1,262 research outputs found
Sertaconazole antifungal profile determined by a microdilution method versus nine topical substances against dermatophyte fungi
Antifungal activity and in vitro inhibition time for sertaconazole (STZ) and 9 other topical drugs, namely amorolfine, bifonazole, clotrimazole, econazole, ketoconazole, miconazole, oxiconazole, terbinafine, and tioconazole were determined against 124 clinical isolates of dermatophyte (12 species) fungi by the microdilution method in a liquid medium and the measurement of optical density. STZ's antifungal activity was not always affected by the tested dermatophyte genus, as was the case with the remaining antifungals. In vitro antifungal activity was at the same level for all the studied azole derivatives, but, in terms of partial inhibitory concentrations, STZ starts its in vitro inhibitory activity in a shorter time than the other tested substances, particularly in those incubation periods when the growth of the dermatophyte fungi was more developed.Fil: Carrillo Muñoz, A. J.. No especifĂca;Fil: Tur Tur, C.. No especifĂca;Fil: Cárdenes, D.. No especifĂca;Fil: Rojas, Florencia Dinorah. Universidad Nacional del Nordeste. Instituto de Medicina Regional; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones CientĂficas y TĂ©cnicas. Centro CientĂfico TecnolĂłgico Conicet - Nordeste; ArgentinaFil: Giusiano, Gustavo Emilio. Universidad Nacional del Nordeste. Instituto de Medicina Regional; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones CientĂficas y TĂ©cnicas. Centro CientĂfico TecnolĂłgico Conicet - Nordeste; Argentin
Els cnidaris bentònics
En aquest treball es presenten 85 espècies de cnidaris bentònics trobats als fons que envolten l'Arxipèlag de Cabrera. També es fa esment de la distribució bionòmica de les espècies més representatives i es compara la fauna trobada amb la de la immediata costa de Mallorca, la costa catalana, i, en general, les del litoral de la Mediterrà nia central i occidental.A check-list of the benthic Cnidaria inhabiting the Archipelago of Cabrera is presented, with comments on the bionomic distribution of the most representative species. The faunistic composition and the species distribution is very similar to the other Balearic islands and the species pool is representative of the coastal Mediterranean Cnidarian fauna
A high efficiency, low background detector for measuring pair-decay branches in nuclear decay
We describe a high efficiency detector for measuring electron-positron pair
transitions in nuclei. The device was built to be insensitive to gamma rays and
to accommodate high overall event rates. The design was optimized for total
pair kinetic energies up to about 7 MeV.Comment: Accepted for publication by Nucl. Inst. & Meth. in Phys. Res. A (NIM
A
Effective balancing error and user effort in interactive handwriting recognition
This is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Pattern Recognition Letters. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Pattern Recognition Letters, Volume 37, 1 February 2014, Pages 135–142 DOI 10.1016/j.patrec.2013.03.010[EN] Transcription of handwritten text documents is an expensive and time-consuming task. Unfortunately, the accuracy of current state-of-the-art handwriting recognition systems cannot guarantee fully-automatic high quality transcriptions, so we need to revert to the computer assisted approach. Although this approach reduces the user effort needed to transcribe a given document, the transcription of handwriting text documents still requires complete manual supervision. An especially appealing scenario is the interactive transcription of handwriting documents, in which the user defines the amount of errors that can be tolerated in the final transcribed document. Under this scenario, the transcription of a handwriting text document could be obtained efficiently, supervising only a certain number of incorrectly recognised words. In this work, we develop a new method for predicting the error rate in a block of automatically recognised words, and estimate how much effort is required to correct a transcription to a certain user-defined error rate. The proposed method is included in an interactive approach to transcribing handwritten text documents, which efficiently employs user interactions by means of active and semi-supervised learning techniques, along with a hypothesis recomputation algorithm based on constrained Viterbi search. Transcription results, in terms of trade-off between user effort and transcription accuracy, are reported for two real handwritten documents, and prove the effectiveness of the proposed approach.The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under Grant agreement No 287755 (transLectures). Also supported by the EC (FEDER, FSE), the Spanish Government (MICINN, MITyC, "Plan E", under grants MIPRCV "Consolider Ingenio 2010", MITTRAL (TIN2009-14633-C03-01), iTrans2 (TIN2009-14511), and FPU (AP2007-02867), and the Generalitat Valenciana (Grants Prometeo/2009/014 and GV/2010/067). Special thanks to Jesus Andres for his fruitful discussions.Serrano Martinez Santos, N.; Civera Saiz, J.; Sanchis Navarro, JA.; Juan CĂscar, A. (2014). Effective balancing error and user effort in interactive handwriting recognition. Pattern Recognition Letters. 37(1):135-142. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.patrec.2013.03.010S13514237
Entrepreneurial Orientation and Firm Performance in the Context of Upper Echelon Theory
Entrepreneurial Orientation (EO) is a firm-level phenomenon, which involves the firm’s prospects to take risks, be proactive, and be innovative. Most of the research assumes a positive EO-performance relationship adopting the EO-as-advantage perspective without providing enough theoretical foundations of the way EO enhances performance. This paper provides insights into the EO and firm performance relationship looking into the EO-as-experimentation perspective. Through EO-as-experimentation perspective, we argue for the importance of looking into the differential effects of each of the EO dimensions on firm performance in active and inactive firms. We hypothesized that the effect of each of the proactiveness and innovativeness dimension of EO on firm performance is positive among active firms and negative among inactive firms. Whereas risk taking dimension of EO is negative among active and inactive firms. Based on the results of firm fixed effect regression some empirical support for the hypotheses is presented and discussed
Canonical description of ideal magnetohydrodynamic flows and integrals of motion
In the framework of the variational principle the canonical variables
describing ideal magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) flows of general type (i.e., with
spatially varying entropy and nonzero values of all topological invariants) are
introduced. The corresponding complete velocity representation enables us not
only to describe the general type flows in terms of single-valued functions,
but also to solve the intriguing problem of the ``missing'' MHD integrals of
motion. The set of hitherto known MHD local invariants and integrals of motion
appears to be incomplete: for the vanishing magnetic field it does not reduce
to the set of the conventional hydrodynamic invariants. And if the MHD analogs
of the vorticity and helicity were discussed earlier for the particular cases,
the analog of Ertel invariant has been so far unknown. It is found that on the
basis of the new invariants introduced a wide set of high-order invariants can
be constructed. The new invariants are relevant both for the deeper insight
into the problem of the topological structure of the MHD flows as a whole and
for the examination of the stability problems. The additional advantage of the
proposed approach is that it enables one to deal with discontinuous flows,
including all types of possible breaks.Comment: 16 page
Spectroscopy of 13B via the 13C(t,3He) reaction at 115 AMeV
Gamow-Teller and dipole transitions to final states in 13B were studied via
the 13C(t,3He) reaction at Et = 115 AMeV. Besides the strong Gamow-Teller
transition to the 13B ground state, a weaker Gamow-Teller transition to a state
at 3.6 MeV was found. This state was assigned a spin-parity of 3/2- by
comparison with shell-model calculations using the WBP and WBT interactions
which were modified to allow for mixing between nhw and (n+2)hw configurations.
