Students’ surveys and involvement in educational activities within virtual environments are related to students’ satisfaction in elearning graduate programs

Ponència presentada a 3rd International Conference on Higher Education Advances, HEAd’17, Universitat Politècnica de València, València, 2017This paper evaluates associations across the dimensions included in students’ surveys and virtual activities for applying educational models within e-learning graduate programs. Firstly, we focus on the outcomes derived from teachers’ and students’ participation in virtual classroom forums and, secondly, on the determinants of students’ satisfaction in the graduate program. Data analyses show that teachers’ and students’ participation in forums as dynamic educational activities are positively correlated with students’ general satisfaction. To study the determinants of students’ satisfaction, we perform a regression analysis that considers as explanatory variables educational planning, teaching qualifications and development of learning, as well as of a number of controls related to the virtual learning environment and participation in the academic program. According to the obtained results, teaching skills and learning environments are associated with higher students’ satisfaction in a virtual learning environment. This type of analysis is of great interest in a social environment characterized by increasing communication via electronic networking. We find that dynamic educational activities and dimensions taken on board on students’ surveys are related to students’ satisfaction in e-learning graduate programs

Detection of Atrial Fibrillation Driver Locations Using CNN and Body Surface Potentials

[EN] Atrial fibrillation (AF) is characterized by complex and irregular propagation patterns, and AF onset locations and drivers responsible for its perpetuation are main targets for ablation procedures. Several Deep Learningbased methods have proposed to detect AF, but the estimation of the atrial area where the drivers are found is a topic where further research is needed. In this work, we propose to estimate the zone where AF drivers are found from body surface potentials (BSPs) and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), modeling a supervised classification problem. Accuracy in the test set was 0.89 when using noisy BSPs (SNR=20dB), while the Cohen¿s Kappa was 0.85. Therefore, the proposed method could help to identify target regions for ablation using a non-invasive procedure, and avoiding the use of ECG Imaging (ECGI).This work has been partially supported by: Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovacion (PID2019-105032GB-I00), Instituto de Salud Carlos III, and Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovacion y Universidades (supported by FEDER Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional PI17/01106 and RYC2018-024346B-750), Consejeria de Ciencia, Universidades e Innovacion of the Comunidad de Madrid through the program RIS3 (S-2020/L2-622), EIT Health (Activity code 19600, EIT Health is supported by EIT, a body of the European Union) and the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Skodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 860974.Cámara-Vázquez, MÁ.; Hernández-Romero, I.; Morgado-Reyes, E.; Guillem Sánchez, MS.; Climent, AM.; Barquero-Pérez, Ó. (2021). Detection of Atrial Fibrillation Driver Locations Using CNN and Body Surface Potentials. 1-4. https://doi.org/10.22489/CinC.2021.2561

EVAI: e-learning platform : student’s reference guide

La plataforma EVAI és un entorn d'aprenentatge virtual (e-learning) basat en programari obert de font lliure. Referent al programari, i com les altres plataformes com Moodle, utilitza el sistema d'Internet conegut com WAMP (Windows, Apatxe, MySql/MariaDB i PHP). Però també, EVAI és un projecte actiu, dinàmic, constantment en evolució, la manifestació operativa de la qual és la plataforma virtual que presentem ací. EVAI no és solament una plataforma d'ensenyament en línia. Més aviat, és una filosofia d'ensenyament i aprenentatge compartida i experimentada en temps real, que es renova i es regenera a través de la interacció entre els seus usuaris (professorat i estudiants). És, al mateix temps, pragmàtica i abstracta perquè gradualment es construeix dia a dia, quan la pensem, la utilitzem i la representem

Regularization Techniques for ECG Imaging during Atrial Fibrillation: A Computational Study

