‘Opioidergic postconditioning’ of heart muscle during ischemia/reperfusion injury

  Background: Ischemic preconditioning and postconditioning are the novel strategies of attaining cardioprotection against ischemia/reperfusion (I/R) injury. Previous studies suggested the role of opioid pathway, however the class of opioid receptors responsible for this effect in humans remains unknown. The aim of the study was to assess the influence of opioids on simulated I/R injury outcomes in the hu­man myocardium. Methods: Trabeculae of the human right atrium were electrically driven in organ bath and subjected to simulated I/R injury. Morphine (10–4M, 10–5M, 10–6M) or d-opioid receptor agonist DADLE (10–8M, 10–7M, 10–6M) was used at the time of re-oxygenation. Additional trabecula was subjected to hypoxia protocol only (Control). Contractive force of the myocardium was assessed as the maximal force of a contraction (Amax), the rate of rise of the force of a contraction (Slope L) and relaxation as the rate of decay of the force of a contraction (Slope T). Results: Application of morphine 10–4M resulted in increase of Amax, Slope L and Slope T during re-oxygenation period as compared to Control (77.99 ± 1.5% vs. 68.8 ± 2.2%, p < 0.05; 45.72 ± 2.9% vs. 34.12 ± 5.1%, p < 0.05; 40.95 ± 2.5% vs. 32.37 ± 4.3%, p < 0.05). Parameters were not significantly different in the lower morphine concentrations. Application of DADLE 10–6M resulted in decrease of Amax and Slope L as compared to Control (68.13 ± 5.5% vs. 76.62 ± 6.6%, p < 0.05; 28.29 ± 2.2 vs. 34.80 ± 3.9%, p < 0.05). Conclusions: At re-oxygenation, morphine improves systolic and diastolic function of the human myo­cardium in the dose-dependent manner. Delta-opioid receptor stimulation attenuates systolic function of human heart muscle which remains in contrast to previous reports with animal models of I/R injury. (Cardiol J 2017; 24, 4: 419–425

Assessment of measurement reliability for the IPN test in cardiac patients

Cardiological diagnostics use maximal and submaximal tests with increasing load. Maximal stress tests are currently considered the gold standard. The Institut für Prävention und Nachsorge, Cologne (IPN) test may be an alternative when maximal patient load is not indicated. The universality of the test is well-documented in sport, but the reliability of this test is unknown. The aim of this study was to assess between-trial and between-day reliability for parameters assessed by the IPN stress test in cardiological patients.: In a study of 24 patients aged 39 to 79 years with cardiovascular diseases, the IPN cycle ergometer short test was performed (submaximal performance test). The reliability of heart rate, systolic and diastolic pressure, absolute power at submaximal load, relative performance at submaximal load and target heart rate were assessed. Good (Interclass Correlation Coefficient (ICC) values ranged from 0.832 to 0.894) and excellent (ICC values ranged from 0.904 to 0.969) between-trial reliability was noted. Between-day reliability was good (ICC values from 0.777 to 0.895) and excellent (ICC values from 0.922 to 0.950). The obtained results suggest that the IPN test may be a reliable tool for use in the assessment of cardiological patients, avoiding the implementation of maximal efforts when excessive patient load is not recommended

Towards an event annotated corpus of Polish

Towards an event annotated corpus of PolishThe paper presents a typology of events built on the basis of TimeML specification adapted to Polish language. Some changes were introduced to the definition of the event categories and a motivation for event categorization was formulated. The event annotation task is presented on two levels – ontology level (language independent) and text mentions (language dependant). The various types of event mentions in Polish text are discussed. A procedure for annotation of event mentions in Polish texts is presented and evaluated. In the evaluation a randomly selected set of documents from the Corpus of Wrocław University of Technology (called KPWr) was annotated by two linguists and the annotator agreement was calculated. The evaluation was done in two iterations. After the first evaluation we revised and improved the annotation procedure. The second evaluation showed a significant improvement of the agreement between annotators. The current work was focused on annotation and categorisation of event mentions in text. The future work will be focused on description of event with a set of attributes, arguments and relations

