1,527 research outputs found
A heterotic sigma model with novel target geometry
We construct a (1,2) heterotic sigma model whose target space geometry
consists of a transitive Lie algebroid with complex structure on a Kaehler
manifold. We show that, under certain geometrical and topological conditions,
there are two distinguished topological half--twists of the heterotic sigma
model leading to A and B type half--topological models. Each of these models is
characterized by the usual topological BRST operator, stemming from the
heterotic (0,2) supersymmetry, and a second BRST operator anticommuting with
the former, originating from the (1,0) supersymmetry. These BRST operators
combined in a certain way provide each half--topological model with two
inequivalent BRST structures and, correspondingly, two distinct perturbative
chiral algebras and chiral rings. The latter are studied in detail and
characterized geometrically in terms of Lie algebroid cohomology in the
quasiclassical limit.Comment: 83 pages, no figures, 2 references adde
Biomarkers of oxidative and nitrosative damage in Alzheimer's disease and mild cognitive impairment
Alzheimer's disease (AD) is the most common type of dementia in the elderly. Products of oxidative and nitrosative stress (OS and NS, respectively) accumulate with aging, which is the main risk factor for AD. This provides the basis for the involvement of OS and NS in AD pathogenesis. OS and NS occur in biological systems due to the dysregulation of the redox balance, caused by a deficiency of antioxidants and/or the overproduction of free radicals. Free radical attack against lipids, proteins, sugars and nucleic acids leads to the formation of bioproducts whose detection in fluids and tissues represents the currently available method for assessing oxidative/nitrosative damage. Post-mortem and in-vivo studies have demonstrated an accumulation of products of free radical damage in the central nervous system and in the peripheral tissues of subjects with AD or mild cognitive impairment (MCI). In addition to their individual role, biomarkers for OS and NS in AD are associated with altered bioenergetics and amyloid-beta (Aβ) metabolism. In this review we discuss the main results obtained in the field of biomarkers of oxidative/nitrosative stress in AD and MCI in humans, in addition to their potential role as a tool for diagnosis, prognosis and treatment efficacy in AD. © 2009 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved
Liderazgo personal y universidad de formación en los médicos del departamento de especialidades médicas de un hospital nacional de Lima - Cercado, 2016
El presente estudio de tipo cualitativo, exploratorio, observacional, descriptivo, no
experimental y transversal, realizado en un hospital nacional de Lima Cercado. La
muestra estudiada estuvo conformada por médicos del departamento de
especialidades médicas que accedieron al correcto llenado de la encuesta motivo
del presente estudio, instrumento que se basó en los cuestionarios desarrollados
por el ingeniero David Fischman para su obra, El espejo del lÃder (2004), sobre
una muestra no probabilÃstica y dirigida compuesta por 51 médicos de una
población total de 69 médicos que no tienen cargo administrativo lo que
representa un 73.91% de esa población.
Se obtuvo como resultados que no existe relación entre el tipo de
universidad y el nivel de liderazgo de médicos del departamento de
especialidades médicas de un hospital nacional de Lima. No existe relación entre
el tipo de universidad y el nivel de control de ego de los médicos de ese mismo
departamento. No existe relación entre el tipo de universidad y el nivel de
Equilibrio de los médicos. No existe relación entre el tipo de universidad y el nivel
de Desapego y finalmente no existe relación entre el tipo de universidad y el nivel
de Responsabilidad de los médicos del departamento de especialidades médicas
de un hospital nacional de Lima, 2016.
