Coronary artery grafting in infants

Coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) with cardiac vale repair is an uncommon surgery in infants. CABG is technically demanding in infants due to the small size not only of the coronary arteries but also the potential graft arteries. The short and long-term outcome of surgery is not known and thus has largely been avoided. This article reports the case histories of two infants in whom CABG was undertaken successfully as a life-saving measure.peer-reviewe

Fecal antibody subtypes predict disease activity in pediatric patients with Crohn disease

Thesis (M.A.)--Boston UniversityBackground: Pediatric patients with Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) often receive a delayed diagnosis due to the presence of a variety of nonspecific gastrointestinal and extra-intestinal symptoms. As a result, patients are at an increased risk for growth and pubertal delays, as well as other developmental problems. Therefore, there is great need for the development of a noninvasive, inexpensive, reliable, and objective method of diagnosing and monitoring this disease. Fecal biomarkers have the potential for meeting all of these requirements, and are thought to have increased value because they may better reflect the interaction between luminal bacteria and the mucosal immune system than serum biomarkers. Antibodies in the serum that are directed against Saccharomyces cerevisiae (ASCA) have been identified in patients diagnosed with Crohn disease (CD). It has been suggested that the presence and levels of ASCA, as well as other serum antibodies, may be able to predict the severity, duration, complications, and response to treatments and therapies in patients with IBD. Data from an unpublished study carried out at the Center for Inflammatory Bowel Disease at Boston Children’s Hospital shows that fecal ASCA is detectable in the stool of patients with CD, and that ASCA levels change over time and in response to disease activity. Therefore, the goal of the present study is to further explore the relationship between fecal ASCA and disease activity in patients with CD and to discern if differences in ASCA immunoglobulin subtypes reflect disease activity in pediatric patients with CD. Methods: Stool from 21 patients with Crohn disease, which were tested to be positive for ASCA, were analyzed in this study. Of the 21 patients, 13 were categorized as having active disease, while 8 were categorized as having inactive disease. ASCA immunoglobulin (Ig) testing and fecal lactoferrin (FLA) testing were performed on these samples. Marker values were compared between the active and inactive disease groups. [TRUNCATED

Exponential approximations in optimal design

One-point and two-point exponential functions have been developed and proved to be very effective approximations of structural response. The exponential has been compared to the linear, reciprocal and quadratic fit methods. Four test problems in structural analysis have been selected. The use of such approximations is attractive in structural optimization to reduce the numbers of exact analyses which involve computationally expensive finite element analysis

Duodenal duplication cyst in an adult: a rare case.

Duodenal duplication cysts are rare congenital anomalies, found commonly in infants and children. In rare instances they can occur in adults, often manifesting clinically as pancreatitis. We here present one such case of an 18-year-old female, who presented with symptoms of duodenal obstruction, weight loss and pancreatitis. She was diagnosed as having a duodenal duplication cyst (DDC) on a CT scan. She made a good recovery after a total cyst excision. This case report aims to highlight the importance of clinicians having duplication cysts in their list of differential diagnoses as these cases are often under-diagnosed due to their rare occurrences

A Study on Knowledge and Practice of Post Menopausal Women on Health Maintenance in A Selected Rural Community of Mangalore Dakshina Kannada District, Karnataka

Introduction: Menopause is a biological certainty and universality, but every woman's experience is unique. Many of the problems can be prevented or delayed and women can continue to live active, healthy lives if proper attention is given to their health needs. Aim and Objective: To determine the knowledge and practice of post menopausal women on health maintenance. Material and methods: Eighty post-menopausal rural women were selected randomly. Cross section design was used. Knowledge on health maintenance was determined using a structured knowledge questionnaire. Breast self examination and Kegel exercise (simulated) were determined using an observation check list. Result: Seventy five percent subjects had good knowledge on health maintenance, 1.25 % had very poor knowledge. There was no association observed between knowledge score and selected demographic variables. Practice score obtained were very poor (mean % 0.48). There was positive correlation between pre-test knowledge and practice of subjects. Conclusion: Avoiding smoking excess salt, sugar, caffeine and adequate intake of calcium, vitamin D, lifestyle modification, exercises, and good awareness would keep oneself healthy in the rest of the life. Keywords: Knowledge, practice, health maintenance, post menopausal women, rural community

Energy Efficient Estimation of Gaussian Sources Over Inhomogeneous Gaussian MAC Channels

It has been shown lately the optimality of uncoded transmission in estimating Gaussian sources over homogeneous/symmetric Gaussian multiple access channels (MAC) using multiple sensors. It remains, however, unclear whether it still holds for any arbitrary networks and/or with high channel signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and high signal-to-measurement-noise ratio (SMNR). In this paper, we first provide a joint source and channel coding approach in estimating Gaussian sources over Gaussian MAC channels, as well as its sufficient and necessary condition in restoring Gaussian sources with a prescribed distortion value. An interesting relationship between our proposed joint approach with a more straightforward separate source and channel coding scheme is then established. We then formulate constrained power minimization problems and transform them to relaxed convex geometric programming problems, whose numerical results exhibit that either separate or uncoded scheme becomes dominant over a linear topology network. In addition, we prove that the optimal decoding order to minimize the total transmission powers for both source and channel coding parts is solely subject to the ranking of MAC channel qualities, and has nothing to do with the ranking of measurement qualities. Finally, asymptotic results for homogeneous networks are obtained which not only confirm the existing optimality of the uncoded approach, but also show that the asymptotic SNR exponents of these three approaches are all the same. Moreover, the proposed joint approach share the same asymptotic ratio with respect to high SNR and high SMNR as the uncoded scheme

Optimal Customer Targeting for Sustainable Demand Response in Smart Grids1

AbstractDemand Response (DR) is a widely used technique to minimize the peak to average consumption ratio during high demand periods. We consider the DR problem of achieving a given curtailment target for a set of consumers equipped with a set of discrete curtailment strategies over a given duration. An effective DR scheduling algorithm should minimize the curtailment error - the difference between the targeted and achieved curtailment values - to minimize costs to the utility provider and maintain system reliability. The availability of smart meters with fine-grained customer control capability can be leveraged to offer customers a dynamic range of curtailment strategies that are feasible for small durations within the overall DR event. Both the availability and achievable curtailment values of these strategies can vary dynamically through the DR event and thus the problem of achieving a target curtailment over the entire DR interval can be modeled as a dynamic strategy selection problem over multiple discrete sub-intervals. We argue that DR curtailment error minimizing algorithms should not be oblivious to customer curtailment behavior during sub-intervals as (expensive) demand peaks can be concentrated in a few sub-intervals while consumption is heavily curtailed during others in order to achieve the given target, which makes such solutions expensive for the utility. Thus in this paper, we formally develop the notion of Sustainable DR (SDR) as a solution that attempts to distribute the curtailment evenly across sub-intervals in the DR event. We formulate the SDR problem as an Integer Linear Program and provide a very fast -factor approximation algorithm. We then propose a Polynomial Time Approximation Scheme (PTAS) for approximating the SDR curtailment error to within an arbitrarily small factor of the optimal. We then develop a novel ILP formulation that solves the SDR problem while explicitly accounting for customer strategy switching overhead as a constraint. We perform experiments using real data acquired from the University of Southern Californias smart grid and show that our sustainable DR model achieves results with a very low absolute error of 0.001-0.05 kWh range