Access to diagnosis and treatment of Chagas disease/infection in endemic and non-endemic countries in the XXI century.

In this article, Médicos Sin Fronteras (MSF) Spain faces the challenge of selecting, piecing together, and conveying in the clearest possible way, the main lessons learnt over the course of the last seven years in the world of medical care for Chagas disease. More than two thousand children under the age of 14 have been treated; the majority of whom come from rural Latin American areas with difficult access. It is based on these lessons learnt, through mistakes and successes, that MSF advocates that medical care for patients with Chagas disease be a reality, in a manner which is inclusive (not exclusive), integrated (with medical, psychological, social, and educational components), and in which the patient is actively followed. This must be a multi-disease approach with permanent quality controls in place based on primary health care (PHC). Rapid diagnostic tests and new medications should be available, as well as therapeutic plans and patient management (including side effects) with standardised flows for medical care for patients within PHC in relation to secondary and tertiary level, inclusive of epidemiological surveillance systems

Simulated evaluation of faceted browsing based on feature selection

In this paper we explore the limitations of facet based browsing which uses sub-needs of an information need for querying and organising the search process in video retrieval. The underlying assumption of this approach is that the search effectiveness will be enhanced if such an approach is employed for interactive video retrieval using textual and visual features. We explore the performance bounds of a faceted system by carrying out a simulated user evaluation on TRECVid data sets, and also on the logs of a prior user experiment with the system. We first present a methodology to reduce the dimensionality of features by selecting the most important ones. Then, we discuss the simulated evaluation strategies employed in our evaluation and the effect on the use of both textual and visual features. Facets created by users are simulated by clustering video shots using textual and visual features. The experimental results of our study demonstrate that the faceted browser can potentially improve the search effectiveness

Flowmeter and Ground Penetrating Radar: comparison between hydrogeological and geophysical methods

We discuss a comparison between saturated hydraulic conductivity calculated with Electromagnetic Borehole Flowmeter (EBF) and water content obtained by Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) Zero Offset Profile (ZOP

Quantitative Structure-Property Relationships for Predicting the Retention Indices of Fragrances on Stationary Phases of Different Polarity

El objetivo de este trabajo fue el desarrollo de relaciones cuantitativas estructura–propiedad predictivas para el modelado de índices de retención (I) de fragancias, medidas en tres fases estacionarias de diferente polaridad: DB–225MS, HP5–MS y HP–1. Se ha prestado particular atención al curado de los datos experimentales. Posteriormente, se usó el método de subconjuntos balanceados (BSM) para dividir cada base de datos en grupos de calibración, validación y predicción. Los modelos se construyeron a partir de 1819 descriptores moleculares independientes de la conformación, los cuales fueron analizados mediante el método de reemplazo (RM) para la selección de los mismos, con la finalidad de obtener los mejores modelos. Para la fase estacionaria DB–225MS se obtuvo un modelo basado en cuatro descriptores, mientras que para las columnas HP5–MS y HP–1 se propusieron modelos con tres descriptores. Los modelos fueron validados mediante validación cruzada de dejar–uno–fuera y dejar–varios–fuera, así como otros criterios de validación. Adicionalmente, con la finalidad de cumplir los principios propuestos por la Organization for Economic Co–operation and Development (OECD), la capacidad predictiva de los modelos se evaluó mediante la predicción de los índices de retención del grupo externo de predicción, el dominio de aplicabilidad fue apropiadamente definido y se realizó una interpretación de cada descriptor molecular involucrado.The purpose of this work was to develop predictive quantitative structure–property relationships for modeling the retention indices (I) of fragrances measured in three stationary phases of different polarities: DB–225MS, HP5–MS and HP–1. Attention was paid to the curation of the experimental data. Subsequently, the Balanced Subsets method (BSM) was used to split each dataset into training, validation and test sets. Models were established by using 1819 conformation–independent molecular descriptors which were analyzed by the replacement method (RM) variable subset selection in order to obtain the optimal models. A four–descriptor model was obtained for the DB–225MS stationary phase while a three–parametric model was proposed for both the HP5–MS and HP–1 columns. Models were validated by means of the leave–one–out and leave–many–out cross–validation procedures, as well as other validation criteria. Moreover, in order to accomplish the principles proposed by the Organization for Economic Co–operation and Development (OECD), the model’s predictive ability was measured by predicting retention indices of the external test set. The applicability domain was properly defined and the interpretation of each of the molecular descriptors used in this study was provided.Fil: Rojas Villa, Cristian Xavier. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - La Plata. Instituto de Investigaciones Fisicoquímicas Teóricas y Aplicadas. Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas. Instituto de Investigaciones Fisicoquímicas Teóricas y Aplicadas; ArgentinaFil: Duchowicz, Pablo Román. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - La Plata. Instituto de Investigaciones Fisicoquímicas Teóricas y Aplicadas. Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas. Instituto de Investigaciones Fisicoquímicas Teóricas y Aplicadas; ArgentinaFil: Tripaldi, P.. Universidad de Azuay; EcuadorFil: Pis Diez, Reinaldo. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - La Plata. Centro de Química Inorgánica "Dr. Pedro J. Aymonino". Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas. Centro de Química Inorgánica "Dr. Pedro J. Aymonino"; Argentin

