International evidence-based recommendations on ultrasound-guided vascular access

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The genetic basis of craniofacial and dental abnormalities

The embryonic head development, including the formation of dental structures, is a complex and delicate process guided by specific genetic programs. Genetic changes and environmental factors can disturb the execution of these programs and result in abnormalities in orofacial and dental structures. Orofacial clefts and hypodontia/ oligodontia are examples of such abnormalities frequently seen in dental clinics. An insight into the mechanisms and genes involved in the formation of orofacial and dental structures has been gradually gained by genetic analysis of families and by the use of experimental vertebrate models such as the mouse and chick models. The development of novel clinical therapies for orofacial and dental pathological conditions depends very much on a detailed knowledge of the molecular and cellular processes that are involved in head formation

Knowledge Enriched Short-term Scheduling for Engineer-to-order Products

AbstractContemporary shop-floors are highly affected by the ever-increasing complexity that is caused by the fluctuating customer demands. Therefore, a high degree of flexibility is needed and the scheduling of manufacturing tasks must be agile to changes. For addressing this challenge, this research work proposes a knowledge enriched short-term job-shop scheduling engine. More precisely, it focuses on the short-term scheduling of the resources of the machine shop, through an artificial intelligence algorithm that generates and evaluates alternative assignments of resources to tasks. Based on the requirements of a new order, a similarity mechanism retrieves successfully executed past orders together with a dataset that includes the processing times, the job and task sequence and the suitable resources. Afterwards it adapts these parameters to the requirements of the new order so as to evaluate the alternative schedules and identify a good alternative in a timely manner. The deriving schedule can be presented on mobile devices and it can be manipulated by the planner on-the-fly respecting tasks precedence constraints and machine availability. A case study from the mold making industry is used for validating the proposed framework

Knowledge-based Estimation of Manufacturing Lead Time for Complex Engineered-to-order Products

AbstractProduct complexity leads to increased unpredictability of indices related to manufacturing performance estimation. This phenomenon is intensified in companies that produce engineered-to-order products, such as the knowledge and labour intensive mould-making industry. During the initial capturing of product specifications formalisation difficulties arise. Moreover, the estimation of delivery times for new moulding project is solely based on the engineers’ experience. A methodology, which has been developed into a software tool is proposed that exposes graphical interfaces for customers to submit new orders and establish a formalised communication with the engineering team. The collected data are stored in a knowledge repository and are processed by a case-based reasoning mechanism for the lead time estimation. A real-life pilot installation has been initiated to a mould making SME. Preliminary results depict a significant reduction in the number of iterations between customers and engineering department compared to the traditional approach followed by the company, and improved accuracy of lead time estimation

The effect of inebriation on human brain functional connectivity

Given the effect of acute alcohol intake on the human emotional state, we hypothesized that even a moderate dose of alcohol will affect the brain activity of social drinkers, both at rest (default-mode network, DMN) and when passively viewing emotional stimuli, in terms of functional connectivity. Electroencephalographic (EEG) recordings were performed on 27 participants after receiving an alcoholic beverage and placebo respectively, at rest and during passive viewing of affective images from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS). The selected images were representative of 4 categories: pleasant and high arousing, pleasant and low arousing, unpleasant and high arousing and unpleasant and low arousing. Salivary alcohol served to measure the inebriation levels. The activity of cortical sources was estimated with the standardized Low Resolution Electromagnetic Tomography (sLORETA). The magnitude square coherence (MSC) on each pair of them was estimated for each frequency band to form functional networks among the cortical sources. The networks were treated in the context of graph theory and their global parameters were calculated. Our preliminary results refer to the DMN connectivity. The MSC averaged across all sources' pairs, along with the global efficiency of the DMN, were significantly (p < 0.05) higher following alcohol intake (vs. placebo) in alpha and beta bands. The inter-connectivity of certain nodes, roughly outlining the DMN, was elevated (p < .05 corrected) in alpha band during alcohol sessions indicating a pronounced baseline functional connectivity. Our findings support the hypothesis that alcohol affects the functional connectivity of the DMN not necessarily locally, but in a more global way. A resting state pronounced functional connectivity in the human brain can elucidate to an extent the attention impairment already observed following acute alcohol intake, since the transition to an attentive state would be more demanding. Extensive functional connectivity analysis is underway in order to examine the effect of acute alcohol intake on the connectivity patterns eliciting during passive viewing of emotional stimuli examining whether it is different for different kinds of affective images. As expected, measures that globally quantify the brain functional connectivity were sensitively affected by alcohol-induced alterations in the DMN. We will soon have some findings on the functional networks formed as a response to emotional stimuli following inebriation