Certolizumab pegol treatment in three patients with takayasu arteritis

Although glucocorticoids are the mainstay of treatment in Takayasu arteritis (TA), anti-tumor necrosis factor agents are other treatment options in refractory disease. The onset of TA is generally observed in females of reproductive age. Certolizumab pegol (CZP) lacks a fragment crystallizable region and this gives advantage of minimal transfer through the placenta, which makes CZP a safer option in pregnancy. Although there are case reports and trials about use of infliximab, etanercept, and adalimumab in TA, there are scarce data about use of CZP. In this article, we present three TA cases treated with CZP. While two patients benefited from CZP, one patient was refractory to CZP

Relatório de Revisão pela Gestão de 2014

We introduce the concept of cognitive design pattern to provide a design methodology for distributed multi-agent systems. A cognitive design pattern is a reusable solution to tackle problems requiring cognitive abilities (e.g. decision-making, attention, categorisation). It provides theoretical models and design guidelines to define the individual control rules in order to obtain a desired behaviour for the multiagent system as a whole. In this paper, we propose a cognitive design pattern for collective decision-making inspired by the nest-site selection behaviour of honeybee swarms. We illustrate how to apply the pattern to a case study involving spatial factors: the collective selection of the shortest path between two target areas. We analyse the dynamics of the multi-agent system and we show a very good agreement with the predictions of the macroscopic model.SCOPUS: ar.kinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

On the Impact of Fast Failure Detectors on Real-Time Fault-Tolerant Systems

Abstract. We investigate whether fast failure detectors can be useful — and if so by how much — in the design of real-time fault-tolerant systems. Specifically, we show how fast failure detectors can speed up consensus and fault-tolerant broadcasts, by providing fast algorithms and deriving some matching lower bounds, for synchronous systems with crashes. These results show that a fast failure detector service (implemented using specialized hardware or expedited message delivery) can be an important tool in the design of real-time mission-critical systems.