Changing pattern of visceral leishmaniasis, United Kingdom, 1985-2004.

A 20-year (1985-2004) retrospective review of 39 patients with imported visceral leishmaniasis found that tourism to Mediterranean countries and HIV infection were associated with visceral leishmaniasis. Diagnosis was often delayed. Treatment with liposomal amphotericin B has improved prognosis. Visceral leishmaniasis should be made a reportable disease

Green construction in India: gaining a deeper understanding

A workshop on green construction was organized in New Delhi in July 2008 by Jamia Millia University, India and University of Salford, U.K., aiming to increase 'green' practices that are environmentally friendly and energy efficient. The workshop included participants from regulatory bodies, public and private construction companies and researchers. The object of the workshop was to provide an opportunity to capture issues, challenges and research issues in green practices throughout the supply chain in the construction sector in India. The methodology constituted a survey that was provided to all participants, where eight questions were composed by the facilitators. The participants were asked about their views on voluntary and compulsory ways of assessment and audit of green implementation in India. The findings of the workshop featured major challenges, drivers, initiatives, and the ways of effective implementation as well as enforcement on the discussed topic

Plasma Surface Functionalization of AFP Manufactured Composites for Improved Adhesive Bond Performance

Application of carbon fiber reinforced polymer (CFRP) as a high-performance structural material has widespread application in the present aerospace industry. However, as-processed composite materials require a comprehensive surface treatment prior to bonding to remove contaminants and impart surface functionality and topography to overcome their poor adhesion properties. Atmospheric pressure plasma jet treatment (APPJT) has been increasingly garnering attention as an alternate method for surface preparation of CFRP. This method has been reported to achieve success in imparting favorable polar functional groups into the composite surfaces enhancing wettability and surface energy of the bonded surfaces. In some cases, APPJT has been demonstrated to remove contaminants or, in the case of silicones, convert them to silica. In this study, an atmospheric pressure plasma jet (APPJ) system was used for surface activation of a composite laid-up by an automated fiber placement (AFP) machine. Surface modifications prior to and after treatment were characterized using water contact angle (WCA) measurements, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), and atomic force microscopy (AFM). Double cantilever beam (DCB) tests were performed to quantify the bonding performance of the composites. The results show a marked enhancement of the mode I interlaminar fracture toughness with the application of APPJT

Compressive Object Tracking using Entangled Photons

We present a compressive sensing protocol that tracks a moving object by removing static components from a scene. The implementation is carried out on a ghost imaging scheme to minimize both the number of photons and the number of measurements required to form a quantum image of the tracked object. This procedure tracks an object at low light levels with fewer than 3% of the measurements required for a raster scan, permitting us to more effectively use the information content in each photon.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figure

Optimizing Frequency Queries for Data Mining Applications

Data mining algorithms use various Trie and bitmap-based representations to optimize the support (i.e., frequency) counting performance. In this paper, we compare the memory requirements and support counting performance of FP Tree, and Compressed Patricia Trie against several novel variants of vertical bit vectors. First, borrowing ideas from the VLDB domain, we compress vertical bit vectors using WAH encoding. Second, we evaluate the Gray code rank-based transaction reordering scheme, and show that in practice, simple lexicographic ordering, obtained by applying LSB Radix sort, outperforms this scheme. Led by these results, we propose HDO, a novel Hamming-distance-based greedy transaction reordering scheme, and aHDO, a linear-time approximation to HDO. We present results of experiments performed on 15 common datasets with varying degrees of sparseness, and show that HDO- reordered, WAH encoded bit vectors can take as little as 5% of the uncompressed space, while aHDO achieves similar compression on sparse datasets. Finally, with results from over a billion database and data mining style frequency query executions, we show that bitmap-based approaches result in up to hundreds of times faster support counting, and HDO-WAH encoded bitmaps offer the best space-time tradeoff

High Quality, Efficient Hierarchical Document Clustering Using Closed Interesting Itemsets

High dimensionality remains a significant challenge for document clustering. Recent approaches used frequent itemsets and closed frequent itemsets to reduce dimensionality, and to improve the efficiency of hierarchical document clustering. In this paper, we introduce the notion of "closed interesting" itemsets (i.e. closed itemsets with high interestingness). We provide heuristics such as "super item" to efficiently mine these itemsets and show that they provide significant dimensionality reduction over closed frequent itemsets. Using "closed interesting" itemsets, we propose a new hierarchical document clustering method that outperforms state of the art agglomerative, partitioning and frequent-itemset based methods both in terms of FScore and Entropy, without requiring dataset specific parameter tuning. We evaluate twenty interestingness measures on nine standard datasets and show that when used to generate "closed interesting" itemsets, and to select parent nodes, Mutual Information, Added Value, Yule's Q and Chi-Square offers best clustering performance, regardless of the characteristics of underlying dataset. We also show that our method is more scalable, and results in better run-time performance as compare to leading approaches. On a dual processor machine, our method scaled sub-linearly and was able to cluster 200K documents in about 40 seconds

Incorporating development of a patient-reported outcome instrument in a clinical drug development program: examples from a heart failure program.

BackgroundPatient-reported outcome (PRO) measures can be used to support label claims if they adhere to US Food & Drug Administration guidance. The process of developing a new PRO measure is expensive and time-consuming. We report the results of qualitative studies to develop new PRO measures for use in clinical trials of omecamtiv mecarbil (a selective, small molecule activator of cardiac myosin) for patients with heart failure (HF), as well as the lessons learned from the development process.MethodsConcept elicitation focus groups and individual interviews were conducted with patients with HF to identify concepts for the instrument. Cognitive interviews with HF patients were used to confirm that no essential concepts were missing and to assess patient comprehension of the instrument and items.ResultsDuring concept elicitation, the most frequently reported HF symptoms were shortness of breath, tiredness, fluid retention, fatigue, dizziness/light-headedness, swelling, weight fluctuation, and trouble sleeping. Two measures were developed based on the concepts: the Heart Failure Symptom Diary (HF-SD) and the Heart Failure Impact Scale (HFIS). Findings from cognitive interviews suggested that the items in the HF-SD and HFIS were relevant and well understood by patients. Multiple iterations of concept elicitation and cognitive interviews were needed based on FDA request for a broader patient population in the qualitative study. Lessons learned from the omecamtiv mecarbil PRO/clinical development program are discussed, including challenges of qualitative studies, patient recruitment, expected and actual timelines, cost, and engagement with various stakeholders.ConclusionDevelopment of a new PRO measure to support a label claim requires significant investment and early planning, as demonstrated by the omecamtiv mecarbil program