Pain management in the right iliac fossa during the Covid-19 pandemic

Abdominal pain in the right iliac fossa in women may be caused by a complicated ovarian cyst, adnexitis, and appendicitis. The paper analyses the characteristics of patients with right iliac fossa pain admitted during the Covid-19 pandemic. A retrospective analysis on 25 cases with abdominal pain in the right iliac fossa admitted to “St. Apostol Andrei” Emergency County Clinical Hospital Constanta, Romania between March 2020 and March 2021 was performed. In 52% of the cases, the symptomatology remitted with antispasmodics, 4 (16%) patients had cystic torsion and right adnexectomy (group A, without adnexa), 6 (24%) patients had ruptured cysts and right cystectomy, and 2 (8%) had immediate cystectomy together with appendectomy due to signs of peritoneal irritation (group B, adnexa retained). The age, the signs and the symptoms, as well as the inpatient diagnosis in group A were lower compared to patients in group B. The ovarian cyst can become a major surgical emergency if twisted or ruptured and it reaches an important vascular source, especially if it is associated with acute appendicitis, which often poses problems of differential diagnosis. The collaboration between gynecologists and surgeons is essential in the optimal therapeutic solution of these cases

Preserving Left Aberrant Hepatic Artery During Gastrectomy for Cancer – Literature Review and Case Report

Introduction: Identifying left aberrant hepatic artery during gastrectomy for cancer is occasional. In case of replaced left hepatic artery, its ligation can lead to hepatic injury or ischemia, while preserving it can cause difficulties during lymphadenectomy. In literature there is no consensus regarding preserving replaced left hepatic artery during gastrectomy for cancer. A recent study, analysing adverse effects of ligating an aberrant left hepatic artery, shows in patients with over 5 times elevated transaminase levels, increase in hospital length and postoperative complications. On the other hand, there are studies that consider ligation of aberrant left hepatic artery safe, the only inconvenient being postoperative transient elevation of transminase levels, when ligated artery diameter is over 1.5 mm. Material and methods: We report the case of a 65 years old male, known with myocardial infarction, admitted for epigastric pain, nausea, vomiting, dysphagia for solids and important weight loss. Upper gastrointestinal endoscopy with biopsy and computed tomography showed esogastric tumoral mass, signet ring cell carcinoma, no metastases. Intraopertive, we found replaced left hepatic artery arising from left gastric artery, close to the celiac trunk, its diameter being approximately 1 cm. Total radical D2 gastrectomy with mechanical eso-jejunal Roux-en-Y anastomosis was performed. Postoperative evolution was favorable surgically, but the patient had SarsCov2 infection during hospitalization. The final pathology report showed 18 lymph nodes examined, 5 being with adenocarcinoma metastases. Conclusions: Preserving replaced left hepatic artery during gastrectomy for cancer is preferable, lymphadenectomy not being affected. Potential postoperative complications resulted from ligation of replaced left hepatic artery could have chanced the prognosis

On the Blind Estimation of Chip Time of Time-Hopping Signals Through Minimization of a Multimodal Cost Function

International audienceIn this correspondence, we focus on blind estimation of the chip duration of time-hopping signals by introducing a cost function based on time-of-arrival (ToA) folding over multiple observation sets. An opti- mization algorithm that takes advantage of the highly oscillatory behavior in the nearby of the global minimum is proposed and a performance bound for the chip time estimate is derived. The pertinence of our approach is shown through numerical results, considering alternative methods like pe- riodogram and separable least squares line search. The proposed technique enables a good tradeoff between statistical accuracy and computational complexity

A New Compression Method using a Chaotic Symbolic Approach

International audienceIn this article, a new compression method is investigated using a particular chaotic modulation type. The symbolic approach presented associates to every informational sequence a trajectory in the state space of the chaotic generator. We are also introducing a new type of chaotic generator adapted to the probability distribution of the informational sequence, and we prove that using the described generator the theoretical compression performances attain the optimal entropy compression. Finally we confirm the theoretical analysis with performance tests for different sequences with different symbolic probabilities

