Percutaneous transluminal balloon angioplasty in stenosis of native hemodialysis arteriovenous fistulas: technical success and analysis of factors affecting postprocedural fistula patency

PURPOSEWe aimed to determine the predictors of technical success and patency after percutaneous transluminal angioplasty (PTA) of de novo dysfunctional hemodialysis arteriovenous fistulas (AVF).METHODSWe performed a retrospective analysis of first time PTA in 228 patients (129 men, 99 women; mean age, 56.8±14.6 years). Anatomical (location, length, grade, and number of stenoses) and clinical variables (sex, age, prior AVF, diabetes mellitus, AVF age, side, and location) were reviewed.RESULTSA total of 330 stenoses were found in 228 patients. PTA was technically successful in 96.3% of the stenoses (n=319). Clinical success was achieved in 97.2% (n=321). Early dysfunction (within six months) was positively correlated with patient age (P < 0.001) and diabetes (P < 0.005). Older age (P < 0.001) and diabetes (P = 0.002) were associated with a lower primary patency rate. Patient age (P < 0.001), presence of diabetes (P = 0.023), length of stenosis (P = 0.003), early recurrence (P = 0.003) and presence of residual stenosis (P = 0.014) were associated with a lower secondary patency rate. CONCLUSIONPatency of dysfunctional hemodialysis fistulas can be maintained safely with continuous follow-up and repeated interventions without shortening the venous segment by surgical revision. Percutaneous approach to hemodialysis access stenosis is an alternative to the conventional surgical approach and PTA is an effective treatment method for dysfunctional AVF

DEVELOPING A SIGNAL SIMILARITY ANALYSE SOFTWARE FOR ACCELEROMETER SENSOR DATA

With the latest developments in semiconductor technology, accelerometers that can be inserted into the electronic chips have been developed so that movement measurement have become easier and more common. Nowadays, many smart mobile phones are equipped with cheap but powerful accelerometer sensors. The data obtained from such sensors are used to determine the movements in x, y and z coordinates. In the scope of our study, a software has been developed to perform similarity analysis of accelerometer data. Developed software can read signal data from a text file to compare the signals and shows the signal graphics on the computer screen, the signals can be shifted and zooming operations can be performed. The developed interface also computes descriptive statistics for comparable accelerometer signals and calculates signal similarity ratios. After the manipulations, the results of the analysis can be exported to a text or an image file

HealthFace: A web-based remote monitoring interface for medical healthcare systems based on a wireless body area sensor network

The wireless body area sensor network (WBASN) is a type of wireless sensor network. The wireless sensor nodes in a WBASN are placed on, near, or within a human body. In a medical healthcare system, WBASNs continuously provide healthcare, monitoring, especially of elderly or ill people wherever the patient goes. Wireless nodes sense and process human vital signs such as heart rate, blood pressure, body temperature, and respiration. They then send collected data to a medical center via a base station in order for medical professionals to monitor the patient's health. In the medical center, doctors and caregivers need monitoring systems or interfaces to process, analyze, and visualize the received data from WBASN-based systems. In tins paper, we present a web-based remote monitoring interface, HealthFace, for medical healthcare systems based on a WBASN. Users can easily access the developed Health,Face via any Internet-connected device, such as a PC, PDA, laptop, or cell phone, without needing any special software or programs except for a web browser. In addition, the implemented HealthFace presents several features, including recording, displaying, and analyzing collected data from the sensor nodes using MATLAB Builder NE with Web Figure. Web Figure enables users to utilize 3-dimensional view, zoom., and movement functions

Design and implementation of a new quality of service-aware cross-layer medium access protocol for wireless body area networks

Wireless body area networks (WBANs) consist of tiny sensors that enable monitoring the health status of a person. quality of service (QoS) is a major challenge for WBANs due to the importance of vital sign information. Therefore, many QoS-based medium access control (MAC) protocols and technologies have been developed to overcome this problem. Standardization of various technologies and protocols must be addressed. ISO/IEEE 11073 personal health data standards aim to provide interoperability between healthcare devices and technologies. This paper presents a new QoS-aware cross-layer MAC protocol based on the ISO/IEEE 11073 standards that employs a slot allocation scheme, multi-channel architecture, priority mechanism, admission control, and cross-layer solution. The proposed MAC protocol has been modeled and simulated by OPNET Modeler. In addition, the proposed MAC protocol is compared with standard technologies and recent protocols in the literature, and it achieves better results for end-to-end delay, packet loss ratio, and throughput parameters. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

isMAC: An Adaptive and Energy-Efficient MAC Protocol Based on Multi-Channel Communication for Wireless Body Area Networks

Recently, the use of wireless body area networks (WBAN) has been increasing rapidly in medical healthcare applications. WBANs consist of smart nodes that can be used to sense and transmit vital data such as heart rate, temperature and ECG from a human body to a medical centre. WBANs depend on limited resources such as energy and bandwidth. In order to utilise these resources efficiently, a very well organized medium access control (MAC) protocol must be considered. In this paper, a new, adaptive and energy-efficient MAC protocol, entitled isMAC, is proposed for WBANs. The proposed MAC is based on multi-channel communication and aims to prolong the network lifetime by effectively employing (i) a collision prevention mechanism, (ii) a coordinator node (WCN) selection algorithm and (iii) a transmission power adjustment approach. The isMAC protocol has been developed and modelled, by using OPNET Modeler simulation software. It is based on a networking scenario that requires especially high data rates such as ECG, for performance evaluation purposes. Packet delay, network throughput and energy consumption have been chosen as performance metrics. The comparison between the simulation results of isMAC and classical IEEE 802.15.4 (ZigBee) protocol shows that isMAC significantly outperforms IEEE 802.15.4 in terms of packet delay, throughput and energy consumption

Massive Primary Intraventricular Hemorrhage Due to Idiopathic Lateral Posterior Choroidal Artery Aneurysm: Case Illustration

Peripheral aneurysms of the lateral posterior choroidal artery are rare and mostly in association with vascular and occlusive pathologies such as moyamoya disease. To the best of our knowledge, pure lateral posterior choroidal artery aneurysms without association of any other vascular diseases are unique and only 3 cases have been reported in the literature