72 research outputs found
Modificación hidrotérmica del almidón de yuca para su empleo como estabilizador de helados
En el trabajo se desarrolla un procedimiento de modificación física de almidón nativo de yuca a través de un tratamiento hidrotérmico en la zona previa a la gelatinización, de la cual no existen reportes de experimentación. El objetivo es determinar la influencia de las principales variables del proceso sobre el comportamiento reológico, con el propósito de ser empleado como estabilizador en la Industria heladera. Se alcanzaron buenos resultados reológicos con una concentración de 6% p/p de almidón nativo a 56 0C. El material obtenido se usó en formulaciones de helados, sustituyendo parte de los productos convencionales con efectos muy positivos en cuanto a la evaluación sensorial y el índice de aireación. Los resultados alcanzados permiten establecer perspectivas para el empleo de almidones modificados de yuca cuyo tratamiento hidrotérmico en la zona previa a la gelatinización ofrece efectos positivos, como estabilizante de suspensiones acuosas, similares a los que se alcanzan con almidones pregelatinizados, además con la ventaja de obtener el producto modificado con mayor facilidad
Procedure for the formulation of business opportunities. Case studies in the food industry
Given the importance of identifying business opportunities in the chemical and food process industry, considering available technologies and raw materials as well as potential markets, the objective of this work is to propose a heuristic procedure for the formulation of business opportunities applied to a case study of the food industry. The proposed procedure considers previous actions and methodological pro-cedures and establishes a sequence of actions that facilitate the selection and development of new business opportunities considering market possibilities and potentialities, assimilable technologies, strategic projection through the SWOT matrix, economic evaluation and sensitivity analysis. The importance of adequately establishing the technical and technological scheme of the process and the financial analysis of the business as a tool to facilitate the objective evaluation of the situation and the correct decision making is demonstrated. The proposed methodology was applied to a case study associated to primary and modified products of Manihot esculenta Cranz (cassava), determining the technological, environmental and technical-economic conditions that guarantee the effectiveness and sustainability of cassava-cookies, flour and starch production businesses as combined primary assortments and precolloidal starch as a structurally modified assortment
Inhibition of angiogenic and non-angiogenic targets by sorafenib in renal cell carcinoma (RCC) in a RCC xenograft model
Barriers to routine G6PD testing prior to treatment with primaquine
Background
Primaquine is essential for the radical cure of vivax malaria, however its broad application is hindered
by the risk of drug-induced haemolysis in individuals with glucose-6-phosphate-dehydrogenase (G6PD) deficiency.
Rapid diagnostic tests capable of diagnosing G6PD deficiency are now available, but these are not used widely.
Methods
A series of qualitative interviews were conducted with policy makers and healthcare providers in four
vivax-endemic countries. Routine G6PD testing is not part of current policy in Bangladesh, Cambodia or China, but
it is in Malaysia. The interviews were analysed with regard to respondents perceptions of vivax malaria, -primaquine
based treatment for malaria and the complexities of G6PD deficiency.
Results
Three barriers to the roll-out of routine G6PD testing were identified in all sites: (a) a perceived low risk
of drug-induced haemolysis; (b) the perception that vivax malaria was benign and accordingly treatment with
primaquine was not regarded as a priority; and, (c) the additional costs of introducing routine testing. In Malaysia,
respondents considered the current test and treat algorithm suitable and the need for an alternative approach was
only considered relevant in highly mobile and hard to reach populations.