THE PREVALENCE OF HYPODONTIA IN CHILDREN WITH CLEFT AND NONRELATED CONTROLS

The aim of this study was to compare the occurrence of hypodontia, dental age, and asymmetric dental development in children with cleft with a nonsibling control group. The study sample consisted of 30 children with cleft (aged 7.2 to 17.1 years) and 60 controls without cleft (aged between 7 and 18.8 years). Hypodontia, dental age, and asymmetric dental development were assessed on panoramic radiographs of the children with cleft and the control children without cleft. The cleft (p.001) group showed a significantly higher frequency of hypodontia and a significantly higher occurrence (cleft p.01) of asymmetric dental development, compared with the control group. Only a small, but insignificant delay in dental development could be found in the cleft group. The cleft subjects showed a significantly higher occurrence of hypodontia and asymmetric dental development than the non-cleft control group. This may suggest a genetic component for the occurrence of hypodontia and asymmetric dental development

Automatic Gain Control in a Kalman Filter Based Synchronization Chaotic Receiver

International audienceIt has been recently pointed out than the Kalman filter is a powerful tool for the synchronization of chaos, which remains a major difficulty in the development of efficient chaos based digital communication systems, capable of operating over nonstationnary channels. The input signal power fluctuations, which often causes large errors in synchronizing chaotic waveforms, is discussed in this paper. The automatic gain control will be solved in two manners, the first one relying on a modification of the chaotic dynamics and the second one by matching the second order statistics of the original chaotic spreading code. The performance of these approaches will be illustrated through numerical simulations for a symmetric chaos shift keying system (i.e. chaotic direct sequence spread spectrum). A dual Unscented Kalman filtering schemewill be achieved at the receiver to demodulate and synchronize simultaneously

Multipath Combining in Chaotic Direct-Sequence Spread Spectrum Communications through Dual Estimation

International audienceThe aim of the present paper is to increase the reliability of a Kalman filter-based DS-SS receiver by considering in the state space models the multipath coefficients and associated delays. The objective being to operate at very low SNRs in shallow water (to achieve furtive transmissions) and with the need of a limited computational cost, the implementation relies on the Unscented Kalman Filter, which is known to be more robust than the popular Extended Kalman Filter. The proposed receiver schemes are discussed and compared using experimental data

On Exact Kalman Filtering of Polynomial Systems

International audienceA closed-form state estimator for some polynomial nonlinear systems is derived in this paper. Exploiting full Taylor series expansion we first give exact matrix expressions to compute mean and covariance of any random variable distribution that has been transformed through a polynomial function. An original discrete-time Kalman filtering implementation relying on this exact polynomial transformation is proposed. The important problem of chaotic synchronization of Chebyshev maps is then considered to illustrate the significance of these results. Mean Square Error (MSE) between synchronized signals and consistency criteria are chosen as performance measures under various signal-tonoise ratios (SNR). Comparisons to the popular Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) and to the recent Unscented Kalman Filter (UKF) are also conducted to show the pertinence of our filtering formulation

Assessment of Angular Spectral Distributions of Laser Accelerated Particles for Simulation of Radiation Dose Map in Target Normal Sheath Acceleration Regime of High Power Laser-Thin Solid Target Interaction—Comparison with Experiments

An adequate simulation model has been used for the calculation of angular and energy distributions of electrons, protons, and photons emitted during a high-power laser, 5-µm thick Ag target interaction. Their energy spectra and fluencies have been calculated between 0 and 360 degrees around the interaction point with a step angle of five degrees. Thus, the contribution of each ionizing species to the total fluency value has been established. Considering the geometry of the experimental set-up, a map of the radiation dose inside the target vacuum chamber has been simulated, using the Geant4 General Particle Source code, and further compared with the experimental one. Maximum values of the measured dose of the order of tens of mGy per laser shot have been obtained in the direction normal to the target at about 30 cm from the interaction point

Pseudo-blind demodulation of chaotic DS-SS signals through Exact Kalman Filtering

International audienceThis paper adresses the problem of symbol estimation in the case of a spread spectrum based system where the receiver has only the information about the nonlinear function used to generate the spreading sequence. We propose two methods to achieve this, first based on the already considered DUAL form and a correlator second based one. For the DUAL form we consider multiple Kalman filter implementations suited to the case of nonlinear estimation methods among them Unscented Kalman Filter (UKF) and Exact Polynomial Kalman Filter (ExPKF). Finaly to provide a perfomance evaluation on the proposed methods we obtain throughout Monte-Carlo simulations the Bit Error Rate (BER) characteristics with respect to Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR)