The North Sea Bicycle Race ECG project : time-domain analysis

Analysis of electrocardiogram and heart rate provides useful information about health condition of a patient. The North Sea Bicycle Race is an annual cycling competition in Norway. Examination of ECG recordings collected from participants of this race may allow defining and evaluating the relationship between physical endurance exercises and heart electrophysiology. Parameters reflecting potentially alarming deviations are to be identified in this study. This paper presents results of a time-domain analysis of ECG data collected in 2014, implementing K-Means clustering. A double stage analysis strategy, aimed at producing hierarchical clusters, is proposed. The first phase allows rough separation of data. Second stage is applied to reveal internal structure of the majority clusters. In both steps, discrepancies driving the separation could stem from three sources. Firstly, they could be signs of abnormalities in electrical activity of the heart. Secondly, they may allow discriminating between natural groups of participants – according to sex, age, physical fitness. Finally, some deviations could result from faults in data extraction, therefore serving in evaluation of the parameters. The clusters were defined predominantly by combinations of features: heartbeat signals correlation, P-wave shape, and RR intervals; none of the features alone was discriminative for all the clusters

Wearing Quality of Austenitic, Duplex Cast Steel, Gray and Spheroidal Graphite Iron

The current work presents the research results of abrasion wear and adhesive wear at rubbing and liquid friction of new austenitic, austenitic-ferritic (“duplex”) cast steel and gray cast iron EN-GJL-250, spheroidal graphite iron EN-GJS-600-3, pearlitic with ledeburitic carbides and spheroidal graphite iron with ledeburitic carbides with a microstructure of the metal matrix: pearlitic, upper bainite, mixture of upper and lower bainite, martensitic with austenite, pearlitic-martensitic-bainitic-ausferritic obtained in the raw state. The wearing quality test was carried out on a specially designed and made bench. Resistance to abrasion wear was tested using sand paper P40. Resistance to adhesive wear was tested in interaction with steel C55 normalized, hardened and sulfonitrided. The liquid friction was obtained using CASTROL oil. It was stated that austenitic cast steel and “duplex” are characterized by a similar value of abrasion wear and adhesive wear at rubbing friction. The smallest decrease in mass was shown by the cast steel in interaction with the sulfonitrided steel C55. Austenitic cast steel and “duplex��� in different combinations of friction pairs have a higher wear quality than gray cast iron EN-GJL- 250 and spheroidal graphite iron EN-GJS-600-3. Austenitic cast steel and “duplex” are characterized by a lower wearing quality than the spheroidal graphite iron with bainitic-martensitic microstructure. In the adhesive wear test using CASTROL oil the tested cast steels and cast irons showed a small mass decrease within the range of 1÷2 mg

Venezuelan kindreds reveal that genetic and environmental factors modulate Huntington's disease age of onset

Huntington's disease (HD) is an autosomal dominant neurodegenerative disease caused by a triplet (CAG) expansion mutation. The length of the triplet repeat is the most important factor in determining age of onset of HD, although substantial variability remains after controlling for repeat length. The Venezuelan HD kindreds encompass 18,149 individuals spanning 10 generations, 15,409 of whom are living. Of the 4,384 immortalized lymphocyte lines collected, 3,989 DNAs were genotyped for their HD alleles, representing a subset of the population at greatest genetic risk. There are 938 heterozygotes, 80 people with variably penetrant alleles, and 18 homozygotes. Analysis of the 83 kindreds that comprise the Venezuelan HD kindreds demonstrates that residual variability in age of onset has both genetic and environmental components. We created a residual age of onset phenotype from a regression analysis of the log of age of onset on repeat length. Familial correlations (correlation ± SE) were estimated for sibling (0.40 ± 0.09), parent-offspring (0.10 ± 0.11), avuncular (0.07 ± 0.11), and cousin (0.15 ± 0.10) pairs, suggesting a familial origin for the residual variance in onset. By using a variance-components approach with all available familial relationships, the additive genetic heritability of this residual age of onset trait is 38%. A model, including shared sibling environmental effects, estimated the components of additive genetic (0.37), shared environment (0.22), and nonshared environment (0.41) variances, confirming that ≈40% of the variance remaining in onset age is attributable to genes other than the HD gene and 60% is environmental

The relationship between CAG repeat length and age of onset differs for Huntington's disease patients with juvenile onset or adult onset

Age of onset for Huntington's disease (HD) varies inversely with the length of the disease-causing CAG repeat expansion in the HD gene. A simple exponential regression model yielded adjusted R-squared values of 0.728 in a large set of Venezuelan kindreds and 0.642 in a North American, European, and Australian sample (the HD MAPS cohort). We present evidence that a two-segment exponential regression curve provides a significantly better fit than the simple exponential regression. A plot of natural log-transformed age of onset against CAG repeat length reveals this segmental relationship. This two-segment exponential regression on age of onset data increases the adjusted R-squared values by 0.012 in the Venezuelan kindreds and by 0.035 in the HD MAPS cohort. Although the amount of additional variance explained by the segmental regression approach is modest, the two slopes of the two-segment regression are significantly different from each other in both the Venezuelan kindreds [F(2, 439) =11.13, P =2 × 10 -5] and in the HD MAPS cohort [F(2, 688) =38.27, P = 2 × 10 -16]. In both populations, the influence of each CAG repeat on age of onset appears to be stronger in the adult-onset range of CAG repeats than in the juvenile-onset range. © 2006 The Authors Journal compilation © 2006 University College London.link_to_subscribed_fulltex