Prosper: image and robot-guided prostate brachytherapy

Brachytherapy for localized prostate cancer consists in destroying cancer by introducing iodine radioactive seeds into the gland through hollow needles. The planning of the position of the seeds and their introduction into the prostate is based on intra-operative ultrasound (US) imaging. We propose to optimize the global quality of the procedure by: i) using 3D US; ii) enhancing US data with MRI registration; iii) using a specially designed needle-insertion robot, connected to the imaging data. The imaging methods have been successfully tested on patient data while the robot accuracy has been evaluated on a realistic deformable phantom

Financial Education for Child and Youth Care Practitioners

This paper aims to identify the needs of financial education of Child and Youth Care practitioners (CYCPs). There is not much knowledge about the deficits of financial education of young people in care (YPC) and young care leavers (YCL) and we want to bring more light into this difficult topic. We use focus group interviews in five different countries (Bulgaria, Austria, Germany, Poland, and France) to find the needs of the CYCPs with a special focus on the needs of YCLs. Our focus groups showed that CYCPs do not have enough basic and further education to handle the situation with YPC and YCLs successfully. We found that the needs of the YPC and YCLs concerning financial education are consistent with the needed knowledge, skills and competences of the CYCPs. Some needs of CYCPs and young people in care are to understand the meaning of money, to handle pocket money, to understand the logic of credit and financial contracts and to know how an online bank account works

Conditioning Medicine A new pharmacological preconditioning-based target: from drosophila to kidney transplantation

International audienceOne of the biggest challenges in medicine is to dampen the pathophysiological stress induced by an episode of ischemia. Such stress, due to various pathological or clinical situations, follows a restriction in blood and oxygen supply to tissue, causing a shortage of oxygen and nutrients that are required for cellular metabolism. Ischemia can cause irreversible damage to target tissue leading to a poor physiological recovery outcome for the patient. Contrariwise, preconditioning by brief periods of ischemia has been shown in multiple organs to confer tolerance against subsequent normally lethal ischemia. By definition, preconditioning of organs must be applied preemptively. This limits the applicability of preconditioning in clinical situations, which arise unpredictably, such as myocardial infarction and stroke. There are, however, clinical situations that arise as a result of ischemia-reperfusion injury, which can be anticipated, and are therefore adequate candidates for preconditioning. Organ and more particularly kidney transplantation, the optimal treatment for suitable patients with end stage renal disease (ESRD), is a predictable surgery that permits the use of preconditioning protocols to prepare the organ for subsequent ischemic/reperfusion stress. It therefore seems crucial to develop appropriate preconditioning protocols against ischemia that will occur under transplantation conditions, which up to now mainly referred to mechanical ischemic preconditioning that triggers innate responses. It is not known if preconditioning has to be applied to the donor, the recipient, or both. No drug/target pair has been envisioned and validated in the clinic. Options for identifying new target/drug pairs involve the use of model animals, such as drosophila, in which some physiological pathways, such as the management of oxygen, are highly conserved across evolution. Oxygen is the universal element of life existence on earth. In this review we focus on a very specific pathway of pharmacological preconditioning identified in drosophila that was successfully transferred to mammalian models that has potential application in human health. Very few mechanisms identified in these model animals have been translated to an upper evolutionary level. This review highlights the commonality between oxygen regulation between diverse animals

TRF2 controls telomeric nucleosome organization in a cell cycle phase-dependent manner

Mammalian telomeres stabilize chromosome ends as a result of their assembly into a peculiar form of chromatin comprising a complex of non-histone proteins named shelterin. TRF2, one of the shelterin components, binds to the duplex part of telomeric DNA and is essential to fold the telomeric chromatin into a protective cap. Although most of the human telomeric DNA is organized into tightly spaced nucleosomes, their role in telomere protection and how they interplay with telomere-specific factors in telomere organization is still unclear. In this study we investigated whether TRF2 can regulate nucleosome assembly at telomeres.By means of chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChIP) and Micrococcal Nuclease (MNase) mapping assay, we found that the density of telomeric nucleosomes in human cells was inversely proportional to the dosage of TRF2 at telomeres. This effect was not observed in the G1 phase of the cell cycle but appeared coincident of late or post-replicative events. Moreover, we showed that TRF2 overexpression altered nucleosome spacing at telomeres increasing internucleosomal distance. By means of an in vitro nucleosome assembly system containing purified histones and remodeling factors, we reproduced the short nucleosome spacing found in telomeric chromatin. Importantly, when in vitro assembly was performed in the presence of purified TRF2, nucleosome spacing on a telomeric DNA template increased, in agreement with in vivo MNase mapping.Our results demonstrate that TRF2 negatively regulates the number of nucleosomes at human telomeres by a cell cycle-dependent mechanism that alters internucleosomal distance. These findings raise the intriguing possibility that telomere protection is mediated, at least in part, by the TRF2-dependent regulation of nucleosome organization

Load allocation problem for optimal design of aircraft electrical power system

More and more electric systems are embedded in today aircraft. As a result, the complexity of electrical power system design is increasing and the need of generic and efficient design methods is today required. Among numerous design tasks, the allocation of electric systems on the busbars of the electrical power system is considered as an important one since it has a direct impact on the aircraft mass. But due to the high number of possible allocations and regarding the large diversity of potential sizing cases for the equipments, finding the optimal allocation of electric loads is a hard task. In this paper, the problem is formalized mathematically. Then, four stochastic optimization methods are assessed on complex load allocation problems. Based on this assessment, a genetic algorithm using niching method is considered as the most appropriate algorithm for solving this aircraft design proble

Considering the degradation effects of amino-functional plasma polymer coatings for biomedical application

Materials for biomedical applications typically involve surface engineering. Scaffolds used for tissue engineering, for example, require a surface functionalization in order to support cell growth. The deposition of functional plasma polymer coatings seems to be an attractive approach to modify substrates for biomedical applications.Possible degradation of highly functional plasma polymers and the effect of its degradation products on cell growth, however, are not yet investigated in detail. Plasma polymer formation is governed by gas phase (mainly determining the chemical composition) and surface processes (inducing cross-linking) which both influence the incorporation of amino groups in a-C:H:N coatings deposited by NH₃/C₂H₄ discharges. Aging is studied in air and in aqueous conditions revealing the degradation of such plasma polymers (loss in thickness and loss of amino groups). Degradation products seem to influence viability and proliferation of mouse skeletal muscle cells on electrospun poly(ε-caprolactone) scaffolds. Thus, possible chemical changes as a function of time or exposure to different media must be taken into account in the design of functional plasma polymer coatings for biomedical applications in order to avoid possible adverse effects on cell growth

Interior penalty discontinuous Galerkin method for coupled elasto-acoustic media

We introduce a high order interior penalty discontinuous Galerkin scheme for the nu- merical solution of wave propagation in coupled elasto-acoustic media. A displacement formulation is used, which allows for the solution of the acoustic and elastic wave equations within the same framework. Weakly imposing the correct transmission condition is achieved by the derivation of adapted numerical fluxes. This generalization does not weaken the discontinuous Galerkin method, thus hp-non-conforming meshes are supported. Interior penalty discontinuous Galerkin methods were originally developed for scalar equations. Therefore, we propose an optimized formulation for vectorial equations more suited than the straightforward standard transposition. We prove consis- tency and stability of the proposed schemes. To study the numerical accuracy and convergence, we achieve a classic plane wave analysis. Finally, we show the relevance of our method on numerical experiments