Drug utilization patterns in Zabljak municipality, Serbia and Montenegro

Background: Information about drug utilization among the out patients in Serbia & Montenegro is scanty, and there are no available publications on the topic. Objective: To evaluate and compare patterns of drug utilization in the Zabljak municipality. Methods: Prescriptions for outpatients (n=456) and dispensing records from local pharmacy in Zabljak were reviewed retrospectively over three-months period. Results: The leading diagnoses were infectious diseases of the respiratory system and hypertension. The average number of Defined Daily Doses per 1000 inhabitants per day was 175.05. Cardiovascular drugs (42.8 DDD/1000/day), drugs for gastrointestinal system (39 DDD/1000/day) and antibacterial drugs (19.05 DDD/1000/day) were the most frequently prescribed drugs. Conclusion: The total number of drugs utilized per 1000 inhabitants per day was within the acceptable range. However, the pattern of diagnoses did not correspond to the pattern of drug utilization. Much remains to be done to promote rational selection and use of drugs in outpatients in Serbia and Montenegro. South African Family Practice Vol. 49 (1) 2007: pp. 1

Predicting Blood Glucose with an LSTM and Bi-LSTM Based Deep Neural Network

A deep learning network was used to predict future blood glucose levels, as this can permit diabetes patients to take action before imminent hyperglycaemia and hypoglycaemia. A sequential model with one long-short-term memory (LSTM) layer, one bidirectional LSTM layer and several fully connected layers was used to predict blood glucose levels for different prediction horizons. The method was trained and tested on 26 datasets from 20 real patients. The proposed network outperforms the baseline methods in terms of all evaluation criteria.Comment: 5 pages, submitted to 2018 14th Symposium on Neural Networks and Applications (NEUREL

Tissue temperature monitoring using thermoacoustic and photoacoustic techniques

Real-time temperature monitoring with high spatial resolution (~1 mm) and high temperature sensitivity (1 °C or better) is needed for the safe deposition of heat energy in surrounding healthy tissue and efficient destruction of tumor and abnormal cells during thermotherapy. A temperature sensing technique using thermoacoustic and photoacoustic measurements combined with a clinical Philips ultrasound imaging system (iU22) has been explored in this study. Using a tissue phantom, this noninvasive method has been demonstrated to have high temporal resolution and temperature sensitivity. Because both photoacoustic and thermoacoustic signal amplitudes depend on the temperature of the source object, the signal amplitudes can be used to monitor the temperature. The signal is proportional to the dimensionless Grueneisen parameter of the object, which in turn varies with the temperature of the object. A temperature sensitivity of 0.5 °C was obtained at a temporal resolution as short as 3.6 s with 50 signal averages

Temperature mapping using photoacoustic and thermoacoustic tomography

Photoacoustic (PA) and thermoacoustic (TA) effects are based on the generation of acoustic waves after tissues absorb electromagnetic energy. The amplitude of the acoustic signal is related to the temperature of the absorbing target tissue. A combined photoacoustic and thermoacoustic imaging system built around a modified commercial ultrasound scanner was used to obtain an image of the target's temperature, using reconstructed photoacoustic or thermoacoustic images. To demonstrate these techniques, we used photoacoustic imaging to monitor the temperature changes of methylene blue solution buried at a depth of 1.5 cm in chicken breast tissue from 12 to 42 °C. We also used thermoacoustic imaging to monitor the temperature changes of porcine muscle embedded in 2 cm porcine fat from 14 to 28 °C. The results demonstrate that these techniques can provide noninvasive real-time temperature monitoring of embedded objects and tissue

Cities and Climate Change: The Precedents and Why They Matter

This paper reviews the long tradition of city-scale climatological and meteorological applications prior to the emergence in the 1990s of early work on the urban/global climate change interface. It shows how ‘valuing and seeing the urban’ came to be achieved within modern scientific meteorology and how in a limited but significant set of cases that science has contributed to urban practice. The paper traces the evolution of urban climatology since 1950 as a distinct research field within physical geography and meteorology, and its transition from observational monographs to process modelling; reviews the precedents, successful or otherwise, of knowledge transfer from science into public action through climatically aware regulation or design of urban environment; and notes the neglect of these precedents in contemporary climate change discourse—a serious omission

Performance characterization of an integrated ultrasound, photoacoustic, and thermoacoustic imaging system

We developed a novel trimodality system for human breast imaging by integrating photoacoustic (PA) and thermoacoustic (TA) imaging techniques into a modified commercial ultrasound scanner. Because light was delivered with an optical assembly placed within the microwave antenna, no mechanical switching between the microwave and laser sources was needed. Laser and microwave excitation pulses were interleaved to enable PA and TA data acquisition in parallel at a rate of 10 frames per second. A tube (7 mm inner diameter) filled with oxygenated bovine blood or 30 mM methylene blue dye was successfully detected in PA images in chicken breast tissue at depths of 6.6 and 8.4 cm, respectively, for the first time. The SNRs at these depths reached ∼24 and ∼15  dB, respectively, by averaging 200 signal acquisitions. Similarly, a tube (13 mm inner diameter) filled with saline solution (0.9%) at a depth of 4.4 cm in porcine fat tissue was successfully detected in TA images. The PA axial, lateral, and elevational resolutions were 640 μm, 720 μm, and 3.5 mm, respectively, suitable for breast cancer imaging. A PA noise-equivalent sensitivity to methylene blue solution of 260 nM was achieved in chicken tissue at a depth of 3.4 cm