Temporal Expressions in Polish Corpus KPWr

Temporal Expressions in Polish Corpus KPWrThis article presents the result of the recent research in the interpretation of Polish expressions that refer to time. These expressions are the source of information when something happens, how often something occurs or how long something lasts. Temporal information, which can be extracted from text automatically, plays significant role in many information extraction systems, such as question answering, discourse analysis, event recognition and many more. We prepared PLIMEX — a broad description of Polish temporal expressions with annotation guidelines, based on the state-of-the-art solutions for English, mainly TimeML specification. We also adapted the solution to capture the local semantics of temporal expressions, called LTIMEX. Temporal description also supports further event identification and extends event description model, focusing at anchoring events in time, ordering events and reasoning about the persistence of events. We prepared the specification, which is designed to address these issues and we annotated all documents in Polish Corpus of Wroclaw University of Technology (KPWr) using our annotation guidelines

Rola terapii przezcewnikowych w leczeniu ostrej zatorowości płucnej — opinia Polskiej Inicjatywy PERT, Sekcji Krążenia Płucnego, Asocjacji Interwencji Sercowo-Naczyniowych i Asocjacji Intensywnej Terapii Kardiologicznej Polskiego Towarzystwa Kardiologicznego

Dzięki postępom w zakresie technologii kardiologii interwencyjnej leczenie przezcewnikowe stało się w ostatnich latach realną opcją terapeutyczną w leczeniu pacjentów z ostrą zatorowością płucną z wysokim ryzykiem wczesnej śmiertelności. Obecnie stosowane techniki przezcewnikowe umożliwiają miejscową fibrynolizę lub embolektomię przy minimalnym ryzyku powikłań. Stąd mogą być rozważane u pacjentów z grupy wysokiego ryzyka jako alternatywa dla chirurgicznej embolektomii płucnej, gdy systemowa tromboliza jest przeciwwskazana lub nieskuteczna. Rozważane są również u pacjentów z grupy średniego–wysokiego ryzyka, u których pomimo leczenia przeciwzakrzepowego nie uzyskano poprawy lub nastąpiło pogorszenie stanu klinicznego. Celem artykułu było przedstawienie roli technik przezcewnikowych w leczeniu chorych z ostrą zatorowością płucną zgodnie z aktualną wiedzą i opinią ekspertów. Leczenie interwencyjne opisano w szerszym kontekście organizacji opieki nad pacjentem. Przedstawiono organizację i zadania zespołu szybkiego reagowania w zatorowości płucnej, rolę obrazowania przedzabiegowego, zasady antykoagulacji okołozabiegowej, kryteria kwalifikacji pacjentów, wyboru odpowiedniego czasu interwencji oraz rolę intensywnej terapii. Szczegółowo omówiono dostępne terapie przezcewnikowe, w tym wystandaryzowane protokoły, definicje sukcesu i niepowodzenia procedury. Niniejszy dokument został opracowany we współpracy z ekspertami z różnych polskich towarzystw naukowych, co podkreśla rolę pracy zespołowej w opiece nad chorym z ostrą zatorowością płucną

Role of catheter-directed therapies in the treatment of acute pulmonary embolism. Expert opinion of the Polish PERT Initiative, Working Group on Pulmonary Circulation, Association of Cardiovascular Interventions, and Association of Intensive Cardiac Care