Conclusión: No se halló diferencia significativa entre la presencia de
caracterÃsticas de liderazgo personal y la universidad de procedencia de los
profesionales médicos del departamento de especialidad es médicas del hospital
de Lima Cercado
Algorithm for the treatment of type 2 diabetes: a position statement of Brazilian Diabetes Society
The Brazilian Diabetes Society is starting an innovative project of quantitative assessment of medical arguments of and implementing a new way of elaborating SBD Position Statements. The final aim of this particular project is to propose a new Brazilian algorithm for the treatment of type 2 diabetes, based on the opinions of endocrinologists surveyed from a poll conducted on the Brazilian Diabetes Society website regarding the latest algorithm proposed by American Diabetes Association /European Association for the Study of Diabetes, published in January 2009
Cognitive performance in elderly patients undergoing carotid endarterectomy or carotid artery stenting: A twelve-month follow-up study
Background: It is still a matter of debate if and to what extent carotid endarterectomy (CEA) and carotid artery stenting (CAS) impair cognitive functioning in the elderly. Methods: We conducted a nonrandomized clinical trial on subjects with asymptomatic carotid artery stenosis comparing CEA (n = 28; 24 males and 4 females; 72.6 ± 5.8 years old) with CAS (n = 29; 17 males and 12 females; 75.1 ± 5.7 years old). Cognition, mood and functional status were evaluated by a broad spectrum of tests performed on the day prior to carotid reopening as well as 3 and 12 months after. Results: No significant differences in scores on cognitive tests including the Babcock story recall test and Rey's auditory verbal learning test (memory), category naming test (verbal fluency), trail-making test parts A and B (attention and executive function) and controlled oral word association test (executive functioning) were observed 3 and 12 months after carotid reopening independent of the technique used. Only scores on the copy drawing test (visuospatial and constructional abilities) slightly but significantly (p < 0.05) worsened in the CAS group 12 months after the intervention. No significant differences between the CEA and CAS groups were detected regarding mood and functional status after 3 and 12 months. Conclusions: CEA and CAS seem to be safe procedures in elderly patients in terms of cognitive, mood and functional status in the short and long term. CAS might be preferred for the shorter hospital stay, but further studies with a larger number of old and oldest old subjects with a longer follow-up are needed to better understand the cost-effectiveness of both treatments
Rapid Lung Ultrasound COVID-19 Severity Scoring with Resource-Efficient Deep Feature Extraction
Artificial intelligence-based analysis of lung ultrasound imaging has been
demonstrated as an effective technique for rapid diagnostic decision support
throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. However, such techniques can require days- or
weeks-long training processes and hyper-parameter tuning to develop intelligent
deep learning image analysis models. This work focuses on leveraging
'off-the-shelf' pre-trained models as deep feature extractors for scoring
disease severity with minimal training time. We propose using pre-trained
initializations of existing methods ahead of simple and compact neural networks
to reduce reliance on computational capacity. This reduction of computational
capacity is of critical importance in time-limited or resource-constrained
circumstances, such as the early stages of a pandemic. On a dataset of 49
patients, comprising over 20,000 images, we demonstrate that the use of
existing methods as feature extractors results in the effective classification
of COVID-19-related pneumonia severity while requiring only minutes of training
time. Our methods can achieve an accuracy of over 0.93 on a 4-level severity
score scale and provides comparable per-patient region and global scores
compared to expert annotated ground truths. These results demonstrate the
capability for rapid deployment and use of such minimally-adapted methods for
progress monitoring, patient stratification and management in clinical practice
for COVID-19 patients, and potentially in other respiratory diseases.Comment: Accepted to ASMUS 2022 Workshop at MICCA
Role of naïve-derived T memory stem cells in T-cell reconstitution following allogeneic transplantation
Face Video Competition
