BQC: A free web service to quality control solar irradiance measurements across Europe

Classical quality control (QC) methods of solar irradiance apply easy-to-implement physical or statistical limits that are incapable of detecting low-magnitude measuring errors due to the large width of the intervals. We previously presented the bias-based quality control (BQC), a novel method that flags samples in which the bias of several independent gridded datasets is larger for consecutive days than the historical value. The BQC was previously validated at 313 European and 732 Spanish stations finding multiple low-magnitude errors (e.g., shadows, soiling) not detected by classical QC methods. However, the need for gridded datasets, and ground measurements to characterize the bias, was hindering the BQC implementation. To solve this issue, we present a free web service, www.bqcmethod.com, that implements the BQC algorithm incorporating both the gridded datasets and the reference stations required to use the BQC across Europe from 1983 to 2018. Users only have to upload a CSV file with the global horizontal irradiance measurements to be analyzed. Compared to previous BQC versions, gridded products have been upgraded to SARAH-2, CLARA-A2, ERA5, and the spatial coverage has been extended to all of Europe. The web service provides a flexible environment that allows users to tune the BQC parameters and upload ancillary rain data that help in finding the causes of the errors. Besides, the outputs cover not only the visual and numerical QC flags but also daily and hourly estimations from the gridded datasets, facilitating the access to raster data.We thank the Instituto de Estudios Riojanos for funding part of the web service within the program Estudios Científicos de Temática Riojana, Spain. This research used resources from the Supercomputing Castilla y Leon Center (SCAYLE, www.scayle.es), funded by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF). We would also like to thank the EU meteorological networks that freely distribute their datasets and particularly those researchers who helped us in retrieving these data: Aku Riiëla and Anders Lindfors (FMI), Virginie Gorjoux (Météo France), Sandra Andersson (SHMI), and Jakub Walawender (IMGW-PIB). Finally, we thank the CMSAF and ECMWF for freely distributing their products, and particularly Jörg Trentmann, for providing a beta version of CLARA-A2.1. RU is a postdoc from the University of La Rioja working as a visiting scientist at the European Commission’s Joint Research Center (JRC). RU is funded by the Plan Propio de la Universidad de La Rioja, Spain and V Plan Riojano de I+D, Spain . The views expressed here are purely those of the authors and may not, under any circumstances, be regarded as an official position of the European Commission

Riesgo quirúrgico tras resección pulmonar anatómica en cirugía torácica. Modelo predictivo a partir de una base de datos nacional multicéntrica

Introduction: the aim of this study was to develop a surgical risk prediction model in patients undergoing anatomic lung resections from the registry of the Spanish Video-Assisted Thoracic Surgery Group (GEVATS). Methods: data were collected from 3,533 patients undergoing anatomic lung resection for any diagnosis between December 20, 2016 and March 20, 2018. We defined a combined outcome variable: death or Clavien Dindo grade IV complication at 90 days after surgery. Univariate and multivariate analyses were performed by logistic regression. Internal validation of the model was performed using resampling techniques. Results: the incidence of the outcome variable was 4.29% (95% CI 3.6-4.9). The variables remaining in the final logistic model were: age, sex, previous lung cancer resection, dyspnea (mMRC), right pneumonectomy, and ppo DLCO. The performance parameters of the model adjusted by resampling were: C-statistic 0.712 (95% CI 0.648-0.750), Brier score 0.042 and bootstrap shrinkage 0.854. Conclusions: the risk prediction model obtained from the GEVATS database is a simple, valid, and reliable model that is a useful tool for establishing the risk of a patient undergoing anatomic lung resection

SuperCam Calibration Targets: Design and Development

SuperCam is a highly integrated remote-sensing instrumental suite for NASA’s Mars 2020 mission. It consists of a co-aligned combination of Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS), Time-Resolved Raman and Luminescence (TRR/L), Visible and Infrared Spectroscopy (VISIR), together with sound recording (MIC) and high-magnification imaging techniques (RMI). They provide information on the mineralogy, geochemistry and mineral context around the Perseverance Rover. The calibration of this complex suite is a major challenge. Not only does each technique require its own standards or references, their combination also introduces new requirements to obtain optimal scientific output. Elemental composition, molecular vibrational features, fluorescence, morphology and texture provide a full picture of the sample with spectral information that needs to be co-aligned, correlated, and individually calibrated. The resulting hardware includes different kinds of targets, each one covering different needs of the instrument. Standards for imaging calibration, geological samples for mineral identification and chemometric calculations or spectral references to calibrate and evaluate the health of the instrument, are all included in the SuperCam Calibration Target (SCCT). The system also includes a specifically designed assembly in which the samples are mounted. This hardware allows the targets to survive the harsh environmental conditions of the launch, cruise, landing and operation on Mars during the whole mission. Here we summarize the design, development, integration, verification and functional testing of the SCCT. This work includes some key results obtained to verify the scientific outcome of the SuperCam system

Resiliencia: espacios de adaptación de nuestras ciudades a los nuevos retos urbanos

La presente publicación recoge las reflexiones y experiencias desarrolladas en la Red de Investigación RE-ADAP “Resiliencia: espacios de adaptación de nuestras ciudades a los nuevos retos urbanos”(RED2018-102795-T Plan Estatal I+D+i 2017-2020), tanto por los investigadores e investigadoras que conforman la Red, y sus grupos de investigación, como por todas aquellas personas que han participado en los diferentes Seminarios, Boletines y Píldoras de Investigación realizados en el marco de la Red. El objetivo principal de la Red ha sido articular un enfoque conjunto, integral e innovador que afronte los retos de nuestras ciudades mediante la implantación de políticas públicas urbanas que incorporen la resiliencia. Esta publicación parte de una serie de aproximaciones teóricas a los ejes temáticos de la misma: Inclusión, Salud y Bienestar (ISB), Cambio Climático y Transición Ecológica (CCTE), Soberanía Alimentaria y Servicios Ecosistémicos (SASE) y Espacios de Adaptación (EA); que se complementa con un Catálogo de programas, proyectos de investigación e iniciativas públicas que se encuadran en los diferentes ejes temáticos, además de una Memoria de las actividades realizadas por la Red

