RESCUING THE ISCHEMIC PENUMBRA—OUR EXPIRIENCE

Objectives: Over one million strokes per year are occurring in Europe. Brain stroke is one of the most important death and disability causes in Europe and USA. The main role of perfusion is to determine the border of insult core and ischemic penumbra. Penumbra can be saved with thrombolytic therapy but core have irreversible injuries and represent death of brain cells. Aim: to determine the role of CT brain perfusion in cases of acute brain stroke and following thrombolytic therapy. Methods: We examined 64 patients with acute brain stroke who received thrombolytic therapy after that. All patients were examining on 16 MDCTwith 50 ml of iodine contrast agent following the standard procedure for CT perfusion. Patients were 34 male and 30 female with middle age of 64 years. MRI was made after thrombolytic therapy and compare with perfusion results before therapy. Results: Using an artery and a vein as reference three parameters were measured — blood flow (CBF), blood volume (CBV) and mean transit time (MTT), for each patient. Hemorrhagic was find in 9 (14.01%) patients after thrombolytic therapy. 4 (6.25%) other patients develop new stroke of same but mostly other side of brain. 8 (12.50%) more patients finished lethally. From other 42 patientswith thrombolytic therapywe can positively say that in 31 (48.44%) patients penumbrawas rescued. For other 11 (17.19%) stroke was same size like firstly involved core and penumbra but not bigger. Conclusion: CT perfusion plays major role by showing a curable parts of tissue in brain stroke

POWER TRANSFORMER HEALTH INDEX ESTIMATION USING EVIDENTIAL REASONING

Market-oriented power distribution system requires a well-planned budget with scheduled preventive and corrective maintenance during a replacement of units that are in an unsatisfactory condition. In recent years, the concept of the transformer health index as an integral part of resource management was adopted for the condition assessment and ranking of ETs. However, because of the lack of regular measurement and inspections, the confidence in health index value is greatly reduced.The paper proposes a novel methodology for the ET condition assessment and the lifetime increase through the establishment of priorities for control and maintenance. The solution is based on the upgraded health index, where the confidence to the measurement results is calculated using Evidential reasoning algorithm based on Dempster – Shafer theory. A novel, two – level hierarchical model of ET health index is proposed, with real weighting factors values. This way, the methodology for ET ranking includes the value of available information to describe ET current state. The proposed methodology is tested on real data of an installed ET and compared with the traditional health index calculation

Multi-channel system for remote power quality monitoring of electricity supplied by public distribution networks

Peer Reviewe

Measurements and modeling pollution from traffic in a street canyon: Assessing and ranking the influences

More than half a century, the scientific community is trying to understand the mechanisms and conditions of pollution dispersion within urban areas. Thereat, special attention has been focused on specific areas, such as a street canyon, in which harmful concentrations higher than allowed are more likely registered. However, there is still a controversy about the conditions of occurrence and impact of the individual air pollution components due to fluctuations of key contributions. Given that OSPM is a well-known semi-empirical model specializing in the assessment of air quality within a street canyon. After its testing and validation, the results of subsequent simulations were used as a basis for planning a special experiment in order to implement 48 full factorial designs. Using the response surface methodology, as the final objective, an answer was precisely given on the impact and contribution of urban air pollution components. In addition to the main objective of this study, as a secondary, but not less important result defining emission factors for CO and NOx can be emphasized, which to date have not been determined for the fleet of Serbia

Failure criteria of fibre reinforced composites in homogeneous temperature field

The present paper examines the failure criteria of layered composites with orthotropic properties in the homogeneous temperature field. The composite has modeled by two mechanically equivalent families of fibres. The paper formulates constitutive equations in terms of intrinsic preferred directions, which are defined by the orientation of fibers at any point of the composite. A uniformly heated, thermoelastic solid undergoes distortion as well as volume change because it experiences differential expansions in different directions. This effect is more complicated if, in addition of being anisotropic, the material is inhomogeneous, as in the case with laminated materials. In order to illustrate the influence of temperature on the failure of this group of materials constitutive equations are derived and adoptedforuse in failure criteria, without the influence of temperatures, and with the influence of increased temperature

PURE RED CELL APLASIA INDUCED BY ERYTHROPOIETIN

Introduction: Recombined human erythropoietin has been present in clinical practice for more than 20 years, in these therapeutic indications: anemia in kidney insufficiency, anemia during chemotherapy of tumors, prevention of anemias that appear in premature born babies, it is used for increasing autologous blood cell levels before blood transfusion, AIDS joined anemia (intensified by zidovudine), anemia joined with chronic inflammatory conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis(still in research phase). During the course of Erythropoietin treatment side effects have been noticed, that include multiple organ systems, and have different levels of frequency. Major number of studies shows connection between erythropoietin treatment and bone marrow aplasia, but small number of them states clearly defined side-effect that explains this phenomenon. Objective: Goal of this paper is to analyze available case studies of bone marrow aplasia during erythropoietin application, access their quality and causality of every study. Method: Research of literature used for the preparation of this systematic review has been conducted during the period of November- December 2017. In search for literature medical base PubMed has been used. Inclusion criteria were: available full article, publications in English language, publications conducted on humans, and case report studies. Eight studies passed selection. Results: results were presented by 5 charts: documentation size, credibility, number of case study reports of side-effects in the paper that was graded, Naranjo causality score, data extraction chart. Mean grade value of the studies quality was 7,0, while mean Naranjo score was 6,6