The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-01793-3_73Person recognition using facial features, e.g., mug-shot images, has long been used in identity documents. However, due to the widespread use of web-cams and mobile devices embedded with a camera, it is now possible to realise facial video recognition, rather than resorting to just still images. In fact, facial video recognition offers many advantages over still image recognition; these include the potential of boosting the system accuracy and deterring spoof attacks. This paper presents the first known benchmarking effort of person identity verification using facial video data. The evaluation involves 18 systems submitted by seven academic institutes.The work of NPoh is supported by the advanced researcher fellowship PA0022121477of the Swiss NSF; NPoh, CHC and JK by the EU-funded Mobio project grant IST-214324; NPC and HF by the EPSRC grants EP/D056942 and EP/D054818; VS andNP by the Slovenian national research program P2-0250(C) Metrology and Biomet-ric System, the COST Action 2101 and FP7-217762 HIDE; and, AAS by the Dutch BRICKS/BSIK project.Poh, N.; Chan, C.; Kittler, J.; Marcel, S.; Mc Cool, C.; Rua, E.; Alba Castro, J.... (2009). Face Video Competition. En Advances in Biometrics: Third International Conference, ICB 2009, Alghero, Italy, June 2-5, 2009. Proceedings. 715-724. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-01793-3_73S715724Messer, K., Kittler, J., Sadeghi, M., Hamouz, M., Kostyn, A., Marcel, S., Bengio, S., Cardinaux, F., Sanderson, C., Poh, N., Rodriguez, Y., Kryszczuk, K., Czyz, J., Vandendorpe, L., Ng, J., Cheung, H., Tang, B.: Face authentication competition on the BANCA database. In: Zhang, D., Jain, A.K. (eds.) ICBA 2004. LNCS, vol. 3072, pp. 8–15. Springer, Heidelberg (2004)Messer, K., Kittler, J., Sadeghi, M., Hamouz, M., Kostin, A., Cardinaux, F., Marcel, S., Bengio, S., Sanderson, C., Poh, N., Rodriguez, Y., Czyz, J., Vandendorpe, L., McCool, C., Lowther, S., Sridharan, S., Chandran, V., Palacios, R.P., Vidal, E., Bai, L., Shen, L.-L., Wang, Y., Yueh-Hsuan, C., Liu, H.-C., Hung, Y.-P., Heinrichs, A., Muller, M., Tewes, A., vd Malsburg, C., Wurtz, R., Wang, Z., Xue, F., Ma, Y., Yang, Q., Fang, C., Ding, X., Lucey, S., Goss, R., Schneiderman, H.: Face authentication test on the BANCA database. In: Int’l. Conf. Pattern Recognition (ICPR), vol. 4, pp. 523–532 (2004)Phillips, P.J., Flynn, P.J., Scruggs, T., Bowyer, K.W., Chang, J., Hoffman, K., Marques, J., Min, J., Worek, W.: Overview of the Face Recognition Grand Challenge. In: IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pp. 947–954 (2005)Bailly-Baillière, E., Bengio, S., Bimbot, F., Hamouz, M., Kittler, J., Marithoz, J., Matas, J., Messer, K., Popovici, V., Porée, F., Ruiz, B., Thiran, J.-P.: The BANCA Database and Evaluation Protocol. In: Kittler, J., Nixon, M.S. (eds.) AVBPA 2003. LNCS, vol. 2688. Springer, Heidelberg (2003)Turk, M., Pentland, A.: Eigenfaces for Recognition. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 3(1), 71–86 (1991)Martin, A., Doddington, G., Kamm, T., Ordowsk, M., Przybocki, M.: The DET Curve in Assessment of Detection Task Performance. In: Proc. Eurospeech 1997, Rhodes, pp. 1895–1898 (1997)Bengio, S., Marithoz, J.: The Expected Performance Curve: a New Assessment Measure for Person Authentication. In: The Speaker and Language Recognition Workshop (Odyssey), Toledo, pp. 279–284 (2004)Poh, N., Bengio, S.: Database, Protocol and Tools for Evaluating Score-Level Fusion Algorithms in Biometric Authentication. Pattern Recognition 39(2), 223–233 (2005)Martin, A., Przybocki, M., Campbell, J.P.: The NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation Program, ch. 8. Springer, Heidelberg (2005
Negative parental responses to coming out and family functioning in a sample of lesbian and gay young adults
Parental responses to youths' coming out (CO) are crucial to the subsequent adjustment of children and family. The present study investigated the negative parental reaction to the disclosure of same-sex attraction and the differences between maternal
and paternal responses, as reported by their homosexual daughters and sons. Participants' perceptions of their parents' reactions (evaluated through the Perceived Parental Reactions Scale, PPRS), age at coming out, gender, parental political
orientation, and religiosity involvement, the family functioning (assessed through the Family Adaptability and Cohesion Evaluation Scales, FACES IV), were assessed in 164 Italian gay and lesbian young adults. Pearson correlation coefficients were calculated to assess the relation between family functioning and parental reaction to CO. The paired sample t-test was used to compare mothers and fathers' scores on the PPRS. Hierarchical multiple regression was conducted to analyze the relevance of each variable. No differences were found between mothers and fathers in their reaction to the disclosure. The analysis showed that a negative reaction to coming out was predicted by parents' right-wing political conservatism, strong religious beliefs, and
higher scores in the scales Rigid and Enmeshed. Findings confirm that a negative parental reaction is the result of poor family resources to face a stressful situation and a strong belief in traditional values. These results have important implications in both clinical and social fields
The Glasgow Prognostic Score. An useful tool to predict survival in patients with advanced esophageal squamous cell carcinoma
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