Effect of some physiological factors and pharmacological agents on left ventricular function in man

In recent years, significant conceptual advances have helped to formulate a broad scheme of the mechanisms which regulate ventricular function. Likewise, methodological advances now enable a wide range of haemodynamic measurements to be made in human subjects, with reasonable precision and relative ease. It has thus become possible to relate changes in several haemodynamic variables recorded simultaneously. Although it is still not feasible to estimate the functional competence of the left ventricle (or the heart as a whole) in absolute terns, the qualitative changes can now be assessed with greater confidence. The studies reported here were designed to investigate the changes in left ventricular performance in man during dynamic exercise and following the administration of two pharmacological agents used in clinical practice. The two pharmacological agents, morphine and propranolol, were selected for different reasons. Morphine was chosen in order to determine the circulatory effects that may be attributable to the drug and thereby provide, if possible, a rational basis for its use in the treatment of acute left ventricular failure. The therapeutic efficacy of morphine in this disorder is widely acknowledged, but to date no attempts, other than the one reported here, seem to have been made, (or at least none reported) to delineate the precise mode of action of this drug in the treatment of acute left ventricular failure. A detailed investigation was, therefore, designed to study the haemodynamic changes, with particular reference to left ventricular function, following an intravenous injection of morphine in therapeutic amounts. The report on this study forms the subject matter of Chapter IV. The other pharmacological agent used was propranolol, which is an adrenergic JS-receptor blocking agent. It is generally agreed that the sympathetic nervous system (and the adrenal medulla) dominates in the regulation of the cardiovascular response during dynamic exercise. Since the sympathetic influence (both chronotropic and inotropic) on the heart is mediated through ^-receptors (Ahlquist, 1948), it was felt that with the help of propranolol it should be possible to assess the importance of the sympatho-adrenal system in the regulation of cardiac performance during dynamic exercise. A study was, therefore, designed to investigate the haemodynamic changes during supine leg exercise before and after ^-adrenergic block with propranolol. The report on this investigation is presented in Chapter V. An assessment of the changes in left ventricular performance rg supine leg exercise, which has been used as the standard physiological stimulus, was also undertaken in the course of the study reported in Chapter V. In Chapter I a summary of the present concepts (and some controversies) regarding the regulation cf left ventricular performance is presented. Also Included in this chapter is additional information relevant to the understanding of left ventricular function and the methods that may be used to assess this. A detailed critique of the methods used is given in Chapter II. Since it was not feasible to measure either end-diastolic fibre length or end-diastolic pressure in the left ventricle, the mean pulmonary wedge pressure has been used as an indirect estimate of left ventricular end-diastolic pressure and hence end-diastolic fibre length. It was felt necessary to determine the confidence with which the mean pulmonary wedge pressure could be used as an estimate of left ventricular end-diastolic pressure. To this end, therefore, another study was designed and the report on this is presented in Chapter III. A brief comment on the statistical methods used is given in the appendix. Since this thesis is being presented In two volumes, it was thought best, for ease of reference, to Include all the tables and references in the companion volume

Elevated PAI-1 is associated with poor clinical outcomes in pediatric patients with acute lung injury.

PurposeDeposition of fibrin in the alveolar space is a hallmark of acute lung injury (ALI). Plasminogen activator inhibitor-1 (PAI-1) is an antifibrinolytic agent that is activated during inflammation. Increased plasma and pulmonary edema fluid levels of PAI-1 are associated with increased mortality in adults with ALI. This relationship has not been examined in children. The objective of this study was to test whether increased plasma PAI-1 levels are associated with worse clinical outcomes in pediatric patients with ALI.Design/methodsWe measured plasma PAI-1 levels on the first day of ALI among 94 pediatric patients enrolled in two separate prospective, multicenter investigations and followed them for clinical outcomes. All patients met American European Consensus Conference criteria for ALI.ResultsA total of 94 patients were included. The median age was 3.2 years (range 16 days-18 years), the PaO(2)/F(i)O(2) was 141 +/- 72 (mean +/- SD), and overall mortality was 14/94 (15%). PAI-1 levels were significantly higher in nonsurvivors compared to survivors (P < 0.01). The adjusted odds of mortality doubled for every log increase in the level of plasma PAI-1 after adjustment for age and severity of illness.ConclusionsHigher PAI-1 levels are associated with increased mortality and fewer ventilator-free days among pediatric patients with ALI. These findings suggest that impaired fibrinolysis may play a role in the pathogenesis of ALI in pediatric patients and suggest that PAI-1 may serve as a useful biomarker of prognosis in patients with ALI

