Early Diagnosis and Its Benefits in Sepsis Blood Purification Treatment

Abstract—Sepsis is a progressive medical condition charac-terized as an uncontrolled inflammatory response, which is the leading cause of death in non-coronary intensive care units in the United States. In sepsis treatment, accurate and timely diagnosis is essential for allowing physicians to design appropriate therapeutic strategies at early stages, when therapies are usually the most effective and the least costly. To make an adequate diagnosis, physicians usually rely on manual inspection of a large amount of complex, high-dimensional longitudinal data. We use our recently published data mining method for extracting patterns from such data and show that these patterns can be used to assist physicians in providing early diagnosis. In conducted experiments, we showed that combination of early diagnosis and blood purification therapy can rescue more patients (52%) than standard approach for blood purification therapy (32%). We also propose a hybrid therapy model that combines strengths of early and standard approaches and further improves the percentage of rescued patients. Finally, by correctly classifying 98 % of patients who didn’t need treatment, MSD method provides opportunity to reduce the total cost of treatments. I

Nadzor bolesti riba u Srbiji

U Srbiji se vrši program nadzora virusnih i bakterijskih bolesti na osnovu Programa mera zdravstvene zaštite životinja, u skladu sa propisima Evropske Unije, i to: virusne hemoragične septikemije (VHS) i zarazna hematopoezne nekroze (IHN), zarazne nekroze pankreasa (IPN), prolećne viremije šarana (SVC) i renibakterioze (BKD). Cilj programa praćenja i nadzora bolesti riba je dobijanje i održavanje statusa slobode od bolesti, iskornjivanje ili sprečavanje širenja bolesti. Primarna ciljna populacija u programu nadzora su kalifornijska pastrmka i šaran. U Srbiji postoji nacionalno zakonodavstvo kao osnov za nadzora i kontrolu bolesti riba, kao i lista bolesti obaveznih za prijavljivanje. Pored nacionalnog zakonodavstva, prihvaćeni su i principi navedeni u Direktivi 2006/88/EC, koji se odnose na zahteve za kontrolu zdravlje riba u akvakulturi i njihovih proizvoda. Praćenje i nadzor virusnih bolesti vrše se na osnovu postupaka ispitivanja datih u Odluci Komisije 2001/183/EC, a za bakterijske bolesti, koriste se standardne dijagnostičke procedure. Klinički pregledi na ribnjacima vrše se dva puta godišnje i uzimaju se uzorci za virološka i bakteriološka ispitivanja, u svrhu dokumentovanja odsustva bolesti. Postupak ispitivanja, dat u Priručniku OIE za dijagnostiku bolesti riba, osnova je za ispitivanja. Uzorci svih kategorija riba iz 56 šaranskih i 52 pastrmska ribnjaka se godišnje ispituju na prisustvo bolesti. Za virusološka ispitivanja su korišćeni homogenati bubrega, slezine, jetre i škrga. Pulirani parenhimatozni organi i škrge su homogenizovani i centrifugirani na 2500 x g, 20 minuta. Za izolaciju, supernatanti su inokulirani na 24 sata stare kulture EPC i BF-2 ćelijskih linija. Inokulisane kulture su inkubirane na 15 - 20 °C, tokom 7 dana i svakodnevno su posmatrane na pojavu citopatogenog efekta. Identifikacija virusa je vršena PCR, ELISA testom i testom fluorescentnih antitela. Kao materijal za PCR je uziman homogenat organa i prva ili druga pasaža odgovarajuće ćelijske linije. PCR produkti su sekvencirani direktno, pomoću Big Dye Terminator v1.1 Cycle Sequencing Kit (Applied Biosystems, SAD) i ABI PRISM 3100-Avant Genetic Analyzer (Applied Biosystems). Dobijene sekvence su analizirane pomoću Sequencing Analysis Software 5.1 (Applied Biosystems). Na osnovu rezultata nadzora, Srbija se smatra slobodnom od VHS, IHN i KHV. Najveći problem predstavlja zarazna nekroza pankreasa. Renibakterioza je prisutna na određenom broju ribnjaka

Excavation between the levels H-910 and H-830 in the “Svinja Reka“ mine district of the “Sasa“ mine - Makedonska Kamenica

In this paper, the principles of mining between the levels H-910 and H-830 in the “Svinja reka“ Mi- ning District of the „Sasa“ lead and zinc mine located in the M. Kamenica, are presented. Excavation has to be realized by implementation the sublevel caving mining method, while temporarily leaving the safety pillars, which have to be blasted in the second phase of excavation. The paper presents develop- ment works, as well as works for the ore blasting, based on the designed mining method. Also, the tech- no-economic parameters of mining method and work organization are presented

A Data Mining Approach for Optimization of Acute Inflammation Therapy

Abstract—Acute inflammation is a medical condition which occurs over seconds, minutes or hours and is characterized as a systemic inflammatory response to an infection. Delaying treatment by only one hour decreases patient chance of survival by about 7%. Therefore, there is a critical need for tools that can aid therapy optimization for this potentially fatal condition. Towards this objective we developed a data driven approach for therapy optimization where a predictive model for patients’ behavior is learned directly from historical data. As such, the predictive model is incorporated into a model predictive control optimization algorithm to find optimal therapy, which will lead the patient to a healthy state. To save on the cost of clinical trials and potential failure, we evaluated our model on a population of virtual patients capable of emulating the inflammatory response. Patients are treated with two drugs for which dosage and timing are critical for the outcome of the treatment. Our results show significant improvement in percentage of healthy outcomes comparing to previously proposed methods for acute inflammation treatment found in literature and in clinical practice. In particular, application of our method rescued 87 % of patients that would otherwise die within 168 hours due to septic or aseptic state. In contrast, the best method from literature rescued only 73 % of patients. Keywords-data mining; therapy optimization; acute inflammation. I