Antimicrobial treatment of Corynebacterium striatum invasive infections: a systematic review

The aim of this study was to establish an evidence-based guideline for the antibiotic treatment of Corynebacterium striatum infections. Several electronic databases were systematically searched for clinical trials, observational studies or individual cases on patients of any age and gender with systemic inflammatory response syndrome, harboring C. striatum isolated from body fluids or tissues in which it is not normally present. C. striatum had to be identified as the only causative agent of the invasive infection, and its isolation from blood, body fluids or tissues had to be confirmed by one of the more advanced diagnostic methods (biochemical methods, mass spectrometry and/or gene sequencing). This systematic review included 42 studies that analyzed 85 individual cases with various invasive infections caused by C. striatum. More than one isolate of C. striatum exhibited 100% susceptibility to vancomycin, linezolid, teicoplanin, piperacillin-tazobactam, amoxicillin-clavulanate and cefuroxime. On the other hand, some strains of this bacterium showed a high degree of resistance to fluoroquinolones, to the majority majority of β-lactams, aminoglycosides, macrolides, lincosamides and cotrimoxazole. Despite the antibiotic treatment, fatal outcomes were reported in almost 20% of the patients included in this study. Gene sequencing methods should be the gold standard for the identification of C. striatum, while MALDI-TOF and the Vitek system can be used as alternative methods. Vancomycin should be used as the antibiotic of choice for the treatment of C. striatum infections, in monotherapy or in combination with piperacillin-tazobactam. Alternatively, linezolid, teicoplanin or daptomycin may be used in severe infections, while amoxicillin-clavulanate may be used to treat mild infections caused by C. striatum

Pash 3.0: A versatile software package for read mapping and integrative analysis of genomic and epigenomic variation using massively parallel DNA sequencing

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Massively parallel sequencing readouts of epigenomic assays are enabling integrative genome-wide analyses of genomic and epigenomic variation. Pash 3.0 performs sequence comparison and read mapping and can be employed as a module within diverse configurable analysis pipelines, including ChIP-Seq and methylome mapping by whole-genome bisulfite sequencing.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Pash 3.0 generally matches the accuracy and speed of niche programs for fast mapping of short reads, and exceeds their performance on longer reads generated by a new generation of massively parallel sequencing technologies. By exploiting longer read lengths, Pash 3.0 maps reads onto the large fraction of genomic DNA that contains repetitive elements and polymorphic sites, including indel polymorphisms.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>We demonstrate the versatility of Pash 3.0 by analyzing the interaction between CpG methylation, CpG SNPs, and imprinting based on publicly available whole-genome shotgun bisulfite sequencing data. Pash 3.0 makes use of gapped k-mer alignment, a non-seed based comparison method, which is implemented using multi-positional hash tables. This allows Pash 3.0 to run on diverse hardware platforms, including individual computers with standard RAM capacity, multi-core hardware architectures and large clusters.</p

Effects of Combined Allogenic Adipose Stem Cells and Hyperbaric Oxygenation Treatment on Pathogenesis of Osteoarthritis in Knee Joint Induced by Monoiodoacetate

The beneficial effects of HBO in inflammatory processes make it an attractive type of treatment for chronic arthritis. In addition, the effects of combination therapy based on adipose stem cells and HBO on OA progression have not been fully investigated. The current study explored the efficacy of intra-articular injection of allogeneic adipose-derived mesenchymal stem cells (ADMSCs) combined with hyperbaric oxygenation treatment (HBO) in a rat osteoarthritis (OA) model. The rat OA model was induced by intra-articular injection of monoiodoacetate (MIA) and 7 days after application of MIA rats were divided into five groups: healthy control (CTRL), osteoarthritis (OA), ADMSCs (ADS), the HBO+ADS21day and HBO+ADS28day groups. A single dose of 1 × 106 allogeneic ADMSCs suspended in sterile saline was injected into the knee joint alone or in combination with HBO treatment. Rats were sacrificed at 3 or 4 weeks after MIA injection. Treatment outcomes were evaluated by radiographic, morphological and histological analysis and by specific staining of articular cartilage. We also measured the level of inflammatory and pro/antioxidative markers. We confirmed that combined treatment of ADMSCs and HBO significantly improved the regeneration of cartilage in the knee joint. Rtg score of knee joint damage was significantly decreased in the HBO+ADS21day and HBO+ADS28day groups compared to the OA. However, the positive effect in the HBO+ADS28day group was greater than the HBO+ADS21day group. The articular cartilage was relatively normal in the HBO+ADS28day group, but moderate degeneration was observed in the HBO+ADS21day compared to the OA group. These findings are in line with the histopathological results. A significantly lower level of O2−. was observed in the HBO+ADS28day group but a higher NO level compared to the HBO+ADS21day group. Moreover, in the HBO+ADS28day group significantly higher concentrations of IL-10 were observed but there was no significant difference in proinflammatory cytokine in serum samples. These results indicate that a single intra-articular injection of allogeneic ADMSCs combined with HBO efficiently attenuated OA progression after 28 days with greater therapeutic effect compared to alone ADMSCs or after 3 weeks of combined treatment. Combined treatment might be an effective treatment for OA in humans