Blood Protein Binding of Cyclosporine in Transplant Patients

The objective of this study was to compare the binding of cyclosporine to blood proteins between four healthy subjects and five liver and eight renal transplant patients. Fresh heparinized blood was obtained, to which sufficient quantities of tritium-labelled cyclosporine and unlabelled cyclosporine were added to blood samples or red blood cell (RBC) suspensions. Concentrations of cyclosporine in whole blood, plasma, RBC suspension, and phosphate buffer were estimated by liquid scintigraphy. The blood:plasma ratio of cyclosporine in transplant patients was significantly lower (P < .05) than that in healthy volunteers. The RBC:buffer ratio, a measure of affinity of RBCs for cyclosporine, was highest in those with liver transplants and lowest in those with kidney transplants. The unbound fraction of cyclosporine in plasma was less in transplant patients than in healthy volunteers. The results of this study indicate that there are differences in blood protein binding of cyclosporine between transplant patients that may contribute to the differences in the pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics of this drug

Modelling mortality rates using GEE models

Generalised estimating equation (GEE) models are extensions of generalised linear models by relaxing the assumption of independence. These models are appropriate to analyze correlated longitudinal responses which follow any distribution that is a member of the exponential family. This model is used to relate daily mortality rate of Maltese adults aged 65 years and over with a number of predictors, including apparent temperature, season and year. To accommodate the right skewed mortality rate distribution a Gamma distribution is assumed. An identity link function is used for ease of interpretating the parameter estimates. An autoregressive correlation structure of order 1 is used since correlations decrease as distance between observations increases. The study shows that mortality rate and temperature are related by a quadratic function. Moreover, the GEE model identifies a number of significant main and interaction effects which shed light on the effect of weather predictors on daily mortality rates.peer-reviewe

A constraint programming approach to the hospitals/residents problem

An instance I of the Hospitals/Residents problem (HR) involves a set of residents (graduating medical students) and a set of hospitals, where each hospital has a given capacity. The residents have preferences for the hospitals, as do hospitals for residents. A solution of I is a &lt;i&gt;stable matching&lt;/i&gt;, which is an assignment of residents to hospitals that respects the capacity conditions and preference lists in a precise way. In this paper we present constraint encodings for HR that give rise to important structural properties. We also present a computational study using both randomly-generated and real-world instances. We provide additional motivation for our models by indicating how side constraints can be added easily in order to solve hard variants of HR

Position scientifique de la France dans le monde 2000-2015 (La)

Ce rapport analyse le positionnement scientifique de la France depuis 2000, en s’appuyant essentiellement sur des données bibliométriques. Se concentrant sur la France et certaines de ses problématiques spécifiques, il offre un traitement approfondi de ses données et prend en compte les publications de l’ensemble des acteurs de la recherche en  France.

Certified rule labeling

© Julian Nagele and Harald Zankl. The rule labeling heuristic aims to establish confluence of (left-)linear term rewrite systems via decreasing diagrams. We present a formalization of a confluence criterion based on the interplay of relative termination and the rule labeling in the theorem prover Isabelle. Moreover, we report on the integration of this result into the certifier CeTA, facilitating the checking of confluence certificates based on decreasing diagrams for the first time. The power of the method is illustrated by an experimental evaluation on a (standard) collection of confluence problems

Le "Mastery learning" : une voie pour l'apprentissage et la réussite rapport de recherche faite au Département des techniques informatiques du Cégep André-Laurendeau /

Également disponible en version papierTitre de l'écran-titre (visionné le 5 déc. 2009)Bibliogr

A case study on graphically modelling and detecting knowledge mobility risks

As the world continues to increasingly depend on a knowledge economy, companies are realising that their most valuable asset is knowledge held by their employees. This asset is hard to track, manage and retain especially in a situation where employees are free to job-hop for better pay after providing a few weeks’ notice to their employers. In previous work we have defined the concept of knowledge risk, and presented a graph-based approach for detecting it. In this paper, we present the results of a case study which employs knowledge graphs in the context of four software development teams.peer-reviewe

Improving automatic confluence analysis of rewrite systems by redundant rules

We describe how to utilize redundant rewrite rules, i.e., rules that can be simulated by other rules, when (dis)proving confluence of term rewrite systems. We demonstrate how automatic confluence provers benefit from the addition as well as the removal of redundant rules. Due to their simplicity, our transformations were easy to formalize in a proof assistant and are thus amenable to certification. Experimental results show the surprising gain in power

Formal reasoning with Verilog HDL

Most hardware verification techniques tend to fall under one of two broad, yet separate caps: simulation or formal verification. This paper briefly presents a framework in which formal verification plays a crucial role within the standard approach currently used by the hardware industry. As a basis for this, the formal semantics of Verilog HDL are dened, and properties about synchronization and mutual exclusion algorithms are proved.peer-reviewe

On the formalization of termination techniques based on multiset orderings

Multiset orderings are a key ingredient in certain termination techniques like the recursive path ordering and a variant of size-change termination. In order to integrate these techniques in a certifier for termination proofs, we have added them to the Isabelle Formalization of Rewriting. To this end, it was required to extend the existing formalization on multiset orderings towards a generalized multiset ordering. Afterwards, the soundness proofs of both techniques have been established, although only after fixing some definitions. Concerning efficiency, it is known that the search for suitable parameters for both techniques is NP-hard. We show that checking the correct application of the techniques-where all parameters are provided-is also NP-hard, since the problem of deciding the generalized multiset ordering is NP-hard. © René Thiemann, Guillaume Allais, and JulianNagele