The Role of rescue therapies in the treatment of severe ARDS

ARDS is characterized by a non-cardiogenic pulmonary edema with bilateral chest radiograph opacities and hypoxemia refractory to oxygen therapy. It is a common cause of admission to the ICU due to hypoxemic respiratory failure requiring mechanical ventilation. Corticosteroids are not recommended in ARDS patients. Rescue therapies alleviate hypoxemia in patients unable to maintain reasonable oxygenation: recruitment maneuvers, prone positioning, inhaled nitric oxide, high-frequency oscillatory ventilation, and extracorporeal membrane oxygenation improve oxygenation, but their impact on mortality remains unproven. Restrictive fluid management seems to be a favorable strategy with no significant reduction in 60-d mortality. Future studies are needed to clarify the efficacy of these therapies on outcomes in patients with severe ARDS, and institution of these therapies may be considered on a case-by-case basis

Multifunction MMIC For Miniaturized Solid State Switch Matrix

This paper describes a new multifunction MMIC expressly designed for a reconfiguration matrix equipment.This MMIC has been developed using a standard PHEMT process and includes two switches,a totally switchable-off amplifier and a temperature compensation circuit.The complete circuit has also been designed to interface a standard CMOS control level. Performed simulations and obtained results demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach in reaching compactness and reliability of satellite equipment

Dynamical fluctuations in an exactly solvable model of spin glasses

In this work we calculate the dynamical fluctuations at O(1/N) in the low temperature phase of the $p=2$ spherical spin glass model. We study the large-times asymptotic regimes and we find, in a short time-differences regime, a fluctuation dissipation relation for the four-point correlation functions. This relation can be extended to the out of equilibrium regimes introducing a function $X_{t}$ which, for large time $t$, we find scales as $t^{-1/2}$ as in the case of the two-point functions.Comment: Latex, 8 page

Phase Retrieval for Sparse Signals: Uniqueness Conditions

In a variety of fields, in particular those involving imaging and optics, we often measure signals whose phase is missing or has been irremediably distorted. Phase retrieval attempts the recovery of the phase information of a signal from the magnitude of its Fourier transform to enable the reconstruction of the original signal. A fundamental question then is: "Under which conditions can we uniquely recover the signal of interest from its measured magnitudes?" In this paper, we assume the measured signal to be sparse. This is a natural assumption in many applications, such as X-ray crystallography, speckle imaging and blind channel estimation. In this work, we derive a sufficient condition for the uniqueness of the solution of the phase retrieval (PR) problem for both discrete and continuous domains, and for one and multi-dimensional domains. More precisely, we show that there is a strong connection between PR and the turnpike problem, a classic combinatorial problem. We also prove that the existence of collisions in the autocorrelation function of the signal may preclude the uniqueness of the solution of PR. Then, assuming the absence of collisions, we prove that the solution is almost surely unique on 1-dimensional domains. Finally, we extend this result to multi-dimensional signals by solving a set of 1-dimensional problems. We show that the solution of the multi-dimensional problem is unique when the autocorrelation function has no collisions, significantly improving upon a previously known result.Comment: submitted to IEEE TI

Growth of Self Organized Eutectic Fibers from LiF-Rare Earth Fluoride Systems

Eutectic fibers consisting of an ordered arrangement of LiF fibrils inside a LiREF4 matrix (RE = Y, Gd) can be grown with the micro-pulling-down method at sufficiently large pulling rate exceeding 120 mm/h. The distance between individual fibrils could be scaled down to 1 micrometer at 300 mm/h pulling. LiF-LiYF4 has stronger tendency to form facetted eutectic colonies than LiF-LiGdF4, explained by the larger entropy of melting of the former.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures, Talk on MRS Fall 2012 Bosto

HST emission-line images of nearby 3CR radio galaxies: two photoionization, accretion and feedback modes

We present HST/ACS narrow-band images of a low-z sample of 19 3C radio galaxies to study the H$\alpha$ and [OIII] emissions from the narrow-line region (NLR). Based on nuclear emission line ratios, we divide the sample into High and Low Excitation Galaxies (HEGs and LEGs). We observe different line morphologies, extended line emission on kpc scale, large [OIII]/H$\alpha$ scatter across the galaxies, and a radio-line alignment. In general, HEGs show more prominent emission line properties than LEGs: larger, more disturbed, more luminous, and more massive regions of ionized gas with slightly larger covering factors. We find evidence of correlations between line luminosities and (radio and X-ray) nuclear luminosities. All these results point to a main common origin, the active nucleus, which ionize the surrounding gas. However, the contribution of additional photoionization mechanism (jet shocks and star formation) are needed to account for the different line properties of the two classes. A relationship between the accretion, photoionization and feedback modes emerges from this study. For LEGs (hot-gas accretors), the synchrotron emission from the jet represents the main source of ionizing photons. The lack of cold gas and star formation in their hosts accounts for the moderate ionized-gas masses and sizes. For HEGs (cold-gas accretors), an ionizing continuum from a standard disk and shocks from the powerful jets are the main sources of photoionization, with the contribution from star formation. These components, combined with the large reservoir of cold/dust gas brought from a recent merger, account for the properties of their extended emission-line regions.Comment: accepted for publication on ApJ (22 pages, 12 figures