The effects of the nonextensivity on the dimerization process and nematic ordering

The influence of the dimerization process on the nematic ordering is investigated by using a nonextensive thermostatistics, namely Tsallis thermostatistics(TT). A theoretical model taking into account the dimerization influence on the nematic scalar order parameter has been recently presented[1]. Our study considers this model and the theoretical predictions for the nematic order parameter are improved by using TT

Strategies to preserve autologous blood in patients operated on heart under extracorporeal circulation

Departamentul Chirurgie Cardiacă, IMSP Spitalul Clinic Republican, Chișinău, Republica Moldova, Conferința stiințifică „Nicolae Anestiadi – nume etern al chirurgiei basarabene” consacrată centenarului de la nașterea profesorului Nicolae Anestiadi 26 august 2016Introducere. Atât chirurgie cardiaca cît si caracteristicile tehnice ale circulație extracorporală (CEC) necesita transfuzie de sânge de la donatori, care implică o serie de riscuri pentru pacienți. Scop. explorarea posibilităților de reducere a volumului de transfuzii sângelui homolog, la diferite grupe de vârstă de pacienți care necesită intervenții chirurgicale cardiace. Materiale și metode. Primul lot de studiu a inclus 250 de copii (131 băieți, 119 fete), cu greutatea mai mică de 10 kg (10 .45 ± 3.15) și 1,4 ± 0.7 ani - vârsta medie, cu vicii cardiace congenitale, care au suportat intevenții chirurgicale în condiţii de CEC. În cadrul lotului II, au fost incluși 223 adulți (122 barbati, 101 femei) cu vicii cardiace dobândite, operați în condiții de CEC. Rezultate. La toti copii a fost utilizat metoda de restituire a volumului de umplere cu sânge propriu a pacienților, datorit acestei metode a fost recuperate până 45 % din “priming” . În primul lot de studiu nu a fost nevoie de hemostaza chirurgicală repetată. Pierderea de sânge a reprezentat 6,2 ml / kg / 24h. Transfuzie postoperatorie de sânge homolog (masa eritrocitara) au necesitat 73 de copii, 48,66% din întregul grup. În grupul II au necesitat hemostaza chirurgicală repetată 5 pacienți. Letalitatea a fost de 1,8%(4 pacienți). Concluzii. Minimalizarea perderilor, restituirea primingului cu sânge autolog,utilizarea “ Cell saver “, ultrafiltrare și autotransfuzia intraoperatorie ar putea diminua necesitatea de transfuzie de sânge homolog la pacienții cu intervenții chirurgicale pe cord deschis.Introduction. Both severity of cardiac surgery and technical features of extracorporeal circulation (CEC) circuit demands blood transfusion from donors, which involves a number of risks for the patient. Purpose. To explore the possibilities of reducing the volume of homologous blood transfusion in different age groups of cardiac surgery patients. Material and methods. The study group I included 250 children (131 boys, 119 girls) weighting less than 10kg (10 .45 ± 3.15) and 1.4 ± 0.7 years average age with congenital heart disease, operated on heart under CPB. In group II patients were included 223 adults (122 men, 101women) with acquired heart disease, operated under CPB conditions. Results. No hospital lethality occurred in 1st group and no surgical hemostasis was performed. Blood loss accounted 6.2 ml/kg /24h. Postoperative transfusion of homologous blood (erythrocyte mass) were needed in 73 children, which consists only 48,66% of whole group. Retrograde autologus blood priming was used with recuperation till 45 “ of priming.In 2nd group surgical hemostasis demanded 5 patients. Lethality was 1,8% (4 patients). Conclusions. Priming minimalisation and autologous blood priming, Cell Saver usage, ultrafiltration, preand intraoperative auto transfusion could diminish the necessity of homologous blood transfusion in cardiac surgery patients