Discovering HIV related information by means of association rules and machine learning

Acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) is still one of the main health problems worldwide. It is therefore essential to keep making progress in improving the prognosis and quality of life of affected patients. One way to advance along this pathway is to uncover connections between other disorders associated with HIV/AIDS-so that they can be anticipated and possibly mitigated. We propose to achieve this by using Association Rules (ARs). They allow us to represent the dependencies between a number of diseases and other specific diseases. However, classical techniques systematically generate every AR meeting some minimal conditions on data frequency, hence generating a vast amount of uninteresting ARs, which need to be filtered out. The lack of manually annotated ARs has favored unsupervised filtering, even though they produce limited results. In this paper, we propose a semi-supervised system, able to identify relevant ARs among HIV-related diseases with a minimal amount of annotated training data. Our system has been able to extract a good number of relationships between HIV-related diseases that have been previously detected in the literature but are scattered and are often little known. Furthermore, a number of plausible new relationships have shown up which deserve further investigation by qualified medical experts

How do women living with HIV experience menopause? Menopausal symptoms, anxiety and depression according to reproductive age in a multicenter cohort

CatedresBackground: To estimate the prevalence and severity of menopausal symptoms and anxiety/depression and to assess the differences according to menopausal status among women living with HIV aged 45-60 years from the cohort of Spanish HIV/AIDS Research Network (CoRIS). Methods: Women were interviewed by phone between September 2017 and December 2018 to determine whether they had experienced menopausal symptoms and anxiety/depression. The Menopause Rating Scale was used to evaluate the prevalence and severity of symptoms related to menopause in three subscales: somatic, psychologic and urogenital; and the 4-item Patient Health Questionnaire was used for anxiety/depression. Logistic regression models were used to estimate odds ratios (ORs) of association between menopausal status, and other potential risk factors, the presence and severity of somatic, psychological and urogenital symptoms and of anxiety/depression. Results: Of 251 women included, 137 (54.6%) were post-, 70 (27.9%) peri- and 44 (17.5%) pre-menopausal, respectively. Median age of onset menopause was 48 years (IQR 45-50). The proportions of pre-, peri- and post-menopausal women who had experienced any menopausal symptoms were 45.5%, 60.0% and 66.4%, respectively. Both peri- and post-menopause were associated with a higher likelihood of having somatic symptoms (aOR 3.01; 95% CI 1.38-6.55 and 2.63; 1.44-4.81, respectively), while post-menopause increased the likelihood of having psychological (2.16; 1.13-4.14) and urogenital symptoms (2.54; 1.42-4.85). By other hand, post-menopausal women had a statistically significant five-fold increase in the likelihood of presenting severe urogenital symptoms than pre-menopausal women (4.90; 1.74-13.84). No significant differences by menopausal status were found for anxiety/depression. Joint/muscle problems, exhaustion and sleeping disorders were the most commonly reported symptoms among all women. Differences in the prevalences of vaginal dryness (p = 0.002), joint/muscle complaints (p = 0.032), and sweating/flush (p = 0.032) were found among the three groups. Conclusions: Women living with HIV experienced a wide variety of menopausal symptoms, some of them initiated before women had any menstrual irregularity. We found a higher likelihood of somatic symptoms in peri- and post-menopausal women, while a higher likelihood of psychological and urogenital symptoms was found in post-menopausal women. Most somatic symptoms were of low or moderate severity, probably due to the good clinical and immunological situation of these women

COVID-19 in hospitalized HIV-positive and HIV-negative patients : A matched study

CatedresObjectives: We compared the characteristics and clinical outcomes of hospitalized individuals with COVID-19 with [people with HIV (PWH)] and without (non-PWH) HIV co-infection in Spain during the first wave of the pandemic. Methods: This was a retrospective matched cohort study. People with HIV were identified by reviewing clinical records and laboratory registries of 10 922 patients in active-follow-up within the Spanish HIV Research Network (CoRIS) up to 30 June 2020. Each hospitalized PWH was matched with five non-PWH of the same age and sex randomly selected from COVID-19@Spain, a multicentre cohort of 4035 patients hospitalized with confirmed COVID-19. The main outcome was all-cause in-hospital mortality. Results: Forty-five PWH with PCR-confirmed COVID-19 were identified in CoRIS, 21 of whom were hospitalized. A total of 105 age/sex-matched controls were selected from the COVID-19@Spain cohort. The median age in both groups was 53 (Q1-Q3, 46-56) years, and 90.5% were men. In PWH, 19.1% were injecting drug users, 95.2% were on antiretroviral therapy, 94.4% had HIV-RNA < 50 copies/mL, and the median (Q1-Q3) CD4 count was 595 (349-798) cells/μL. No statistically significant differences were found between PWH and non-PWH in number of comorbidities, presenting signs and symptoms, laboratory parameters, radiology findings and severity scores on admission. Corticosteroids were administered to 33.3% and 27.4% of PWH and non-PWH, respectively (P = 0.580). Deaths during admission were documented in two (9.5%) PWH and 12 (11.4%) non-PWH (P = 0.800). Conclusions: Our findings suggest that well-controlled HIV infection does not modify the clinical presentation or worsen clinical outcomes of COVID-19 hospitalization