This assignment agrees with a recent result from a lifetime measurement of
excited states in 13B. The shell-model calculations also explained the
relatively large spectroscopic strength measured for a low-lying 1/2+ state at
4.83 MeV in 13B. The cross sections for dipole transitions up to Ex(13B)= 20
MeV excited via the 13C(t,3He) reaction were also compared with the shell-model
calculations. The theoretical cross sections exceeded the data by a factor of
about 1.8, which might indicate that the dipole excitations are "quenched".
Uncertainties in the reaction calculations complicate that interpretation.Comment: 11 pages, 6 figure
Predicting disability progression and cognitive worsening in multiple sclerosis using patterns of grey matter volumes
OBJECTIVE: In multiple sclerosis (MS), MRI measures at the whole brain or regional level are only modestly associated with disability, while network-based measures are emerging as promising prognostic markers. We sought to demonstrate whether data-driven patterns of covarying regional grey matter (GM) volumes predict future disability in secondary progressive MS (SPMS). METHODS: We used cross-sectional structural MRI, and baseline and longitudinal data of Expanded Disability Status Scale, Nine-Hole Peg Test (9HPT) and Symbol Digit Modalities Test (SDMT), from a clinical trial in 988 people with SPMS. We processed T1-weighted scans to obtain GM probability maps and applied spatial independent component analysis (ICA). We repeated ICA on 400 healthy controls. We used survival models to determine whether baseline patterns of covarying GM volume measures predict cognitive and motor worsening. RESULTS: We identified 15 patterns of regionally covarying GM features. Compared with whole brain GM, deep GM and lesion volumes, some ICA components correlated more closely with clinical outcomes. A mainly basal ganglia component had the highest correlations at baseline with the SDMT and was associated with cognitive worsening (HR=1.29, 95% CI 1.09 to 1.52, p<0.005). Two ICA components were associated with 9HPT worsening (HR=1.30, 95% CI 1.06 to 1.60, p<0.01 and HR=1.21, 95% CI 1.01 to 1.45, p<0.05). ICA measures could better predict SDMT and 9HPT worsening (C-index=0.69-0.71) compared with models including only whole and regional MRI measures (C-index=0.65-0.69, p value for all comparison <0.05). CONCLUSIONS: The disability progression was better predicted by some of the covarying GM regions patterns, than by single regional or whole-brain measures. ICA, which may represent structural brain networks, can be applied to clinical trials and may play a role in stratifying participants who have the most potential to show a treatment effect
HLA-DRB1*1501 influences long-term disability progression and tissue damage on MRI in relapse-onset multiple sclerosis
BACKGROUND: Whether genetic factors influence the long-term course of multiple sclerosis (MS) is unresolved. OBJECTIVE: To determine the influence of HLA-DRB1*1501 on long-term disease course in a homogeneous cohort of clinically isolated syndrome (CIS) patients. METHODS: One hundred seven patients underwent clinical and MRI assessment at the time of CIS and after 1, 3, 5 and 15 years. HLA-DRB1*1501 status was determined using Sanger sequencing and tagging of the rs3135388 polymorphism. Linear/Poisson mixed-effects models were used to investigate rates of change in EDSS and MRI measures based on HLA-DRB1*1501 status. RESULTS: HLA-DRB1*1501 -positive (n = 52) patients showed a faster rate of disability worsening compared with the HLA-DRB1*1501 -negative (n = 55) patients (annualised change in EDSS 0.14/year vs. 0.08/year, p < 0.025), and a greater annualised change in T2 lesion volume (adjusted difference 0.45 mL/year, p < 0.025), a higher number of gadolinium-enhancing lesions, and a faster rate of brain (adjusted difference -0.12%/year, p < 0.05) and spinal cord atrophy (adjusted difference -0.22 mm2/year, p < 0.05). INTERPRETATION: These findings provide evidence that the HLA-DRB1*1501 allele plays a role in MS severity, as measured by long-term disability worsening and a greater extent of inflammatory disease activity and tissue loss. HLA-DRB1*1501 may provide useful information when considering prognosis and treatment decisions in early relapse-onset MS
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