Morbidly Obese Woman Unaware of Pregnancy until Full-Term and Complicated by Intraamniotic Sepsis with Pseudomonas

A 32-year-old Caucasian woman of body mass index (BMI) 46 presented with urinary symptoms to accident and emergency (A&E). Acute pyelonephritis was the diagnosis. Transabdominal scan revealed a live term fetus. Both the partners were unaware of the ongoing pregnancy until diagnosed. She underwent emergency cesarean under general anaesthesia (GA) for nonreassuring CTG, severe chorioamnionitis, and moderate preecclampsia. A live male baby weighing 4400 grams delivered in poor condition. Placental tissue on culture exhibited scanty growth of pseudomonas aeruginosa. Chorioamnionitis due to pseudomonas is rare, with high neonatal morbidity and mortality. It is mostly reported among preterm prelabor rupture of membranes (PPROM). Educating the community especially morbidly obese women if they put on excessive weight or with irregular periods should seek doctor's advice and exclude pregnancy. For the primary care provider, it is of great importance to exclude pregnancy in any reproductive woman presenting with abdominal complaints. This case also brings to clinicians notice that pseudomonas can be community-acquired and can affect term pregnancies with intact or prolonged rupture of membranes

Mechanistic evaluation of primary human hepatocyte culture using global proteomic analysis reveals a selective dedifferentiation profile

© 2016 The Author(s)The application of primary human hepatocytes following isolation from human tissue is well accepted to be compromised by the process of dedifferentiation. This phenomenon reduces many unique hepatocyte functions, limiting their use in drug disposition and toxicity assessment. The aetiology of dedifferentiation has not been well defined, and further understanding of the process would allow the development of novel strategies for sustaining the hepatocyte phenotype in culture or for improving protocols for maturation of hepatocytes generated from stem cells. We have therefore carried out the first proteomic comparison of primary human hepatocyte differentiation. Cells were cultured for 0, 24, 72 and 168 h as a monolayer in order to permit unrestricted hepatocyte dedifferentiation, so as to reveal the causative signalling pathways and factors in this process, by pathway analysis. A total of 3430 proteins were identified with a false detection rate of <1 %, of which 1117 were quantified at every time point. Increasing numbers of significantly differentially expressed proteins compared with the freshly isolated cells were observed at 24 h (40 proteins), 72 h (118 proteins) and 168 h (272 proteins) (p < 0.05). In particular, cytochromes P450 and mitochondrial proteins underwent major changes, confirmed by functional studies and investigated by pathway analysis. We report the key factors and pathways which underlie the loss of hepatic phenotype in vitro, particularly those driving the large-scale and selective remodelling of the mitochondrial and metabolic proteomes. In summary, these findings expand the current understanding of dedifferentiation should facilitate further development of simple and complex hepatic culture systems

Distributed end host multicast algorithms for the knowledge grid

The Knowledge Grid built on top of the peer-to-peer (P2P) network has been studied to implement scalable, available and sematic-based querying. In order to improve the efficiency and scalability of querying, this paper studies the problem of multicasting queries in the Knowledge Grid. An in-dimensional irregular mesh is a popular overlay topology of P2P networks. We present a set of novel distributed algorithms on top of an m-dimensional irregular mesh overlay for the short delay and low network resource consumption end-host multicast services. Our end-host multicast fully utilizes the advantages of an in-dimensional mesh to construct a two-layer architecture. Compared to previous approaches, the novelty and contribution here are: (1) cluster formation that partitions the group members into clusters in the lower layer where cluster consists of a small number of members; (2) cluster core selection that searches a core with the minimum sum of overlay hops to all other cluster members for each cluster; (3) weighted shortest path tree construction that guarantees the minimum number of shortest paths to be occupied by the multicast traffic; (4) distributed multicast routing that directs the multicast messages to be efficiently distributed along the two-layer multicast architecture in parallel, without a global control; the routing scheme enables the packets to be transmitted to the remote end hosts within short delays through some common shortest paths; and (5) multicast path maintenance that restores the normal communication once the membership alteration appears. Simulation results show that our end-host multicast can distributively achieve a shorter delay and lower network resource consumption multicast services as compared with some well-known end-host multicast systems. Copyright (C) 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd

Defeating TCG TOCTOU attacks in trusted HVM

Virtualization technologies have been explored to mitigate the vulnerabilities in the current TCG architecture. But only a small number of efforts address the handling of the detected TCG TOCTOU attacks. This paper aims to defeat TCG TOCTOU attacks occurring in Xen hardware virtual machines. We propose an efficient response approach (ERA) in the environment of the Xen virtual machine monitor and the virtual TPM facility shipped with the Xen. ERA has the following features: (1) Effective in defeating the TCG TOCTOU attacks; (2) Impose less overhead on the system during normal execution; and (3) Transparent to guest virtual machines. We describe the ERA implementation in detail and evaluate its ability via experiments. © 2010 IEEE

Experimental and analytical investigation of the turbulent burning velocity of two-component fuel mixtures of hydrogen, methane and propane

In this paper, we present some experimental and analytical model results of two-component fuel mixtures of methane, propane and hydrogen. Experimentally obtained turbulent burning velocity ST for outwardly propagating spherical lean turbulent premixed flames is examined with an algebraic flame surface wrinkling reaction model using 1) mean local burning velocity, and 2) the critical chemical time scale from the leading edge model by Zel'dovich and Frank-Kamenetskii. Based on the latter approach, the time scale that characterizes the effects of preferential diffusion phenomenon in critically curved spherical flames is incorporated into the reaction model. For this, a proposed simple linear model is used for estimating the effective Lewis number of the two-component fuel (CH4–H2 and C3H8–H2)/Air mixtures. In general, both approaches are effective ways in achieving qualitatively consistent ST trends for both mixtures. However, in the second approach, model predictions show large ST deviation especially at high turbulence. This may be attributed to the use of approximate values of activation temperature and for the use of the effective Lewis number of both mixtures based on the simple linear model