A comparative study of four novel sleep apnoea episode prediction systems

The prediction of sleep apnoea and hypopnoea episodes could allow treatment to be applied before the event be-comes detrimental to the patients sleep, and for a more spe-cific form of treatment. It is proposed that features extracted from breaths preceding an apnoea and hypopnoea could be used in neural networks for the prediction of these events. Four different predictive systems were created, processing the nasal airflow signal using epoching, the inspiratory peak and expiratory trough values, principal component analysis (PCA) and empirical mode decomposition (EMD). The neu-ral networks were validated with naïve data from six over-night polysomnographic records, resulting in 83.50% sensi-tivity and 90.50% specificity. Reliable prediction of apnoea and hypopnoea is possible using the epoched flow and EMD of breaths preceding the event

"Intestinal spirochaetosis" of the vervet monkey

Electron microscopy revealed that 80% of captured vervet monkeys, held in quarantine for experimental use, showed extensive proliferation of spiral-shaped bacteria on the mucosal epithelium of the large bowel. A consortium, consisting of a predominant spirillum together with a spirochaete, was usually seen as a lawn covering the colonic epithelium. Sparsely populated areas showed preferential colonization of the tubular glands. Pathological changes were minimal, being confined to the microvillus border, and affected animals showed no evidence of distress. These findings are compared with those of a similar condition known as "intestinal spirochaetosis" reported in other primates, including man.The articles have been scanned in colour with a HP Scanjet 5590; 600dpi. Adobe Acrobat XI Pro was used to OCR the text and also for the merging and conversion to the final presentation PDF-format

The role of aerodynamic forces in a mathematical model for suspension bridges

In a fish-bone model for suspension bridges studied by us in a previous paper we introduce linear aerodynamic forces. We numerically analyze the role of these forces and we theoretically show that they do not influence the onset of torsional oscillations. This suggests a new explanation for the origin of instability in suspension bridges: it is a combined interaction between structural nonlinearity and aerodynamics and it follows a precise pattern. This gives an answer to a long-standing question about the origin of torsional instability in suspension bridges