Syndromics: A Bioinformatics Approach for Neurotrauma Research

Substantial scientific progress has been made in the past 50 years in delineating many of the biological mechanisms involved in the primary and secondary injuries following trauma to the spinal cord and brain. These advances have highlighted numerous potential therapeutic approaches that may help restore function after injury. Despite these advances, bench-to-bedside translation has remained elusive. Translational testing of novel therapies requires standardized measures of function for comparison across different laboratories, paradigms, and species. Although numerous functional assessments have been developed in animal models, it remains unclear how to best integrate this information to describe the complete translational “syndrome” produced by neurotrauma. The present paper describes a multivariate statistical framework for integrating diverse neurotrauma data and reviews the few papers to date that have taken an information-intensive approach for basic neurotrauma research. We argue that these papers can be described as the seminal works of a new field that we call “syndromics”, which aim to apply informatics tools to disease models to characterize the full set of mechanistic inter-relationships from multi-scale data. In the future, centralized databases of raw neurotrauma data will enable better syndromic approaches and aid future translational research, leading to more efficient testing regimens and more clinically relevant findings

New Insights into Dutch Elm Disease: Cell Wall Compositional, Ecophysiological, Vascular and Nanomechanical Assessments

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Development of a multi-modal multi-user telepresence and teleaction system

The presented multi-user telepresence and teleaction system enables two teleoperators, which are independently controlled by two human operators, to perform collaborative actions in a remote environment. The system provides the operators with visual, auditory, and haptic feedback and allows them to physically interact with objects in the remote environment. The interaction between the two human operators is enhanced by augmenting visual and auditory feedback. The paper is focused on the amalgamation of the individual subsystems, which handle the different modalities, into one tightly integrated system, which creates a common workspace for two operators. The overall system architecture and the appropriate design of the auditory, visual, and haptic subsystems are discussed. The audio system makes use of a novel high-fidelity interpolation technique to render three-dimensional sound scenes for both human operators, which enhances their interaction. The design of the video system allows modeling and rendering of the remote environment in real time while regarding changes in the scene by perpetually updating the model. The haptic system is based on admittance-type devices, which are best fitted for applications involving large workspaces and high interaction forces. In addition, the implementation of locomotion techniques for telepresence in large-scale environments are presented. Finally, an application example shows that the system can be successfully employed in a remote maintenance task, which consists of exploring a large-scale environment, moving to the target area, and finally repairing a broken pipe by attaching a sealing clamp. The example demonstrates the necessity of multi-user telepresence and teleaction systems and supports the benefits of consistent multi-modal feedback. © 2010 The Author(s)

Pleural catheters after thoracoscopic treatment of malignant pleural effusion : a randomized comparative study on quality of life

Background: Malignant pleural effusion (MPE) complicates many neoplasms and its incidence is expected to rise in parallel with the aging population and longer survival of cancer patients. Although a clear consensus exists on indwelling catheters in patients with poor performance status, no study has hitherto compared different devices in patients requiring temporary or definitive drainage following talc poudrage. Methods: This is a prospective, two-arm, pilot study on patients with MPE undergoing talc poudrage, comparing two different catheters (PleurX\uae versus Pleurocath\uae) positioned because of the inefficacy of the procedure or the high risk of short-term failure. End points of the study were quality of life (QoL), median dyspnea and chest pain assessment by EORTC questionnaires and a 100 mm visual analog scale, total in-hospital length of stay and frequency of serious adverse events. Results: No difference was observed between the two groups in in mean dyspnea and mean chest pain in any questions of the EORTC QLQ-C30 and QLQ-LC13 questionnaires. Duration of the procedure was significantly longer in the PleurX\uae group versus the Pleurocath\uae group (72\ub133 versus 44\ub113 minutes; P=0.03). No difference was observed between the two groups in total length of hospital stay (P=1.00) or complication rate (P=1.00). Conclusions: For the cohort of patients still needing indwelling pleural catheters (PC) after thoracoscopic talc poudrage, PleurX\uae is suggested when drain removal is unlikely due to short life expectancy or the high chance of pleurodesis failure. Conversely, Pleurocath\uae should be recommended in all other patients as it is faster to place and easier to remove