Availability and affordability of treatment for Human African Trypanosomiasis.

Human African Trypanosomiasis (HAT) is a re-emerging disease whose usual treatments are becoming less efficient because of the increasing parasite resistance. Availability of HAT drugs is poor and their production in danger because of technical, ecological and economic constraints. In view of this dramatic situation, a network involving experts from NGOs, WHO and pharmaceutical producers was commissioned with updating estimates of need for each HAT drug for the coming years; negotiations with potential producers of new drugs such as eflornithine; securing sustainable manufacturing of existing drugs; clinical research into new combinations of these drugs for first and second-line treatments; centralizing drug purchases and their distribution through a unique non-profit entity; and addressing regulatory and legal issues concerning new drugs

Diabetes Management with Insulin Pump Therapy and its Compliance in Adolescents

Glycemic control is difficult to achieve for the adolescent with type 1 diabetes mellites (TlDM). Intensive insulin therapy through continuous subcutaneous insulin infusion (CSII) with an insulin pump can give the adolescent better glycemic control and a more flexible schedule and lifestyle. The purpose of this project was to determine if insulin pump therapy among adolescents increases their compliance of their medical regimen and to increase awareness of diabetic educators of insulin pump therapy and it\u27s appropriateness among adolescent patients. An intensive literature review was conducted to detern1ine the current evidence on insulin pump therapy in adolescents and their compliance. There were nine areas of focus in this literature review: treatment difficulties of adolescents with TIDM, diabetes care, nutritional concerns, intensive insulin therapy, adolescents who will benefit from CSII, advantages of CSII, family involvement, keys to success with CSII, and concerns of CSII. At the culmination of the project, local diabetic educators will be given a presentation about insulin pump therapy in adolescents and its effects on compliance

Automatic Computation of Electrodes Trajectory for Deep Brain Stimulation

International audienceIn this paper, we propose an approach to find the optimal position of an electrode, for assisting surgeons in planning Deep Brain Stimulation. We first show how we formalized the rules governing this surgical procedure into geometric constraints. Then we explain our method, using a formal geometric solver, and a template built from 15 MRIs, used to propose a space of possible solutions and the optimal one. We show our results for the retrospective study on 8 implantations from 4 patients, and compare them with the trajectory of the electrode that was actually implanted. The results show a slight difference with the reference trajectories, with a better evaluation for our proposition

Où en est le foyer de trypanosomiase humaine de Mossaka (Congo) ?

Le foyer de Mossaka (sur la basse Sangha, région de la Cuvette au Congo) évolue depuis quelques années de façon inquiétante. En 1989, à la suite d'une prospection que nous avions réalisée dans le foyer, nous avions insisté sur l'urgence des mesures à prendre. Depuis, la situation s'est aggravée tant en ce qui concerne le nombre des malades dépistés (74 en 1987, 171 en 1989, 200 en 1991) qu'en ce qui concerne la population concernée (le foyer s'est étendu ; le nombre des villages ou l'on dépistait des malades est passé de 3 en 1987, à 12 en 1989 et 17 en 1991). Si des mesures ne sont pas prises rapidement, on ne peut que craindre une dramatique extension du foyer de la basse Sangha. (Résumé d'auteur

Comparison of junction temperature evaluations in a power IGBT module using an IR camera and three thermo-sensitive electrical parameters

The measurement of the junction temperature with thermo-sensitive electrical parameters (TSEPs) is largely used by electrical engineers or researchers but the obtained temperature value is generally not verified by any referential information of the actual chip temperature distribution. In this paper, we propose to use infrared (IR) measurements in order to evaluate the relevance of three commonly used TSEPs with IGBT chips: the saturation voltage under a low current, the gate-emitter voltage and the saturation current. The IR measurements are presented in details with an estimation of the emissivity of the black paint deposited on the power module. The temperatures obtained with IR measurements and with the different TSEPs are then compared in two cases: the use of only one chip and the use of two paralleled chips

Vision-based and marker-less surgical tool detection and tracking: a review of the literature

In recent years, tremendous progress has been made in surgical practice for example with Minimally Invasive Surgery (MIS). To overcome challenges coming from deported eye-to-hand manipulation, robotic and computer-assisted systems have been developed. Having real-time knowledge of the pose of surgical tools with respect to the surgical camera and underlying anatomy is a key ingredient for such systems. In this paper, we present a review of the literature dealing with vision-based and marker-less surgical tool detection. This paper includes three primary contributions: (1) identification and analysis of data-sets used for developing and testing detection algorithms, (2) in-depth comparison of surgical tool detection methods from the feature extraction process to the model learning strategy and highlight existing shortcomings, and (3) analysis of validation techniques employed to obtain detection performance results and establish comparison between surgical tool detectors. The papers included in the review were selected through PubMed and Google Scholar searches using the keywords: “surgical tool detection”, “surgical tool tracking”, “surgical instrument detection” and “surgical instrument tracking” limiting results to the year range 2000 2015. Our study shows that despite significant progress over the years, the lack of established surgical tool data-sets, and reference format for performance assessment and method ranking is preventing faster improvement

Dynamic Nuclear Polarization by Thermal Mixing Under Partial Saturation

We describe a low-temperature thermodynamic model for dynamic nuclear polarization (DNP) via continuous-wave partial saturation of electron spin resonance (ESR) lines that are both homogeneously and inhomogeneously broadened. It is a variant of a reasoning proposed by Borghini, which in turn used Redfield's thermodynamic treatment of saturation. Our variant is furthermore based on Provotorov's insight that under partial saturation of a coupled-spin system two distinct spin temperatures should appear in a thermodynamical theory. We apply our model to DNP results obtained at a temperature of 1.2K and in magnetic fields of 3.35 and 5T on 1-13C labeled sodium acetate dissolved in a frozen D2O/ethanol-d6 solution doped with the free radical TEMP