Superficial location of the brachial plexus and axillary artery in relation to pectoralis minor: a case report

Knowledge of the anatomy of the infraclavicular fossa is important as this region is a target site for anaesthesia of the upper limb during infraclavicular approaches to brachial plexus blocks and in central venous cannulation of the axillary or subclavian veins. The cords of the brachial plexus and the axillary artery and vein are classically described as being located deep to the pectoralis minor and major muscles in the infraclavicular fossa. A rare variation was observed on one side of an individual, out of a total of 170 dissections, in which the brachial plexus and axillary artery were located between the pectoralis minor and major muscles. This variation was observed on the right-hand side of a male cadaver, and resulted in a more superficial position of the cords of the brachial plexus and axillary artery in relation to the skin. This superficial position of these vital structures may lead to an increased risk of complications during clinical procedures, such as infraclavicular brachial plexus blocks, central venous cannulation or surgery. Ultrasound should be used whenever possible to visualise variant positions of arteries, veins, nerves or muscles during these and other procedures.Keywords: anatomical variation, axillary artery, brachial plexus, infraclavicular region, pectoralis mino

Comparison of accelerated anaerobic granulation obtained with a bench-scale rotating bioreactor vs. a stationary container for three different substrates

Anaerobic digestion is a very efficient technology for the treatment of wastewater from the food industries. The upflow sludge blanket reactor (UASB) is used to convert carbon in waste streams to CO2 and CH4. The risk of a shortage of anaerobic granules in a situation that requires a replacement granule charge for the UASB is a barrier to implementation of anaerobic technology in countries without UASB reactors, producing a surplus of granules to provide for an adequate inventory of granules. Accelerated granulation provides a means to reduce this risk. Peach cannery effluent (PCE), sucrose and lactate were tested as possible substrates for accelerated granulation inducement for un-granulated sewage sludge. Six experimental runs of 20 d each were done to explore granule growth. Each substrate was seeded with sewage sludge in a 5.4 ℓ bioreactor rotating at 2 r/min, as well as in a stationary container. A rapid drop in pH occurred during the first few days of every run. A lower overall pH in the bioreactor indicates a higher bacterial activity relative to the stationary container. The big drop in pH initially with PCE and sucrose inhibited methanogenic activity and granule growth for these substrates. The settleability of the final effluent from the reactor is superior to that of the stationary container. The total suspended solids analysis showed that the reactor produced a marked increase in the larger particulate sizes, indicating the positive contribution of the rolling action towards growth of granules.Keywords: anaerobic digestion, granulation, wastewater, accelerated granulatio

Symmetry of Brans-Dicke gravity as a novel solution-generating technique

A symmetry of Brans-Dicke gravity in (electro) vacuo or in the presence of conformally invariant matter is presented and used as a solution-generating technique starting from a known solution as a seed. This novel technique is applied to generate, as examples, new spatially homogeneous and isotropic cosmologies, a 3-parameter family of spherical time-dependent spacetimes conformal to a Campanelli-Lousto geometry, and a family of cylindrically symmetric geometries.Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TUBITAK)Turkiye Bilimsel ve Teknolojik Arastirma Kurumu (TUBITAK) [BIDEB-2219]; Namik Kemal UniversityNamik Kemal University; Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of CanadaNatural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC)CGIAR [201603803]We are grateful to Nathalie Deruelle for a discussion and to a referee for useful comments. D. K. C. thanks the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TUBITAK) for a postdoctoral fellowship through the Programme BIDEB-2219 and Namik Kemal University for support. V. F. is supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (Grant No. 201603803), and all authors thank Bishop's University

Quantum secret sharing with qudit graph states

We present a unified formalism for threshold quantum secret sharing using graph states of systems with prime dimension. We construct protocols for three varieties of secret sharing: with classical and quantum secrets shared between parties over both classical and quantum channels.Comment: 13 pages, 12 figures. v2: Corrected to reflect imperfections of (n,n) QQ protocol. Also changed notation from $(n,m)$ to $(k,n)$, corrected typos, updated references, shortened introduction. v3: Updated acknowledgement

Lung responses to secondary endotoxin challenge in rats exposed to pig barn air

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Swine barn air contains endotoxin and many other noxious agents. Single or multiple exposures to pig barn air induces lung inflammation and loss of lung function. However, we do not know the effect of exposure to pig barn air on inflammatory response in the lungs following a secondary infection. Therefore, we tested a hypothesis that single or multiple exposures to barn air will result in exaggerated lung inflammation in response to a secondary insult with <it>Escherichia coli </it>LPS (<it>E. coli </it>LPS).</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>We exposed Sprague-Dawley rats to ambient (N = 12) or swine barn air (N = 24) for one or five days and then half (N = 6/group) of these rats received intravenous <it>E. coli </it>LPS challenge, observed for six hours and then euthanized to collect lung tissues for histology, immunohistochemistry and ELISA to assess lung inflammation.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Compared to controls, histological signs of lung inflammation were evident in barn exposed rat lungs. Rats exposed to barn air for one or five days and challenged with <it>E. coli </it>LPS showed increased recruitment of granulocytes compared to those exposed only to the barn. Control, one and five day barn exposed rats that were challenged with <it>E. coli </it>LPS showed higher levels of IL-1β in the lungs compared to respective groups not challenged with <it>E. coli </it>LPS. The levels of TNF-α in the lungs did not differ among any of the groups. Control rats without <it>E. coli </it>LPS challenge showed higher levels of TGF-β2 compared to controls challenged with <it>E. coli </it>LPS.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>These results show that lungs of rats exposed to pig barn air retain the ability to respond to <it>E. coli </it>LPS challenge.</p

