Legionella Resources on the World Wide Web

Internet resources that focus on Legionella and legionnaires disease are presented. Web sites were selected on the basis of their content and adherence to suggested standards of medical Internet publishing. Free, accessible, English-language Web sites were categorized according to users' needs as follows: (1) those with comprehensive information on Legionella infection (including pathophysiologic characteristics, symptoms, and treatment of legionnaires disease), (2) those with information on outbreaks and epidemiology (including information for travelers), (3) those with information for researchers, (4) those about prevention, and (5) those with information for layperson

Navigating the Web in Search of Resources on Antimicrobial Stewardship in Health Care Institutions

Bacterial resistance to antimicrobials has become a public health threat for which coordinated action at the international, national, and local level is needed. Current recommendations for the control of antimicrobial overuse and resistance in hospitals recommend various strategies, including antimicrobial stewardship programs. Several of these integrated and multidisciplinary antimicrobial management programs provide detailed information and recommendations on the Web. We performed a search of the most relevant and authoritative Web sites in English that were available without need for special registration or cost. The search excluded community-based programs, and we present only established programs or those providing expert information useful for building a hospital-based antimicrobial stewardship program. The overview of these Web sites may be useful either for institutions or individuals planning to implement such programs in their own health care institution or for educational purposes targeted at different professionals involved in improving antimicrobial practic

An equivalent classical plate model of corrugated structures

AbstractAn equivalent classical plate model of corrugated structures is derived using the variational asymptotic method. Starting from a thin shell theory, we carry out an asymptotic analysis of the strain energy in terms of the smallness of a single corrugation with respect to the characteristic length of macroscopic deformation of the corrugated structure. We obtained the complete set of analytical formulas for effective plate stiffnesses valid for both shallow and deep corrugations. These formulas can reproduce the well-known classical plate stiffnesses when the corrugated structure is degenerated to a flat plate. The extension–bending coupling stiffnesses are obtained the first time. The complete set of relations are also derived for recovering the local fields of corrugated structures

Multiphoton Effects Enhanced Due to Ultrafast Photon-Number Fluctuations

Multi-photon processes are the essence of nonlinear optics. Optical harmonics generation and multi-photon absorption, ionization, polymerization or spectroscopy are widely used in practical applications. Generally, the rate of an n-photon effect scales as the n-th order autocorrelation function of the incident light, which is high for light with strong photon-number fluctuations. Therefore `noisy' light sources are much more efficient for multi-photon effects than coherent sources with the same mean power, pulse duration and repetition rate. Here we generate optical harmonics of order 2-4 from bright squeezed vacuum (BSV), a state of light consisting of only quantum noise with no coherent component. We observe up to two orders of magnitude enhancement in the generation of optical harmonics due to ultrafast photon-number fluctuations. This feature is especially important for the nonlinear optics of fragile structures where the use of a `noisy' pump can considerably increase the effect without overcoming the damage threshold

Analyzing Digital Image by Deep Learning for Melanoma Diagnosis

Image classi cation is an important task in many medical applications, in order to achieve an adequate diagnostic of di erent le- sions. Melanoma is a frequent kind of skin cancer, which most of them can be detected by visual exploration. Heterogeneity and database size are the most important di culties to overcome in order to obtain a good classi cation performance. In this work, a deep learning based method for accurate classi cation of wound regions is proposed. Raw images are fed into a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) producing a probability of being a melanoma or a non-melanoma. Alexnet and GoogLeNet were used due to their well-known e ectiveness. Moreover, data augmentation was used to increase the number of input images. Experiments show that the compared models can achieve high performance in terms of mean ac- curacy with very few data and without any preprocessing.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Identification of Oxidized Protein Hydrolase as a Potential Prodrug Target in Prostate Cancer

Background: Esterases are often overexpressed in cancer cells and can have chiral specificities different from that of the corresponding normal tissues. For this reason, ester prodrugs could be a promising approach in chemotherapy. In this study, we focused on the identification and characterization of differentially expressed esterases between non-tumorigenic and tumorigenic prostate epithelial cells.Methods: Cellular lysates from LNCaP, DU 145, and PC3 prostate cancer cell lines, tumorigenic RWPE-2 prostate epithelial cells, and non-tumorigenic RWPE-1 prostate epithelial cells were separated by native polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (n-PAGE) and the esterase activity bands visualized using α-naphthyl acetate or α-naphthyl-N-acetylalaninate (ANAA) chiral esters and Fast Blue RR salt. The esterases were identified using nanospray LC/MS-MS tandem mass spectrometry and confirmed by Western blotting, native electroblotting, inhibition assays, and activity towards a known specific substrate. The serine protease/esterase oxidized protein hydrolase (OPH) was overexpressed in COS-7 cells to verify our results.Results: The major esterase observed with the ANAA substrates within the n-PAGE activity bands was identified as OPH. OPH (EC 3.4.19.1) is a serine protease/esterase and a member of the prolyl oligopeptidase family. We found that LNCaP lysates contained approximately 40% more OPH compared to RWPE-1 lysates. RWPE-2, DU145 and PC3 cell lysates had similar levels of OPH activity. OPH within all of the cell lysates tested had a chiral preference for the S-isomer of ANAA. LNCaP cells were stained more intensely with ANAA substrates than RWPE-1 cells and COS-7 cells overexpressing OPH were found to have a higher activity towards the ANAA and AcApNA than parent COS-7 cells.Conclusions: These data suggest that prodrug derivatives of ANAA and AcApNA could have potential as chemotherapeutic agents for the treatment of prostate cancer tumors that overexpress OPH

Inhomogeneous LOFF phase revisited for surface superconductivity

We consider 2D surface superconductivity in high magnetic fields parallel to the surface. We demonstrate that the spin-orbit interaction at the surface changes the properties of the inhomogeneous superconducting Larkin-Ovchinnikov-Fulde-Ferrell state that develops above fields given by the paramagnetic criterion. Strong spin-orbit interaction significantly broadens the range of existence of the LOFF phase, which takes the form of periodic superconducting stripes running along the field direction on the surface, leading to the anisotropy of its properties. In connection with experiments by J.H. Schon et al. [Nature 914, 434 (2001)] on superconductivity of electrically doped films of the cuprate material CaCuO2, we also discuss this problem for the d-wave pairing to indicate the possibility of a re-orientation transition as the magnetic field direction is rotated in the plane parallel to the surface. Our results provide a tool for studying surface superconductivity as a function of doping.Comment: 4 pages, 1 fig, revtex

Generation of GeV protons from 1 PW laser interaction with near critical density targets

The propagation of ultra intense laser pulses through matter is connected with the generation of strong moving magnetic fields in the propagation channel as well as the formation of a thin ion filament along the axis of the channel. Upon exiting the plasma the magnetic field displaces the electrons at the back of the target, generating a quasistatic electric field that accelerates and collimates ions from the filament. Two-dimensional Particle-in-Cell simulations show that a 1 PW laser pulse tightly focused on a near-critical density target is able to accelerate protons up to an energy of 1.3 GeV. Scaling laws and optimal conditions for proton acceleration are established considering the energy depletion of the laser pulse.Comment: 26 pages, 8 figure