Complications of nephrotic syndrome

Nephrotic syndrome (NS) is one of the most common glomerular diseases that affect children. Renal histology reveals the presence of minimal change nephrotic syndrome (MCNS) in more than 80% of these patients. Most patients with MCNS have favorable outcomes without complications. However, a few of these children have lesions of focal segmental glomerulosclerosis, suffer from severe and prolonged proteinuria, and are at high risk for complications. Complications of NS are divided into two categories: disease-associated and drug-related complications. Disease-associated complications include infections (e.g., peritonitis, sepsis, cellulitis, and chicken pox), thromboembolism (e.g., venous thromboembolism and pulmonary embolism), hypovolemic crisis (e.g., abdominal pain, tachycardia, and hypotension), cardiovascular problems (e.g., hyperlipidemia), acute renal failure, anemia, and others (e.g., hypothyroidism, hypocalcemia, bone disease, and intussusception). The main pathomechanism of disease-associated complications originates from the large loss of plasma proteins in the urine of nephrotic children. The majority of children with MCNS who respond to treatment with corticosteroids or cytotoxic agents have smaller and milder complications than those with steroid-resistant NS. Corticosteroids, alkylating agents, cyclosporin A, and mycophenolate mofetil have often been used to treat NS, and these drugs have treatment-related complications. Early detection and appropriate treatment of these complications will improve outcomes for patients with NS

Korean Nova Records in A.D. 1073 and A.D. 1074: R Aquarii

R Aqr is known to be a symbiotic binary system with an associated extended emission nebula, possibly produced by a historic outburst. To find the associated historic records, we searched for and compiled all 'Guest Star' and 'Peculiar Star' records in three Korean 'official' history books that cover almost two thousand years, Samguksagi, Goryeosa, Joseonwangjosillok. In addition to the record of A.D. 1073, previously noted by Li (1985), we have found in Goryeosa another candidate record of A.D. 1074, which has the same positional description as that of A.D. 1073 with an additional brightness description. We examined various aspects of the two records and conclude that they both are likely to be the records of outburst of R Aqr. This means that there were two successive outbursts in A.D. 1073 and in A.D. 1074, separated by approximately one year. Based on these records, we estimate the distance to R Aqr to be 273 pc if the expansion of the nebula has been at a constant rate. The brightness record of A.D. 1074 corresponds to the absolute magnitude at outburst of M_(outburst) = -6.2 mag. ~ -5.2 mag. at this distance. The two Korean records associated with R Aqr may provide astronomically meaningful constraints to the outburst model of R Aqr and the formative process of its nebulosity.Comment: 10 pages, 2 figures, 1 appendix. To appear in Astronomy and Astrophysic

Intuitive Multilingual Audio-Visual Speech Recognition with a Single-Trained Model

We present a novel approach to multilingual audio-visual speech recognition tasks by introducing a single model on a multilingual dataset. Motivated by a human cognitive system where humans can intuitively distinguish different languages without any conscious effort or guidance, we propose a model that can capture which language is given as an input speech by distinguishing the inherent similarities and differences between languages. To do so, we design a prompt fine-tuning technique into the largely pre-trained audio-visual representation model so that the network can recognize the language class as well as the speech with the corresponding language. Our work contributes to developing robust and efficient multilingual audio-visual speech recognition systems, reducing the need for language-specific models.Comment: EMNLP 2023 Finding

AN EMPIRICAL STUDY OF DIFFERENT BRANCHING STRATEGIES FOR CONSTRAINT SATISFACTION PROBLEMS

Many real life problems can be formulated as constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs). Backtracking search algorithms are usually employed to solve CSPs and in backtracking search the choice of branching strategies can be critical since they specify how a search algorithm can instantiate a variable and how a problem can be reduced into subproblems; that is, they define a search tree. In spite of the apparent importance of the branching strategy, there have been only a few empirical studies about different branching strategies and they all have been tested exclusively for numerical constraints. In this thesis, we employ the three most commonly used branching strategies in solving finite domain CSPs. These branching strategies are described as follows: first, a branching strategy with strong commitment assigns its variables in the early stage of the search as in k-Way branching; second, 2-Way branching guides a search by branching one side with assigning a variable and the other with eliminating the assigned value; third, the domain splitting strategy, based on the least commitment principle, branches by dividing a variable's domain rather than by assigning a single value to a variable. In our experiments, we compared the efficiency of different branching strategies in terms of their execution times and the number of choice points in solving finite domain CSPs. Interestingly, our experiments provide evidence that the choice of branching strategy for finite domain problems does not matter much in most cases--provided we are using an effective variable ordering heuristic--as domain splitting and 2-Way branching end up simulating k-Way branching. However, for an optimization problem with large domain size, the branching strategy with the least commitment principle can be more efficient than the other strategies. This empirical study will hopefully interest other practitioners to take different branching schemes into consideration in designing heuristics