Evidence for long-term variability in the ultra high energy photon flux from Cygnus X-3

A time-correlation analysis of atmospheric Cerenkov pulses by a wide-angle photomultiplier system was previously shown to have present in it a nonrandom component which seemed associated with the Right Ascension (RA) range approx. 20+or-04h. A recent examination of multi-muon events recorded by a photon-decay detector shows a similar time-dependent effect, closely matching the previous results, supporting the suggestion that the effect is of cosmic origin. However, even though Cyg. X-3 lies well inside the region of peak intensity, it does not seem possible to ascribe to it the whole effect, for the implied photon flux appears too large to be reconciled to various gamma-ray measurements of Cyg. X-3. The original data were subjected to a phase-histogram analysis and it as found that only 2.5% of overall recorded data are compatible with a phase-dependent emission from Cyg. X-3. Assuming these events to be gamma rays yields a detected flux of (2.6 + or - 0.3) x 10 to the minus 12th power gamma cm -2s-1 above 5 x 10 to the 14th power eV. Comparing this value with more recent ultra high energy (UHE) photon data from the same source, it is suggested that the available data generally favor a long-term reduction in the Cyg. X-3 inferred luminosity ( 10 to the 13th power eV) by a factor of (1.8 + or - 0.3) per year

Analysis of Eye Movements to Cartoon Faces in Videos

Saccades are rapid eye movements that move our gaze between successive points of fixation. They are indicative of how we direct our attention and therefore play a role in memory and cognition. For static images, it is established that saccades move faster to faces compared to other objects. We hypothesize that the same is true for videos. To test this hypothesis, saccades to faces in motion pictures have been analyzed. The analysis here entails the recording of saccades to two videos followed by a statistical study of saccades going towards faces or going away from faces. What makes this study relevant is that videos as stimuli can be very different from images. As compared to images, videos encapsulate features such as facial expressions, audio, captions, background, and foreground motion etc.. To carry out the study, two cartoon videos, each ten minutes in duration, were shown to human subjects while recording their saccades. We also tracked the location of faces in the videos. Saccade data was compared to the position of faces on the screen to determine whether saccades moved to faces or away from faces. We expected faster velocities for saccades to faces. The results are consistent with expectations. Saccade amplitudes and velocities show difference when going to faces or away from them. Faces are special compared to other visual stimuli and this study indicates that saccades are significantly longer and faster going towards faces. In conclusion, faces attract significant attention. Whether in static images or videos, saccades towards faces are faster and longer. Having analyzed saccade amplitudes and velocities in videos, it can be stated that despite other features in videos such as centering (to the screen) of the central characters, scene cuts, character movement during a scene, faces remain the dominant attention grabbing feature

Automatic social role recognition and its application in structuring multiparty interactions

Automatic processing of multiparty interactions is a research domain with important applications in content browsing, summarization and information retrieval. In recent years, several works have been devoted to find regular patterns which speakers exhibit in a multiparty interaction also known as social roles. Most of the research in literature has generally focused on recognition of scenario specific formal roles. More recently, role coding schemes based on informal social roles have been proposed in literature, defining roles based on the behavior speakers have in the functioning of a small group interaction. Informal social roles represent a flexible classification scheme that can generalize across different scenarios of multiparty interaction. In this thesis, we focus on automatic recognition of informal social roles and exploit the influence of informal social roles on speaker behavior for structuring multiparty interactions. To model speaker behavior, we systematically explore various verbal and non verbal cues extracted from turn taking patterns, vocal expression and linguistic style. The influence of social roles on the behavior cues exhibited by a speaker is modeled using a discriminative approach based on conditional random fields. Experiments performed on several hours of meeting data reveal that classification using conditional random fields improves the role recognition performance. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by evaluating it on previously unseen scenarios of multiparty interaction. Furthermore, we also consider whether formal roles and informal roles can be automatically predicted by the same verbal and nonverbal features. We exploit the influence of social roles on turn taking patterns to improve speaker diarization under distant microphone condition. Our work extends the Hidden Markov model (HMM)- Gaussian mixture model (GMM) speaker diarization system, and is based on jointly estimating both the speaker segmentation and social roles in an audio recording. We modify the minimum duration constraint in HMM-GMM diarization system by using role information to model the expected duration of speaker's turn. We also use social role n-grams as prior information to model speaker interaction patterns. Finally, we demonstrate the application of social roles for the problem of topic segmentation in meetings. We exploit our findings that social roles can dynamically change in conversations and use this information to predict topic changes in meetings. We also present an unsupervised method for topic segmentation which combines social roles and lexical cohesion. Experimental results show that social roles improve performance of both speaker diarization and topic segmentation