Service User Experiences of How Flexible Assertive Community Treatment May Support or Inhibit Citizenship: A Qualitative Study

The aim of this study was to explore and describe service user experiences of how receiving services from a Flexible Assertive Community Treatment (FACT) team may support or inhibit citizenship. Within a participatory design, individual interviews with 32 service users from five Norwegian FACT teams were analyzed using thematic, cross-sectional analysis. The findings showed that FACT may support citizenship by relating to service users as whole people, facilitating empowerment and involvement, and providing practical and accessible help. Experiences of coercion, limited involvement and authoritarian aspects of the system surrounding FACT had inhibited citizenship for participants in this study.publishedVersio

TDDonto2: A Test-Driven Development Plugin for arbitrary TBox and ABox axioms

Ontology authoring is a complex task where modellers rely heavily on the automated reasoner for verification of changes, using effectively a time-consuming test-last approach. Test-first with Test-Driven Development aims to speed up such processes, but tools to date covered only a subset of possible OWL 2 DL axioms and provide limited feedback. We have addressed these issues with a model for TDD testing to give more feedback to the modeller and seven new, generic, TDD algorithms that also cover OWL 2 DL class expressions on the left-hand side of inclusions and ABox assertions by availing of several reasoner methods. The model and algorithms have been implemented as a Prot\'eg\'e plugin, TDDonto2

A classification of grammar-infused templates for ontology and model verbalisation

Involving domain-experts in the development, maintenance, and use of knowledge organisation systems can be made easier through the introduction of easy-to-use interfaces that are based on natural language. Well resourced languages make use of natural language generation techniques to provide such interfaces. In particular, they often make use of templates combined with computational grammar rules to generate grammatically complex text. However, there is no model of pairing templates and computational grammar rules to ensure suitability for less-resourced languages. These languages require a modular design that ensures grammar detachability so as to allow grammar re-use across domains and applications. In this paper, we present a model and classification scheme for grammar-infused templates suited for less-resourced languages and classify existing systems that make use of them. We have found that of the 15 systems that pair templates and grammar rules, and their 11 distinct template types, 13 have support for detachable grammars

Abstracting modelling languages: A reutilization approach

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-31095-9_9Proceedings of 24th International Conference, CAiSE 2012, Gdansk, Poland, June 25-29, 2012Model-Driven Engineering automates the development of information systems. This approach is based on the use of Domain-Specific Modelling Languages (DSMLs) for the description of the relevant aspects of the systems to be built. The increasing complexity of the target systems has raised the need for abstraction techniques able to produce simpler versions of the models, but retaining certain properties of interest. However, developing such abstractions for each DSML from scratch is a time and resource consuming activity. Our solution to this situation is a number of techniques to build reusable abstractions that are defined once and can be reused over families of modelling languages sharing certain requirements. As a proof of concept, we present a catalogue of reusable abstractions, together with an implementation in the MetaDepth multi-level meta-modelling tool.Work funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitivity (TIN2011-24139), and the R&D programme of Madrid Region (S2009/TIC-1650)

Spatio-structural granularity of biological material entities

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>With the continuously increasing demands on knowledge- and data-management that databases have to meet, ontologies and the theories of granularity they use become more and more important. Unfortunately, currently used theories and schemes of granularity unnecessarily limit the performance of ontologies due to two shortcomings: (i) they do not allow the integration of multiple granularity perspectives into one granularity framework; (ii) they are not applicable to cumulative-constitutively organized material entities, which cover most of the biomedical material entities.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The above mentioned shortcomings are responsible for the major inconsistencies in currently used spatio-structural granularity schemes. By using the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) as a top-level ontology and Keet's general theory of granularity, a granularity framework is presented that is applicable to cumulative-constitutively organized material entities. It provides a scheme for granulating complex material entities into their constitutive and regional parts by integrating various compositional and spatial granularity perspectives. Within a scale dependent resolution perspective, it even allows distinguishing different types of representations of the same material entity. Within other scale dependent perspectives, which are based on specific types of measurements (e.g. weight, volume, etc.), the possibility of organizing instances of material entities independent of their parthood relations and only according to increasing measures is provided as well. All granularity perspectives are connected to one another through overcrossing granularity levels, together forming an integrated whole that uses the <it>compositional object perspective </it>as an integrating backbone. This granularity framework allows to consistently assign structural granularity values to all different types of material entities.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The here presented framework provides a spatio-structural granularity framework for all domain reference ontologies that model cumulative-constitutively organized material entities. With its multi-perspectives approach it allows querying an ontology stored in a database at one's own desired different levels of detail: The contents of a database can be organized according to diverse granularity perspectives, which in their turn provide different <it>views </it>on its content (i.e. data, knowledge), each organized into different levels of detail.</p