37 research outputs found
The body constitution of patients and intubation scales as predictors of difficult intubation considered in relation to the experience of the intubator
The aims of the study were to identify factors that may result in difficulties in
intubation, and to compare the results obtained when an experienced and
when a less experienced anaesthesiologist was involved. The 96 patients included
in the study were evaluated for difficult intubation according to the
following scales: Mallampati, upper lip bite test (ULBT) and Patil. The mobility
of the cervical segments of the vertebral column, the distance between the
jugular notch of the sternum and the chin and the anatomical constitution of
the body were other factors that were taken into consideration. Statistical analysis
was performed in order to identify factors that may result in difficulties in intubation
for an experienced and for a less experienced anaesthesiologist
The multi-stream flows and the dynamics of the cosmic web
A new numerical technique to identify the cosmic web is proposed. It is based
on locating multi-stream flows, i.e. the places where the velocity field is
multi-valued. The method is local in Eulerian space, simple and computaionally
efficient. This technique uses the velocities of particles and thus takes into
account the dynamical information. This is in contrast with the majority of
standard methods that use the coordinates of particles only. Two quantities are
computed in every mesh cell: the mean and variance of the velocity field. In
the cells where the velocity is single-valued the variance must be equal to
zero exactly, therefore the cells with non-zero variance are identified as
multi-stream flows. The technique has been tested in a N-body simulation of the
\L CDM model. The preliminary analysis has shown that numerical noise does not
pose a significant problem. The web identified by the new method has been
compared with the web identified by the standard technique using only the
particle coordinates. The comparison has shown overall similarity of two webs
as expected, however they by no means are identical. For example, the
isocontours of the corresponding fields have significantly different shapes and
some density peaks of similar heights exhibit significant differences in the
velocity variance and vice versa. This suggest that the density and velocity
variance have a significant degree of independence. The shape of the
two-dimensional pdf of density and velocity variance confirms this proposition.
Thus, we conclude that the dynamical information probed by this technique
introduces an additional dimension into analysis of the web.Comment: 19 pages, 10 figure
The Fueling and Evolution of AGN: Internal and External Triggers
In this chapter, I review the fueling and evolution of active galactic nuclei
(AGN) under the influence of internal and external triggers, namely intrinsic
properties of host galaxies (morphological or Hubble type, color, presence of
bars and other non-axisymmetric features, etc) and external factors such as
environment and interactions. The most daunting challenge in fueling AGN is
arguably the angular momentum problem as even matter located at a radius of a
few hundred pc must lose more than 99.99 % of its specific angular momentum
before it is fit for consumption by a BH. I review mass accretion rates,
angular momentum requirements, the effectiveness of different fueling
mechanisms, and the growth and mass density of black BHs at different epochs. I
discuss connections between the nuclear and larger-scale properties of AGN,
both locally and at intermediate redshifts, outlining some recent results from
the GEMS and GOODS HST surveys.Comment: Invited Review Chapter to appear in LNP Volume on "AGN Physics on All
Scales", Chapter 6, in press. 40 pages, 12 figures. Typo in Eq 5 correcte
The relationship of TP53 R72P polymorphism to disease outcome and TP53 mutation in myelodysplastic syndromes
Nonsynonymous TP53 exon 4 single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP), R72P, is linked to cancer and mutagen susceptibility. R72P associations with specific cancer risk, particularly hematological malignancies, have been conflicting. Myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS) with chromosome 5q deletion is characterized by erythroid hypoplasia arising from lineage-specific p53 accumulation resulting from ribosomal insufficiency. We hypothesized that apoptotically diminished R72P C-allele may influence predisposition to del(5q) MDS. Bone marrow and blood DNA was sequenced from 705 MDS cases (333 del(5q), 372 non-del(5q)) and 157 controls.
Genotype distribution did not significantly differ between del(5q) cases (12.6% CC, 38.1% CG, 49.2% GG), non-del(5q) cases (9.7% CC, 44.6% CG, 45.7% GG) and controls (7.6% CC, 37.6% CG, 54.8% GG) (P = 0.13). Allele frequency did not differ between non-del(5q) and del(5q) cases (P = 0.91) but trended towards increased C-allele frequency comparing non-del(5q) (P = 0.08) and del(5q) (P = 0.10) cases with controls. Median lenalidomide response duration increased proportionate to C-allele dosage in del(5q) patients (2.2 (CC), 1.3 (CG) and 0.89 years (GG)). Furthermore, C-allele homozygosity in del(5q) was associated with prolonged overall and progressionfree survival and non-terminal interstitial deletions that excluded 5q34, whereas G-allele homozygozity was associated with inferior
outcome and terminal deletions involving 5q34 (P = 0.05). These findings comprise the largest MDS R72P SNP analysis
A Parallel Algorithm and Architecture for the Control of Kinematically Redundant Manipulators
Kinematically redundant manipulators are inherently capable of more dextrous manipulation due to their additional degrees of freedom. To achieve this dexterity, however, one must be able to efficiently calculate the most desirable configuration from the infinite number of possible configurations that satisfy the end-effector constraint. It has been previously shown that the singular value decomposition (SVD) plays a crucial role in doing such calculations. In this work, a parallel algorithm for calculating the SVD is incorporated into a computational scheme for solving the equations of motion for kinematically redundant systems. This algorithm, which generalizes the damped least squares formulation to include solutions that utilize null-space projections and task prioritization as well as augmented or extended Jacobians, is then implemented on a simple linear array of processing elements. By taking advantage of the error bounds on the perturbation of the SVD, it is shown that an array ..