Thanks to advances in interventional cardiology technologies the catheter-directed treatment has become recently a viable therapeutic option in the treatment of patients with acute pulmonary embolism at high risk of early mortality. Current transcatheter techniques allow local fibrinolysis or embolectomy with minimal risk of complications. Therefore they can be considered in high risk patients as an alternative to surgical pulmonary embolectomy when systemic thrombolysis is contraindicated or ineffective. They are also considered in patients with intermediate — high risk with a lack of improvement or clinical deterioration despite anticoagulation. The purpose of this article is to present the role of transcatheter techniques in the treatment of patients with acute pulmonary embolism. We describe current knowledge and experts’ opinion in this field. Interventional treatment is described in the broader context of patient care organization and therapeutic modalities. We present the organization and responsibilities of pulmonary embolism response teams, the role of pre-procedural imaging, peri-procedural anticoagulation, patients selection, timing of intervention and intensive care support. Currently available catheter directed therapies are discussed in detail including standardized protocols, definitions of procedure success and failure. This expert opinion has been developed in collaboration with experts from various Polish scientific societies signifying the role of teamwork in the care for patients with acute pulmonary embolism

Rational Speculative Bubbles in the Fine Wine Investment Market

The paper focuses on detection of rational speculative bubbles in fine wineinvestment market. Our research was conducted using recursive tests. The chosenmethod additionally allowed us to set time frames for potential bubbles. Theresults have shown that speculative bubble episodes appeared between 2006–2007both in fine wine market and in most of selected traditional stock exchanges.However, only the fine wine market recorded the second wave of speculativebubbles between 2010–2011

Towards Recognition of Spatial Relations between Entities for Polish

Towards Recognition of Spatial Relations between Entities for Polish In this paper, the problem of spatial relation recognition in Polish is examined. We present the different ways of distributing spatial information throughout a sentence by reviewing the lexical and grammatical signals of various relations between objects. We focus on the spatial usage of prepositions and their meaning, determined by the ‘conceptual’ schemes they constitute. We also discuss the feasibility of a comprehensive recognition of spatial relations between objects expressed in different ways by reviewing the existing tools and resources for text processing in Polish. As a result, we propose a heuristic method for the recognition of spatial relations expressed in various phrase structures called spatial expressions. We propose a definition of spatial expressions by taking into account the limitations of the available tools for the Polish language. A set of rules is used to generate candidates of spatial expressions which are later tested against a set of semantic constraints. The results of our work on recognition of spatial expressions in Polish texts were partially presented in (Marcińczuk, Oleksy, & Wieczorek, 2016). In that paper we focused on a detailed analysis of errors obtained using a set of basic morphosyntactic patterns for generating spatial expression candidates - we identified and described the most common sources of errors, i.e. incorrectly recognized or unrecognized expressions. In this paper we focused mainly on the preliminary stages of spatial expression recognition. We presented an extensive review on how the spatial information can be encoded in the text, types of spatial triggers in Polish and a detailed evaluation of morphosyntactic patterns which can be used to generate spatial expression candidates.   Rozpoznawanie relacji przestrzennych między obiektami fizycznymi w języku polskim Artykuł dotyczy zagadnienia rozpoznawania relacji przestrzennych w języku polskim. Autorzy przedstawili różne sposoby przekazywania w tekstach informacji na temat relacji przestrzennych między obiektami fizycznymi, uwzględniając sygnały o charakterze leksykalnym i gramatycznym. Istotną częścią artykułu jest omówienie znaczenia przyimków użytych w celu wyrażenia relacji przestrzennych. Znaczenie to kształtowane jest przez schematy konceptualne współtworzone przez poszczególne przyimki. Omówiono również możliwości kompleksowego rozpoznawania relacji przestrzennych wyrażonych za pomocą różnych środków językowych. Służy temu przegląd istniejących zasobów i narzędzi przetwarzania języka polskiego. Jako rezultat autorzy proponują heurystyczną metodę rozpoznawania relacji przestrzennych realizowanych językowo za pomocą struktur składniowych określonych jako wyrażenia przestrzenne. W artykule zaprezentowano definicję wyrażeń przestrzennych uwzględniającą specyfikę narzędzi dostępnych do przetwarzania języka polskiego. Zestaw reguł składniowych umożliwia wytypowanie fraz – kandydatów kwalifikujących się jako wyrażenia przestrzenne, które następnie zostają porównane z adekwatnym zestawem ograniczeń semantycznych