The inverse problem of electrocardiography is usually analyzed during stationary rhythms. However, the performance of the regularization methods under fibrillatory conditions has not been fully studied. In this work, we assessed different regularization techniques during atrial fibrillation (AF) for estimating four target parameters, namely, epicardial potentials, dominant frequency (DF), phase maps, and singularity point (SP) location. We use a realistic mathematical model of atria and torso anatomy with three different electrical activity patterns (i.e., sinus rhythm, simple AF, and complex AF). Body surface potentials (BSP) were simulated using Boundary Element Method and corrupted with white Gaussian noise of different powers. Noisy BSPs were used to obtain the epicardial potentials on the atrial surface, using 14 different regularization techniques. DF, phase maps, and SP location were computed from estimated epicardial potentials. Inverse solutions were evaluated using a set of performance metrics adapted to each clinical target. For the case of SP location, an assessment methodology based on the spatial mass function of the SP location, and four spatial error metrics was proposed. The role of the regularization parameter for Tikhonov-based methods, and the effect of noise level and imperfections in the knowledge of the transfer matrix were also addressed. Results showed that the Bayes maximum-a-posteriori method clearly outperforms the rest of the techniques but requires a priori information about the epicardial potentials. Among the purely non-invasive techniques. Tikhonov-based methods performed as well as more complex techniques in realistic fibrillatory conditions, with a slight gain between 0.02 and 0.2 in terms of the correlation coefficient. Also, the use of a constant regularization parameter may be advisable since the performance was similar to that obtained with a variable parameter (indeed there was no difference for the zero-order Tikhonov method in complex fibrillatory conditions). Regarding the different targets. DF and SP location estimation were more robust with respect to pattern complexity and noise, and most algorithms provided a reasonable estimation of these parameters, even when the epicardial potentials estimation was inaccurate. Finally, the proposed evaluation procedure and metrics represent a suitable framework for techniques benchmarking and provide useful insights for the clinical practice.This work has been partially supported by TEC2013-46067-R (Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad, Spanish Government).Figuera C; Suárez Gutiérrez V; Hernández-Romero, I.; Rodrigo Bort, M.; Liberos Mascarell, A.; Atienza, F.; Guillem Sánchez, MS.... (2016). Regularization Techniques for ECG Imaging during Atrial Fibrillation: A Computational Study. Frontiers in Physiology. 7(466):1-17. https://doi.org/10.3389/fphys.2016.00466S117746

Lineage-specific function of Engrailed-2 in the progression of chronic myelogenous leukemia to T-cell blast crisis

In hematopoietic malignancies, oncogenic alterations interfere with cellular differentiation and lead to tumoral development. Identification of the proteins regulating differentiation is essential to understand how they are altered in malignancies. Chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML) is a biphasic disease initiated by an alteration taking place in hematopoietic stem cells. CML progresses to a blast crisis (BC) due to a secondary differentiation block in any of the hematopoietic lineages. However, the molecular mechanisms of CML evolution to T-cell BC remain unclear. Here, we have profiled the changes in DNA methylation patterns in human samples from BC-CML, in order to identify genes whose expression is epigenetically silenced during progression to T-cell lineage-specific BC. We have found that the CpG-island of the ENGRAILED-2 (EN2) gene becomes methylated in this progression. Afterwards, we demonstrate that En2 is expressed during T-cell development in mice and humans. Finally, we further show that genetic deletion of En2 in a CML transgenic mouse model induces a T-cell lineage BC that recapitulates human disease. These results identify En2 as a new regulator of T-cell differentiation whose disruption induces a malignant T-cell fate in CML progression, and validate the strategy used to identify new developmental regulators of hematopoiesis.Research at C.C.’s lab was partially supported by FEDER, Fondo de Investigaciones Sanitarias, CSIC P.I.E., Junta de Castilla y León, and from an institutional grant from the Fundación Ramón Areces. Research in ISG group is partially supported by FEDER and by MICINN (SAF2012-32810), by MEC OncoBIO Consolider-Ingenio 2010 (Ref. CSD2007-0017), by NIH grant (R01 CA109335-04A1), the ARIMMORA project (FP7-ENV-2011, European Union Seventh Framework Program), by Junta de Castilla y León (BIO/SA06/13) and by “Proyecto en red de investigación en células madre tumorales” supported by Obra Social Kutxa y Consejería de Sanidad de la Junta de Castilla y Leon. C.V.D.’s research is supported by Junta de Castilla y León (proyecto de investigación en biomedicina SAN/39/2010). J.A.M.C.’s research is supported by the Instituto de Salud Carlos III (ISCIII), grants FIS-PI12/00202 and RTICC-RD12/0036/0063. All Spanish funding is co-sponsored by the European Union FEDER program. I.S.G. is an API lab of the EuroSyStem project and a partner of DECIDE European network. F.A.-J. and E.C.S. were supported by Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation fellowships. E.C.-S. was a “Residencia de Estudiantes” Fellow. A.T.N. was the recipient of a “Beca de Postgrado de la Fundación Ramón Areces/UAM.”Peer Reviewe

