Congenital broncho-oesophageal fistula

A case of broncho-oesophageal fistula causing bronchiectasis of the left· lung is reported. Oesophagorespiratory fistulas without atresia of the oesophagus often have an insidious clinical course and most commonly present in adulthood. This rare congenital anomaly should be considered as a cause of chronic pulmonary sepsis.. The clinical, radiographic and therapeutic features of this lesion are discussed

ARES: Adaptive, Reconfigurable, Erasure coded, atomic Storage

Atomicity or strong consistency is one of the fundamental, most intuitive, and hardest to provide primitives in distributed shared memory emulations. To ensure survivability, scalability, and availability of a storage service in the presence of failures, traditional approaches for atomic memory emulation, in message passing environments, replicate the objects across multiple servers. Compared to replication based algorithms, erasure code-based atomic memory algorithms has much lower storage and communication costs, but usually, they are harder to design. The difficulty of designing atomic memory algorithms further grows, when the set of servers may be changed to ensure survivability of the service over software and hardware upgrades, while avoiding service interruptions. Atomic memory algorithms for performing server reconfiguration, in the replicated systems, are very few, complex, and are still part of an active area of research; reconfigurations of erasure-code based algorithms are non-existent. In this work, we present ARES, an algorithmic framework that allows reconfiguration of the underlying servers, and is particularly suitable for erasure-code based algorithms emulating atomic objects. ARES introduces new configurations while keeping the service available. To use with ARES we also propose a new, and to our knowledge, the first two-round erasure code based algorithm TREAS, for emulating multi-writer, multi-reader (MWMR) atomic objects in asynchronous, message-passing environments, with near-optimal communication and storage costs. Our algorithms can tolerate crash failures of any client and some fraction of servers, and yet, guarantee safety and liveness property. Moreover, by bringing together the advantages of ARES and TREAS, we propose an optimized algorithm where new configurations can be installed without the objects values passing through the reconfiguration clients

The elixir (or burden) of youth? Exploring differences in innovation between start-ups and established firms

Despite the widely acknowledged role of start-ups in economic development, little is known about their innovative activities compared with those of established firms. Drawing on a sample of 12,209 UK firms, we differentiate between services and manufacturing firms and, using a matching estimator approach, demonstrate that start-ups differ significantly from established firms in their innovation activities. We find that in services, being a start-up increases the likelihood of product innovations. However, in manufacturing, we find no significant differences in the likelihood of product innovation between start-ups and established firms. When examining the returns to innovation, we find that start-ups have a significant advantage both in services and in manufacturing. We explore the implications of these results for theory and policy

The value and role of non-invasive prenatal testing in a select South African population

Background. Concerns have been raised about the injudicious use of non-invasive prenatal testing (NIPT) using cell-free DNA (cfDNA), which often leads to inaccuracies in interpretation of the role and value of cfDNA in prenatal screening.Objective. To determine the value and role of NIPT in a select South African (SA) population.Methods. A retrospective review of patients who elected to have NIPT between 1 October 2013 and 30 June 2015 at the Morningside Mediclinic Maternal and Fetal Medicine Centre in Johannesburg, SA. Patients had NIPT after either combined first-trimester screening (CFTS) or a second-trimester ultrasound scan. Data were collected on details of the first- and/or second-trimester screening, results of the NIPT, invasive tests done, decisions made in the event of abnormal results, and pregnancy outcomes.Results. Overall, 3 473 first- and second-trimester fetal assessments were done at the centre during the study period, and 2.3% of patients (n=82) elected to have NIPT. The majority of these individuals elected to have NIPT on the basis of positive findings on CFTS, or markers of aneuploidy detected on a second-trimester ultrasound scan. Of the tests done, 97.6% produced results. Of those with no results, one did not meet quality metrics and the other had a low fetal fraction of cfDNA. There were two abnormal NIPT results, one indicating a high risk of trisomy 13 and the other a triploidy. Patients who screened negative elected not to have an invasive test.Conclusion. The value of NIPT in this study was that it made it possible to avoid a number of invasive tests. NIPT had a role in contingency screening