Inundated Area Delineation Using MODIS Data: Towards a Global Scale Geo-Database of Flood Events

The availability of global and accurate information is the primary factor affecting the possibility of planning and managing effective disaster response strategies, above all in less developed countries. The second determinant factor that avoids the full spreading of remote sensing technologies is cost-effectiveness and steadiness of results. This paper illustrates a straightforward method for rapid retrieval of inundation maps at regional and global scale by processing MODIS data with the Spectral-Temporal Principal Components Analysis and Digital Terrain Model filtering. Case studies are presented for three different vulnerable regions in developing countries struck by a severe river flood during the last year (2005, from spring to fall): India, Pakistan and Romania. For all the events studied it was obtained an overall accuracy greater than 95% and a kappa coefficient grater than 0.70, demonstrating this methodology is very accurate in mapping inundated areas. Moreover, the integration with vector data (such as roads, railways or urbanized areas) may be used to fast detect infrastructure damages at regional and global scale. This work is the first step to develop a global geo-database of flood-affected areas, a basic tool for helping public administrators in efficiently managing natural hazards. This is especially useful for less developed countries, which unfortunately suffer the heaviest damages because of the high density of population and the scarcity of prevention and rapid response strategies

Monsoon Flooding Response: a Multi-scale Approach to Water-extent Change Detection

This paper has the aim of illustrating an automatic and speditive way for retrieving inundation extent from multispectral and multitemporal satellite data, together with land-cover changes caused by flooding events, which is a fundamental issue for managing a reconstruction plan after the event. A straightforward method to map inundated areas was applied in the North-Eastern region of Bangladesh, heavily struck by monsoonal rains in September 2000. This method in based on the Principal Components Transform (PCT) of multispectral satellite data, in its Spectral-Temporal implementation, followed by logical filtering and image segmentation, in order to reach the needed coherency of the results. The use of multiresolution data (28.5-meters ground resolution Landsat-7/ETM+ and 1,100-meters ground resolution NOAA-14/AVHRR) makes possible to evaluate hazard affected areas at different scales. Comparison to RADARSAT-derived water extension maps assessed an Overall Accuracy between 86.4% (for the flood map derived with NOAA-14/AVHRR data over the whole Bangladesh) and 90.6% (for the flood map derived with Landsat-7/ETM+ data over the North-East part of the country)

Diversity, Assortment, Dissimilarity, Variety: A Study of Diversity Measures Using Low Level Features for Video Retrieval

In this paper we present a number of methods for re-ranking video search results in order to introduce diversity into the set of search results. The usefulness of these approaches is evaluated in comparison with similarity based measures, for the TRECVID 2007 collection and tasks [11]. For the MAP of the search results we find that some of our approaches perform as well as similarity based methods. We also find that some of these results can improve the P@N values for some of the lower N values. The most successful of these approaches was then implemented in an interactive search system for the TRECVID 2008 interactive search tasks. The responses from the users indicate that they find the more diverse search results extremely useful

Cavity Resonance Sensor with Disposable Analyte Container for Point of Care Testing

The use of phononic crystals and resonant structures as sensing platforms paves the way to the development of new biomedical technologies. An acoustic sensor with a resonant cavity and a disposable element was investigated in this paper. The sensor consists of seven layers with high acoustic impedance mismatch. The disposable element used was a glass spectrophotometry cuvette and, during the experimentation, it was filled with different liquid analytes showing characteristic transmission features that could be used as measures to differentiate and identify them. Experimental transmission curves were obtained using an electronic characterization system that uses a double sideband modulation technique to acquire valuable information about the structure being analyzed. Simulations using the 1-D transmission line method were performed to support the experimental realizations. The frequency of maximum transmission has been found to be strongly dependent on the speed of sound of the analyte under test