Cerebral Arterial Air Embolism Associated with Mechanical Ventilation and Deep Tracheal Aspiration

Arterial air embolism associated with pulmonary barotrauma has been considered a rare but a well-known complication of mechanical ventilation. A 65-year-old man, who had subarachnoid hemorrhage with Glasgow coma scale of 8, was admitted to intensive care unit and ventilated with the help of mechanical ventilator. Due to the excessive secretions, deep tracheal aspirations were made frequently. GCS decreased from 8–10 to 4-5, and the patient was reevaluated with cranial CT scan. In CT scan, air embolism was detected in the cerebral arteries. The patient deteriorated and spontaneous respiratory activity lost just after the CT investigation. Thirty minutes later cardiac arrest appeared. Despite the resuscitation, the patient died. We suggest that pneumonia and frequent tracheal aspirations are predisposing factors for cerebral vascular air embolism

Recent advances on distributed unsupervised learning

Distributed machine learning is a problem of inferring a desired relation when the training data is distributed throughout a network of agents (e.g. sensor networks,robotswarms,etc.).Atypicalproblemofunsupervisedlearningisclustering, that is grouping patterns based on some similarity/dissimilarity measures. Provided theyarehighlyscalable,fault-tolerantandenergyefficient,clusteringalgorithmscan be adopted in large-scale distributed systems. This work surveys the state-of-the-art in this field, presenting algorithms that solve the distributed clustering problem efficiently, with particular attention to the computation and clustering criteria