore, it is not surprising that inhibition of VEGF signaling (eg, … [Full Text of this Article

CLort: High Throughput and Low Energy Network Intrusion Detection on IoT Devices with Embedded GPUs

While IoT is becoming widespread, cyber security of its devices is still a limiting factor where recent attacks (e.g., the Mirai bot-net) underline the need for countermeasures. One commonly-used security mechanism is a Network Intrusion Detection System (NIDS), but the processing need of NIDS has been a significant bottleneck for large dedicated machines, and a show-stopper for resource-constrained IoT devices. However, the topologies of IoT are evolving, adding intermediate nodes between the weak devices on the edges and the powerful cloud in the center. Also, the hardware of the devices is maturing, with new CPU instruction sets, caches as well as co-processors. As an example, modern single board computers, such as the Odroid XU4, come with integrated Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) that support general purpose computing. Even though using all available hardware efficiently is still an open issue, it has the promise to run NIDS more efficiently.In this work we introduce CLort, an extension to the well-known NIDS Snort that a) is designed for IoT devices b) alleviates the burden of pattern matching for intrusion detection by offloading it to the GPU. We thoroughly explain how our design is used as part of the latest release of Snort and suggest various optimizations to enable processing on the GPU. We evaluate CLort in regards to throughput, packet drops in Snort, and power consumption using publicly available traffic traces.\ua0CLort achieves up to 52% faster processing throughput than its CPU counterpart. CLort can also analyze up to 12% more packets than its CPU counterpart when sniffing a network.\ua0Finally, the experimental evaluation shows that CLort consumes up to 32% less energy than the CPU counterpart, an important consideration for IoT devices

Repair of an inguinoscrotal hernia containing the urinary bladder: a case report

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Introduction</p> <p>Cases of patients with inguinoscrotal hernia containing the urinary bladder are very rare. These patients usually present with frequent episodes of urinary tract infection, difficulty in walking, pollakisuria and difficulty in initiating micturition because of incarceration of the urinary bladder into the scrotum.</p> <p>Case presentation</p> <p>We describe the case of an 80-year-old Caucasian man with an incarcerated urinary bladder into the scrotum who underwent surgical repair with mesh.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Diagnosis of such cases often requires not only clinical examination but also specialized radiological examinations to show the ectopic position of the urinary bladder. Surgical repair in these patients is a real challenge for surgeons.</p

Historical overview of spinal deformities in ancient Greece

Little is known about the history of spinal deformities in ancient Greece. The present study summarizes what we know today for diagnosis and management of spinal deformities in ancient Greece, mainly from the medical treatises of Hippocrates and Galen. Hippocrates, through accurate observation and logical reasoning was led to accurate conclusions firstly for the structure of the spine and secondly for its diseases. He introduced the terms kyphosis and scoliosis and wrote in depth about diagnosis and treatment of kyphosis and less about scoliosis. The innovation of the board, the application of axial traction and even the principle of trans-abdominal correction for correction of spinal deformities have their origin in Hippocrates. Galen, who lived nearly five centuries later impressively described scoliosis, lordosis and kyphosis, provided aetiologic implications and used the same principles with Hippocrates for their management, while his studies influenced medical practice on spinal deformities for more than 1500 years