Studying the present, understanding the past

Actuopaleontology is an essential discipline to understand the fossil record. It uses the present as a key to understand the past. Actualistic paleontology has been largely used in a vast array of paleontological fields such as ichnology, paleoart or functional morphology. Given its relevance in current and past paleontological studies, here we examine the advantages of this discipline, focusing in four recent works. In them, the study of contemporary groups allows us to know better if it is possible: to know how reliable is amber when studying extinct arthropods communities; to make trophic inferences about extinct elasmobranchs by dental microwear analysis; to reconstruct the morphology of certain fishes depending on its ecological niche or to find the type of flight in extinct birds considering their humerus morphology

Valoración patrimonial de los yacimientos del Mioceno inferior del Barranco de Campisano de la Cuenca de Ribesalbes-Alcora (Araia d'Alcora, Castelló, España)

En el presente trabajo se realiza una valoración patrimonial del conjunto de yacimientos del Mioceno inferior del barranco de Campisano (cuenca de Ribesalbes-Alcora). Los resultados obtenidos al calcular los parámetros según la metodología del Inventario Español de Lugares de Interés Geológico (IELIG) ponen de manifi esto el alto valor científi co y didáctico de la zona, así como un valor turístico y recreativo medio. El riesgo de degradación es medio, por lo que debería ser tenido en cuenta para la protección de los yacimientos a corto plazo. En consonancia con estos datos, se propone la consideración de los yacimientos como LIG (Lugar de Interés Geológico) y su inclusión en el IELIG

Clinical findings and prognosis of Danon’s Disease. An analysis from the Spanish multicenter Danon Registry.

Introducción y objetivos: La enfermedad de Danon (ED) es una enfermedad poco frecuente producida por mutaciones en el gen LAMP2. Se considera una enfermedad multisistémica caracterizada por: miocardiopatía hipertrófica con preexcitación y gran hipertrofia, discapacidad intelectual, miopatía, presentación infantil y peor pronóstico en varones. Existen pocas series que permitan conocer las características clínicas y el pronóstico de la ED en detalle. Métodos Estudio retrospectivo basado en el análisis de los registros clínicos de los pacientes con ED seguidos en 10 hospitales españoles. Resultados Se incluyeron 28 pacientes (3220años, 79% mujeres). Los varones demostraron una elevada prevalencia de manifestaciones extracardiacas: miopatía (80%), trastornos del aprendizaje (83%) y alteraciones visuales (60%), siendo hallazgos infrecuentes en las mujeres (5%, 0% y 24%, respectivamente). Aunque la miocardiopatía hipertrófica era la cardiopatía más habitual (67%), el grosor máximo ventricular fue 157 mm y 12 pacientes (10 mujeres) se presentaron con miocardiopatía dilatada. Sólo 11 pacientes (46%) (4 hombres y 7 mujeres) mostraron preexcitación y en 16 (67%) la enfermedad debutó por encima de los 20 años. Tras una mediana de seguimiento de 4 años (P25-752-9), 4 varones (67%) y 9 mujeres (41%) fallecieron o requirieron un trasplante. Tanto la afectación cardiaca como los eventos adversos ocurrieron más tardíamente en mujeres (37±9 vs 23±16 y 38±21 vs 20±11 años, respectivamente). Conclusiones. Las características clínicas de la ED difieren substancialmente de lo tradicionalmente considerado. La edad de presentación de la ED es más tardía, no se expresa como una patología multisistémica en mujeres y la preexcitación es poco frecuente. Aunque las mujeres presentan mal pronóstico, los eventos adversos ocurren a una edad más avanzada.Background Danon's disease (DD) is a rare disease caused by mutations in the LAMP2 gene. It is considered a multisystemic disease characterized by: hypertrophic cardiomyopathy with preexcitation and ventricular hypertrophy, intellectual disability, myopathy, childhood presentation and worse prognosis in men. Available data regarding clinical characteristics and the prognosis of the DD are scarce. Methods Retrospective study based on the analysis of the clinical records of patients with ED from 10 Spanish hospitals. Results Twenty-eight patients were included (32±20 years, 79% women). Males showed a high prevalence of extracardiac manifestations: myopathy (80%), learning disorders (837%) and visual alterations (60%), which were uncommon findings in women (5%, 0% and 24%, respectively). Although hypertrophic cardiomyopathy was the most common form of heart disease (67%), maximum wall thickness was 15±7 mm and 12 patients (10 women) presented as dilated cardiomyopathy. Only 11 patients (467%) (4 men and 7 women) showed preexcitation and in 16 (67%) the disease started above 20 years-old. After a median follow-up of 4 years (P25-75: 2-9), 4 men (67%) and 9 women (41%) died or required a heart transplant. Both cardiac involvement and adverse events occurred later in women (37 ± 9 vs 23 ± 16 and 38± 21 vs 20 ± 11 years, respectively). Conclusions Clinical characteristics of DD differ substantially from what has been traditionally considered. ED usually presents at an increased age, is not a multisystemic disease in women and preexcitation is rare. Even though, women show also a poor prognosis, adverse events occur at a later age.pre-print518 K

