Malignant atrophic papulosis. A report of two cases with altered fibrinolysis and platelet function

Malignant atrophic papulosis is a systemic vaso-occlusive disorder characterized by typical skin lesions. We report two new cases with impairment of blood fibrinolytic activity and alterations in platelet function. The first case showed an increase in plasminogen activator inhibitor-1 (PAI-1) activity, and the second case had a decrease in platelet aggregation induced by adenosine diphosphate and adrenaline but normal with collagen. The impairment of blood fibrinolytic activity and platelet aggregation may have pathogenic and therapeutic implications in malignant atrophic papulosis

A Reliable Method for Rhythm Analysis during Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation

nterruptions in cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) compromise defibrillation success. However, CPR must be interrupted to analyze the rhythm because although current methods for rhythm analysis during CPR have high sensitivity for shockable rhythms, the specificity for nonshockable rhythms is still too low. This paper introduces a new approach to rhythm analysis during CPR that combines two strategies: a state-of-the-art CPR artifact suppression filter and a shock advice algorithm (SAA) designed to optimally classify the filtered signal. Emphasis is on designing an algorithm with high specificity. The SAA includes a detector for low electrical activity rhythms to increase the specificity, and a shock/no-shock decision algorithm based on a support vector machine classifier using slope and frequency features. For this study, 1185 shockable and 6482 nonshockable 9-s segments corrupted by CPR artifacts were obtained from 247 patients suffering out-of-hospital cardiac arrest. The segments were split into a training and a test set. For the test set, the sensitivity and specificity for rhythm analysis during CPR were 91.0% and 96.6%, respectively. This new approach shows an important increase in specificity without compromising the sensitivity when compared to previous studies.This work received financial support from Spanish Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad (Projects TEC2012-31144 and TEC2012-31928), from the UPV/EHU (unit UFI11/16), and from the Basque government (Grants BFI-2010-174, BFI2010-235, and BFI-2011-166). The authors would like to thank Professor Rojo-A lvarez from the University Rey Juan Carlos (Madrid, Spain) for his assistance with SVM classifiers and for his thorough review of the paper

On-line monitoring imidacloprid and thiacloprid in celery juice using quartz crystal microbalance

Analytical Chemistry812527-532ANCH