Conclusions
Greater efforts are needed to increase awareness of the benefits of the radical cure of Plasmodium vivax
and this should be supported by economic analyses exploring the cost effectiveness of routine G6PD testing.</p
Risk factors associated with mortality from pneumonia among patients with pneumoconiosis
Effects of hospital facilities on patient outcomes after cancer surgery: an international, prospective, observational study
Background Early death after cancer surgery is higher in low-income and middle-income countries (LMICs) compared with in high-income countries, yet the impact of facility characteristics on early postoperative outcomes is unknown. The aim of this study was to examine the association between hospital infrastructure, resource availability, and processes on early outcomes after cancer surgery worldwide.Methods A multimethods analysis was performed as part of the GlobalSurg 3 study-a multicentre, international, prospective cohort study of patients who had surgery for breast, colorectal, or gastric cancer. The primary outcomes were 30-day mortality and 30-day major complication rates. Potentially beneficial hospital facilities were identified by variable selection to select those associated with 30-day mortality. Adjusted outcomes were determined using generalised estimating equations to account for patient characteristics and country-income group, with population stratification by hospital.Findings Between April 1, 2018, and April 23, 2019, facility-level data were collected for 9685 patients across 238 hospitals in 66 countries (91 hospitals in 20 high-income countries; 57 hospitals in 19 upper-middle-income countries; and 90 hospitals in 27 low-income to lower-middle-income countries). The availability of five hospital facilities was inversely associated with mortality: ultrasound, CT scanner, critical care unit, opioid analgesia, and oncologist. After adjustment for case-mix and country income group, hospitals with three or fewer of these facilities (62 hospitals, 1294 patients) had higher mortality compared with those with four or five (adjusted odds ratio [OR] 3.85 [95% CI 2.58-5.75]; p<0.0001), with excess mortality predominantly explained by a limited capacity to rescue following the development of major complications (63.0% vs 82.7%; OR 0.35 [0.23-0.53]; p<0.0001). Across LMICs, improvements in hospital facilities would prevent one to three deaths for every 100 patients undergoing surgery for cancer.Interpretation Hospitals with higher levels of infrastructure and resources have better outcomes after cancer surgery, independent of country income. Without urgent strengthening of hospital infrastructure and resources, the reductions in cancer-associated mortality associated with improved access will not be realised
Diagnostic accuracy of a clinical diagnosis of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis: An international case-cohort study
We conducted an international study of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) diagnosis among a large group of physicians and compared their diagnostic performance to a panel of IPF experts. A total of 1141 respiratory physicians and 34 IPF experts participated. Participants evaluated 60 cases of interstitial lung disease (ILD) without interdisciplinary consultation. Diagnostic agreement was measured using the weighted kappa coefficient (\u3baw). Prognostic discrimination between IPF and other ILDs was used to validate diagnostic accuracy for first-choice diagnoses of IPF and were compared using the Cindex. A total of 404 physicians completed the study. Agreement for IPF diagnosis was higher among expert physicians (\u3baw=0.65, IQR 0.53-0.72, p20 years of experience (C-index=0.72, IQR 0.0-0.73, p=0.229) and non-university hospital physicians with more than 20 years of experience, attending weekly MDT meetings (C-index=0.72, IQR 0.70-0.72, p=0.052), did not differ significantly (p=0.229 and p=0.052 respectively) from the expert panel (C-index=0.74 IQR 0.72-0.75). Experienced respiratory physicians at university-based institutions diagnose IPF with similar prognostic accuracy to IPF experts. Regular MDT meeting attendance improves the prognostic accuracy of experienced non-university practitioners to levels achieved by IPF experts
Pan-cancer analysis of whole genomes
Cancer is driven by genetic change, and the advent of massively parallel sequencing has enabled systematic documentation of this variation at the whole-genome scale(1-3). Here we report the integrative analysis of 2,658 whole-cancer genomes and their matching normal tissues across 38 tumour types from the Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG) Consortium of the International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC) and The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). We describe the generation of the PCAWG resource, facilitated by international data sharing using compute clouds. On average, cancer genomes contained 4-5 driver mutations when combining coding and non-coding genomic elements; however, in around 5% of cases no drivers were identified, suggesting that cancer driver discovery is not yet complete. Chromothripsis, in which many clustered structural variants arise in a single catastrophic event, is frequently an early event in tumour evolution; in acral melanoma, for example, these events precede most somatic point mutations and affect several cancer-associated genes simultaneously. Cancers with abnormal telomere maintenance often originate from tissues with low replicative activity and show several mechanisms of preventing telomere attrition to critical levels. Common and rare germline variants affect patterns of somatic mutation, including point mutations, structural variants and somatic retrotransposition. A collection of papers from the PCAWG Consortium describes non-coding mutations that drive cancer beyond those in the TERT promoter(4); identifies new signatures of mutational processes that cause base substitutions, small insertions and deletions and structural variation(5,6); analyses timings and patterns of tumour evolution(7); describes the diverse transcriptional consequences of somatic mutation on splicing, expression levels, fusion genes and promoter activity(8,9); and evaluates a range of more-specialized features of cancer genomes(8,10-18).Peer reviewe
Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search
Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe
The challenges of introducing routine G6PD testing into radical cure: a workshop report
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