Clinical and pathological characteristics of peripheral T-cell lymphomas in a Spanish population: a retrospective study

We investigated the clinicopathological features and prognostic factors of patients with peripheral T-cell lymphoma (PTCL) in 13 sites across Spain. Relevant clinical antecedents, CD30 expression and staining pattern, prognostic indices using the International Prognostic Index and the Intergruppo Italiano Linfomi system, treatments, and clinical outcomes were examined. A sizeable proportion of 175 patients had a history of immune-related disorders (autoimmune 16%, viral infections 17%, chemo/radiotherapy-treated carcinomas 19%). The median progression-free survival (PFS) and overall survival (OS) were 7·9 and 15·8 months, respectively. Prognostic indices influenced PFS and OS, with a higher number of adverse factors resulting in shorter survival (P 15% of cells were positive in anaplastic lymphoma kinase-positive and -negative anaplastic large-cell lymphoma and extranodal natural killer PTCL groups. We observed PTCL distribution across subtypes based on haematopathological re-evaluation. Poor prognosis, effect of specific prognostic indices, relevance of histopathological sub-classification, and response level to first-line treatment on outcomes were confirmed. Immune disorders amongst patients require further examination involving genetic studies and identification of associated immunosuppressive factors.This study was sponsored by Takeda

Role of age and comorbidities in mortality of patients with infective endocarditis

[Purpose]: The aim of this study was to analyse the characteristics of patients with IE in three groups of age and to assess the ability of age and the Charlson Comorbidity Index (CCI) to predict mortality. [Methods]: Prospective cohort study of all patients with IE included in the GAMES Spanish database between 2008 and 2015.Patients were stratified into three age groups:<65 years,65 to 80 years,and ≥ 80 years.The area under the receiver-operating characteristic (AUROC) curve was calculated to quantify the diagnostic accuracy of the CCI to predict mortality risk. [Results]: A total of 3120 patients with IE (1327 < 65 years;1291 65-80 years;502 ≥ 80 years) were enrolled.Fever and heart failure were the most common presentations of IE, with no differences among age groups.Patients ≥80 years who underwent surgery were significantly lower compared with other age groups (14.3%,65 years; 20.5%,65-79 years; 31.3%,≥80 years). In-hospital mortality was lower in the <65-year group (20.3%,<65 years;30.1%,65-79 years;34.7%,≥80 years;p < 0.001) as well as 1-year mortality (3.2%, <65 years; 5.5%, 65-80 years;7.6%,≥80 years; p = 0.003).Independent predictors of mortality were age ≥ 80 years (hazard ratio [HR]:2.78;95% confidence interval [CI]:2.32–3.34), CCI ≥ 3 (HR:1.62; 95% CI:1.39–1.88),and non-performed surgery (HR:1.64;95% CI:11.16–1.58).When the three age groups were compared,the AUROC curve for CCI was significantly larger for patients aged <65 years(p < 0.001) for both in-hospital and 1-year mortality. [Conclusion]: There were no differences in the clinical presentation of IE between the groups. Age ≥ 80 years, high comorbidity (measured by CCI),and non-performance of surgery were independent predictors of mortality in patients with IE.CCI could help to identify those patients with IE and surgical indication who present a lower risk of in-hospital and 1-year mortality after surgery, especially in the <65-year group