Develop improved metal hydride technology for the storage of hydrogen. Final technical report

The overall objective was to develop commercially viable metal hydrides capable of reversibly storing at least 3 wt.% hydrogen for use with PEM fuel cells and hydrogen fueled internal combustion engine (HICE) applications. Such alloys are expected to result in system capacities of greater than 2 wt.%, making metal hydride storage systems (MHSS`s) a practical means of supplying hydrogen for many consumer applications. ECD`s (Energy Conversion Devices, Inc.) past work on sputtered thin films of transition metal-based alloys led to the commercialization of it`s nickel/metal hydride batteries, and similar work on thin film Mg-based alloys demonstrated potential to achieve very high gravimetric and volumetric energy densities approaching 2,500 Wh/Kg and 2,500 Wh/M{sup 3} respectively. Under this 2-year cost shared project with the DOE, the authors have successfully demonstrated the feasibility of scaling up the Mg-based hydrides from thin film to bulk production without substantial loss of storage capacity. ECD made progress in alloy development by means of compositional and process modification. Processes used include Mechanical Alloying, Melt spinning and novel Gas Phase Condensation. It was showed that the same composition when prepared by melt-spinning resulted in a more homogeneous material having a higher PCT plateau pressure as compared to mechanical alloying. It was also shown that mechanically alloyed Mg-Al-Zn results in much higher plateau pressures, which is an important step towards reducing the desorption temperature. While significant progress has been made during the past two years in alloy development and understanding the relationship between composition, structure, morphology, and processing parameters, additional R and D needs to be performed to achieve the goals of this work

2009 Convocation

Prelude Music: Laura O\u27Neal, 2006 IMSA Graduate; Jonathan Besancon, IMSA Faculty Pledge of Allegiance and Welcome: Sid Sapru, Student Council President; Dr. Max McGee, President; Dr. Eric McLaren, Principal Featured Piece: Laura O\u27Neal, 2006 IMSA Graduate Keynote Speaker: Dr. Tuwanda Williamson, 1991 IMSA Graduat

PLC Installation on Inner Ring Bore SHG Grinding Machine

To supply product of high quality in the market for maintaining the market requirements, machinery should be up to date. This project work is based on the upgradation of the inner ring track grinding machine on a production line. A grinding machine is a type of machine, which uses an abrasive wheel on cutting tool. Each grain of abrasive operation on the wheel's surface cuts a small chip from the work-piece via deformation. Grinding is used to finish work-pieces that must show high surface and high accuracy of shape and dimension. The main objective is:- 1. To reduce the cycle time of machine. 2. To improve the quality of the bearing. 3. To reduce the maintenance cost of the grinding machine. The aim of our system is to reduce the down time of the grinding machine i.e. to increase the productivity of bearings. Apart from down time, our objective is to improve the quality of the bearings. Quality defines the speed, precision and efficiency of bearings. Reduction of the cost of maintenance of the machine is also our prime objective. We meet our objectives with the help of Mitsubishi PLC and Servo System. DOI: 10.17762/ijritcc2321-8169.16049

Automatic Speaker Role Labeling in AMI Meetings: Recognition of Formal and Social Roles

This work aims at investigating the automatic recognition of speaker role in meeting conversations from the AMI corpus. Two types of roles are considered: formal roles, fixed over the meeting duration and recognized at recording level, and social roles related to the way participants interact between themselves, recognized at speaker turn level. Various structural, lexical and prosodic features as well as Dialog Act tags are exhaustively investigated and combined for this purpose. Results reveal an accuracy of 74% in recognizing the speakers formal roles and an accuracy of 66% (percentage of time) in correctly labeling the social roles. Feature analysis reveals that lexical features provide the higher performances in formal/functional role recognition while prosodic features provide the higher performances in social role recognition. Furthermore results reveal that social role recognition in case of rare roles in the corpus can be improved through the use of lexical and Dialog Act information combined over short time windows