Functional neuroimaging Using UWB Impulse Radar: a feasibility study

Microwave imaging is a promising new modality for studying brain function. In the current paper we assess the feasibility of using a single chip implementation of an ultra- wideband impulse radar for developing a portable and low-cost functional neuroimaging device. A numerical model is used to predict the level of attenuation that will occur when detecting a volume of blood in the cerebral cortex. A phantom liquid is made, to study the radar’s performance at different attenuation levels. Although the radar is currently capable of detecting a point reflector in a phantom liquid with submillimeter accuracy and high temporal resolution, object detection at the desired level of attenuation remains a challenge

An unusual case of acute pulmonary embolism

Patiant with a history of hypertension presented to the emergency room with progressive dyspnoea over afew weeks. There was no relevant past history. Clinical examination revealed an elevated jugular venous pressure, pedal oedema and tenderness in the right hypochondrium

Single and two-photon fluorescence studies of linear and non-linear optical chromophores.

The subject matter presented in this thesis concerns the structural and dynamic studies of new fluorescent probe molecules and the application of polarised fluorescence techniques and analysis to molecular motion, order and solvation in a highly ordered environment. Chapter 1 reviews recent group research providing a context to the work in this thesis, whilst Chapters 2 and 3 concern the study of fluorescent probe dynamics. Time resolved photoselection techniques were used to probe the order and full angular motion of Coumarin 6 and Coumarin 153 in the nematic and isotropic phases of the liquid crystal 5CB. The uptake of coumarin molecules into this host differs from previously studied (Xanthene) probes - in particular, Coumarin 6 is seen to adopt a disruptive position within the alkyl tails due to its size and hydrophobic nature this is discussed in Chapter 2. Furthermore, Coumarin 153 undergoes a substantial increase in dipole moment upon electronic excitation this led to a unique study of time dependent solvation dynamics in both a globally and locally structured environment. The presence of strong solvent- solute interactions necessitated the development of a new approach to the analysis of time resolved polarised fluorescence in ordered systems. This approach and the study of time dependent solvation dynamics in the isotropic and nematic phases of 5CB is presented in Chapter 3. Structural studies of new two-photon fluorescent probes in collaboration with CNRS Rennes and Los Alamos are described in the final two chapters. Large two-photon resonances in the green-visible were observed together with a fuller characterisation of those in the near IR. Polarised two-photon absorption and anisotropy measurements were used to examine the structure of the two-photon resonances. Finally, the stimulated emission depletion dynamics of a branched two-photon fluorophore were investigated and found to differ markedly from conventional (non-degenerate) fluorophores

"Where is My Parcel?" Fast and Efficient Classifiers to Detect User Intent in Natural Language

We study the performance of customer intent classifiers designed to predict the most popular intent received through ASOS.com Customer Care Department, namely “Where is my order?”. These queries are characterised by the use of colloquialism, label noise and short message length. We conduct extensive experiments with twowell established classification models: logistic regression via n-grams to account for sequences in the dataand recurrent neural networks that perform the extraction of these sequential patterns automatically. Maintaining the embedding layer fixed to GloVe coordinates, a Mann-Whitney U test indicated that the F1 score on aheld out set of messages was lower for recurrent neural network classifiers than for linear n-grams classifiers (M1=0.828, M2=0.815; U=1,196, P=1.46e-20), unless all layers were jointly trained with all other network parameters (M1=0.831, M2=0.828, U=4,280, P=8.24e-4). This plain neural network produced top performance on a denoised set of labels (0.887 F1) matching with Human annotators (0.889 F1) and superior to linear classifiers (0.865 F1). Calibrating these models to achieveprecision levels above Human performance (0.93 Precision), our results indicate a small difference in Recall of 0.05 for the plain neural networks (training under 1hr), and 0.07 for the linear n-grams (training under 10min), revealing the latter as a judicious choice of model architecture in modern AI production systems