Supporting systematic reviews using LDA-based document representations

BACKGROUND: Identifying relevant studies for inclusion in a systematic review (i.e. screening) is a complex, laborious and expensive task. Recently, a number of studies has shown that the use of machine learning and text mining methods to automatically identify relevant studies has the potential to drastically decrease the workload involved in the screening phase. The vast majority of these machine learning methods exploit the same underlying principle, i.e. a study is modelled as a bag-of-words (BOW). METHODS: We explore the use of topic modelling methods to derive a more informative representation of studies. We apply Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA), an unsupervised topic modelling approach, to automatically identify topics in a collection of studies. We then represent each study as a distribution of LDA topics. Additionally, we enrich topics derived using LDA with multi-word terms identified by using an automatic term recognition (ATR) tool. For evaluation purposes, we carry out automatic identification of relevant studies using support vector machine (SVM)-based classifiers that employ both our novel topic-based representation and the BOW representation. RESULTS: Our results show that the SVM classifier is able to identify a greater number of relevant studies when using the LDA representation than the BOW representation. These observations hold for two systematic reviews of the clinical domain and three reviews of the social science domain. CONCLUSIONS: A topic-based feature representation of documents outperforms the BOW representation when applied to the task of automatic citation screening. The proposed term-enriched topics are more informative and less ambiguous to systematic reviewers. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s13643-015-0117-0) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users

Impact of clinical phenotypes on management and outcomes in European atrial fibrillation patients: a report from the ESC-EHRA EURObservational Research Programme in AF (EORP-AF) General Long-Term Registry

Background: Epidemiological studies in atrial fibrillation (AF) illustrate that clinical complexity increase the risk of major adverse outcomes. We aimed to describe European AF patients\u2019 clinical phenotypes and analyse the differential clinical course. Methods: We performed a hierarchical cluster analysis based on Ward\u2019s Method and Squared Euclidean Distance using 22 clinical binary variables, identifying the optimal number of clusters. We investigated differences in clinical management, use of healthcare resources and outcomes in a cohort of European AF patients from a Europe-wide observational registry. Results: A total of 9363 were available for this analysis. We identified three clusters: Cluster 1 (n = 3634; 38.8%) characterized by older patients and prevalent non-cardiac comorbidities; Cluster 2 (n = 2774; 29.6%) characterized by younger patients with low prevalence of comorbidities; Cluster 3 (n = 2955;31.6%) characterized by patients\u2019 prevalent cardiovascular risk factors/comorbidities. Over a mean follow-up of 22.5 months, Cluster 3 had the highest rate of cardiovascular events, all-cause death, and the composite outcome (combining the previous two) compared to Cluster 1 and Cluster 2 (all P <.001). An adjusted Cox regression showed that compared to Cluster 2, Cluster 3 (hazard ratio (HR) 2.87, 95% confidence interval (CI) 2.27\u20133.62; HR 3.42, 95%CI 2.72\u20134.31; HR 2.79, 95%CI 2.32\u20133.35), and Cluster 1 (HR 1.88, 95%CI 1.48\u20132.38; HR 2.50, 95%CI 1.98\u20133.15; HR 2.09, 95%CI 1.74\u20132.51) reported a higher risk for the three outcomes respectively. Conclusions: In European AF patients, three main clusters were identified, differentiated by differential presence of comorbidities. Both non-cardiac and cardiac comorbidities clusters were found to be associated with an increased risk of major adverse outcomes

Neonatalacute kidney injury: diagnistic and predictive value of serum cystatin C

Studies concerning the local and systemic use of ozonotherapy confirm its effectiveness compared to other physical methods. Therapeutic ozone concentrations (in a physiological solution from 1 mg/l to 6 mg/l, on average 3-4 mg/l with a single dose of 1.2-1.6 mg) activate the immunomodulatory function of the body. When administering ozone on the membranes of phagocytic cells (leukocytes, monocytes, macrophages) hydrophilic compounds are adsorbed. Ozonides stimulate cytokines, which, in their turn, promote activation of cellular and humoral immunity, and increases the rate of body’s nonspecific protection system. However, the effect of ozone on pyoinflammatory state of the soft tissues, depending on the administered dose and severity of the process [1-3,8,10], have not been adequately evaluated in patients with diabetes mellitus