FASE-CPHG Study: identification of asthma phenotypes in the French Severe Asthma Study using cluster analysis

BACKGROUND: In France, data regarding epidemiology and management of severe asthma are scarce. The objective of this study was to describe asthma phenotypes using a cluster analysis in severe asthmatics recruited in a real world setting. METHODS: The study design was prospective, observational and multicentric. The patients included were adults with severe asthma (GINA 4-5) followed-up in French Non Academic Hospital between May 2016 and June 2017. One hundred and seven physicians included 1502 patients. Both sociodemographic and clinical variables were collected. Hierarchical cluster analysis was performed by the Ward method followed by k-means cluster analysis on a population of 1424 patients. RESULTS: Five clusters were identified: cluster 1 (n = 690, 47%) called early onset allergic asthma (47.5% with asthma before 12 years), cluster 2 (n = 153, 10.5%): obese asthma (63.5% with BMI > 30 kg/m(2)), cluster 3 (n = 299, 20.4%): late-onset asthma with severe obstructive syndrome (89% without atopy), cluster 4 (n = 143, 9.8%): eosinophilic asthma (51.7% had more than 500 eosinophils/mm(3)), and cluster 5 (n = 139, 9.5%): aspirin sensitivity asthma (63% had severe asthma attacks). CONCLUSIONS: In our population of adults with severe asthma followed by pulmonologists, five distinct phenotypes were identified and are quite different from those mentioned in previous studies

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Nutrition et cancer (revue de la littérature à propos d'une étude rétrospective sur les prescriptions de nutrition parentérale à domicile dans le cancer bronchique pour le service de pneumologie de l'hôpital Pasteur de Colmar)

STRASBOURG ILLKIRCH-Pharmacie (672182101) / SudocSudocFranceF

Real-Time Adaptive suppression of MR gradient Artifacts on Electorcardiograms using a new 3D Hall Probe

International audienceDue to heart motion, cardiac MRI is made difficult and image acquisitions have to be synchronized with heart activity to suppress cardiac motion artifacts. Electrocardiogram (ECG) is the most accurate tool for this purpose, and Triggering consists in synchronizing MR sequences on the R-waves. The complex MR environment worsens ECG acquisition conditions because of the static magnetic field (Hall Effect), Radio Frequency (RF) and fast switching magnetic field gradients. Many hardware developments have been achieved so as to limit these undesirable effects [1], but gradient artifacts are still a problem and signal processing is required. Two ways of research have been followed; (a) first way consists in building a MR specific QRS detector [2], which is based on the vectocardiogram (VCG) the 3D representation of heart activity. This method does unfortunately not provide a clear ECG and is unable to process patient with low VCG amplitude. (b) Secondly a real-time gradient artifact suppression method has been designed. This method is based on adaptive signal processing [3] and achieves real-time accurate denoising which enables triggering. This method requires gradient signals information, which is a major drawback as the connection to the MR system is rarely available. In this paper a new real-time gradient artifact correction, which does not require any connection to the MR system, is presented. The magnetic field pulse signals will be provided by a new specifically MR designed 3D Hall probe, integrated on a low cost 0.35\μm CMOS technology [4, 5]

Digital Predistortion of Power Amplifier Non-Linearity Applied to CCSDS/DVB-S2 Satellite Telemetry

ITC/USA 2013 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Ninth Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 21-24, 2013 / Bally's Hotel & Convention Center, Las Vegas, NVThe CNES (French Space Agency) has studied memoryless predistortion techniques for power amplifier nonlinearity of satellite payload telemetry. These techniques are applied to high order modulations taken from the DVB-S2 standard and the associated CCSDS blue book. An easy-to-implement calibration method was also developed. The predistortion was implemented at two times the symbol rate after Square Root Raised Cosine shaping on a breadboard model of a 16APSK modulator associated to a Solid State Power Amplifier. It allows to reduce the amplifier back-off and thus to increase the power added efficiency for an equivalent signal quality.International Foundation for TelemeteringProceedings from the International Telemetering Conference are made available by the International Foundation for Telemetering and the University of Arizona Libraries. Visit http://www.telemetry.org/index.php/contact-us if you have questions about items in this collection

Environmental and mechanical evaluation of warm mix asphalts in laboratory and on site

E&E Congress 2016, 6th Eurasphalt & Eurobitume Congress, Prague, TCHÈQUE, RÉPUBLIQUE, 01-/06/2016 - 03/06/2016Warm asphalt mixes made with ready to use binders or with other types of technology like bitumen foam are commonly used in France and elsewhere. In order to develop knowledge on the different technologies, an experimental trial has been organized in September 2013 in partnership between TOTAL Marketing Services, Eiffage TP and Ifsttar. The purpose of the test was to carry out environmental assessment of the warm mixes comparatively to traditional hot mixes. 4 sections have been realized (hot mix asphalt, warm mix asphalt with respectively ready to use binder, foam, and combination of foam and ready to use binder). The asphalt plant had been equipped in order to record energy consumption and to monitor the chimney emissions. On average the different warm mix technologies lead to savings on energy consumption and on greenhouse effect gases. Extensive asphalt quality data like for example voids contents and macrotexture have also been recorded during the trial. Stiffness tests have also been carried out on cores. Performances of warm mixes are equivalent to the ones obtained with hot mix. A follow-up of the test is planned

Phenotyping to Target Obstructive Sleep Apnoea Syndrom (OSAS) in adults patients with severe asthma

BACKGROUND: Obstructive sleep apnoea syndrome (OSAS) and severe asthma are frequently associated. This article focuses on the relationship between severe asthma phenotypes and OSAS. METHODS: FASE-CPHG was an observational, cross-sectional, prospective, multicentric study conducted in 104 non-academic hospitals from May-16 to July-17. 1465 patients with severe asthma were analysed and 1424 patients phenotyped. Clusters were compared for OSAS presence; independent factors associated with OSAS were identified by logistic regression. RESULTS: 11% of patients with severe asthma reported OSAS. OSAS incidence differed according to asthma phenotypes. 98% of OSAS patients belonged to the "obese asthma" cluster, and none to the "early onset allergic asthma" cluster. Independent factors associated with OSAS were obesity (OR=5.782 [3.927-8.512]), male gender (OR=3.047 [2.059-4.510]), high blood pressure (OR=2.875 [1.978-4.181]), depression (OR=2.552 [1.607-4.050]), late-onset asthma (OR=1.789 [1.167-2.743]) and atopy (OR=0.622 [0.408-0.948]). Moreover, OSAS patients were more frequently treated with long-term oral corticosteroids (30% vs 15%, p < 0.0001), that may contribute to the high prevalence of obesity in this group of patients. They were more frequently uncontrolled (78% vs 69%, p = 0.03) and they engaged in low level physical activity (vs 80% vs 68% p ≤ 0.001). CONCLUSION: Our study gives an innovative insight into OSAS associated with severe asthma. Most of patients with OSAS belonged to the cluster "obese asthma" and none to the cluster "early onset allergic asthma". In addition to male gender, arterial hypertension and depression, obese asthma, late onset asthma and non-atopic status were identified as specific risk factors. Oral corticosteroids seems to play a deleterious role. Phenotyping asthma can help physicians target severe asthmatic patients with OSAS and may avoid unnecessary examinations