Prevalence and risk factors of hepatitis B and C viruses among haemodialysis patients in Gaza strip, Palestine

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The prevalence of hepatitis B virus (HBV) and hepatitis C virus (HCV) and its associated risk factors among haemodialysis (HD) patients in Gaza strip was investigated using serological and molecular techniques.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The overall prevalence of HBV among the four HD centers was 8.1%. The main risk factors were HD center (p = 0.05), history of blood transfusion (p < 0.01), and treatment abroad (p = 0.01). The overall prevalence of HCV among the four HD centers was 22%. The main risk factors were HD center (p < 0.01), time duration on HD (p < 0.01), history of blood transfusion (p < 0.01), treatment abroad (p < 0.01), and history of blood transfusion abroad (p < 0.01). Serum aminotransferases levels decreased in HD patients compared with normal population but still there was a direct association between the activity of liver enzymes and both HBV (p < 0.01) and HCV (p < 0.01) infection.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>The much higher prevalence of Hepatitis viruses among HD patients compared to the normal population of Gaza strip indicates a causative relation between HD and hepatitis viruses transmission. Therefore extremely careful observation of preventive infection control measures is essential to limit Hepatitis viruses' transmission in HD centers.</p

Persistent left superior vena cava: Review of the literature, clinical implications, and relevance of alterations in thoracic central venous anatomy as pertaining to the general principles of central venous access device placement and venography in cancer patients

Persistent left superior vena cava (PLSVC) represents the most common congenital venous anomaly of the thoracic systemic venous return, occurring in 0.3% to 0.5% of individuals in the general population, and in up to 12% of individuals with other documented congential heart abnormalities. In this regard, there is very little in the literature that specifically addresses the potential importance of the incidental finding of PLSVC to surgeons, interventional radiologists, and other physicians actively involved in central venous access device placement in cancer patients. In the current review, we have attempted to comprehensively evaluate the available literature regarding PLSVC. Additionally, we have discussed the clinical implications and relevance of such congenital aberrancies, as well as of treatment-induced or disease-induced alterations in the anatomy of the thoracic central venous system, as they pertain to the general principles of successful placement of central venous access devices in cancer patients. Specifically regarding PLSVC, it is critical to recognize its presence during attempted central venous access device placement and to fully characterize the pattern of cardiac venous return (i.e., to the right atrium or to the left atrium) in any patient suspected of PLSVC prior to initiation of use of their central venous access device

A configurable resource allocation for multi-tenant process development in the cloud

International audienceCloud computing has become an important infrastructure for outsourcing service-based business processes in a multi-tenancy way. Configurable process models enable the sharing of a reference process among different tenants that can be customized according to specific needs. While concepts for specifying the control flow of such processes are well understood, there is a lack of support for cloud-specific resource configuration where different allocation alternatives need to be explicitly defined. In this paper, we address this research gap by extending configurable process models with the required configurable cloud resource allocation. Our proposal allows different tenants to customize the selection of the needed resources taking into account two important properties elasticity and shareability. Our prototypical implementation demonstrates the feasibility and the results of our experiments highlight the effectiveness of our approac

No-reference stereo image quality assessment based on joint wavelet decomposition and statistical models

The widespread use of 3D acquisition and display technologies has increased the interest of stereo image dataset in various application fields. As a result, it becomes necessary to have an efficient 3D quality assessment method to measure the human perception of stereoscopic images. While most of the state-of-the-art methods belong to the class of full-reference methods which require the original stereo images to be able to assess the quality, we propose in this paper a no-reference quality metric which does not require any information of the original stereo images. The proposed method operates in the wavelet transform domain and adopts a statistical framework to predict the quality of stereo images. More precisely, a joint wavelet decomposition is first performed on the stereo images to exploit simultaneously the intra and inter-views redundancies. A wavelet transform is also applied to their associated estimated disparity maps. Then, relevant features are extracted from the resulting wavelet subbands by resorting to appropriate statistical models. Simulations, carried out on the standard Live 3D image quality database, show that our proposed design model achieves significant improvement compared to the state-of-the-art 3D quality assessment methods

An assembly line balancing problem automotive cables

In this paper, an Assembly Line Balancing Problem (ALBP) is presented in a real-world automotive cables manufacturer company. This company found it necessary to balance its line, since it needs to increase the production rate. In this ALBP, the number of stations is known and the objective is to minimize cycle time where both precedence and zoning constrains must be satisfied. This problem is formulated as a binary linear program (BLP). Since this problem is NP-hard, an innovative Genetic Algorithm (GA) is implemented. The full factorial design is used to obtain the better combination GA parameters and a simple convergence experimental study is performed on the stopping criteria to reduce computational time. Comparison of the proposed GA results with CPLEX software shows that, in a reasonable time, the GA generates consistent solutions that are very close to their optimal ones. Therefore, the proposed GA approach is very effective and competitive

Experimental design for the preparation of rifampicin microparticles

International audienc