Home monitoring of foot skin temperatures to prevent ulceration

OBJECTIVE - To evaluate the effectiveness of at-home infrared temperature monitoring as a preventative tool in individuals at high risk for diabetes-related lower-extremity ulceration and amputation. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS - Eighty-five patients who fit diabetic foot risk category 2 or 3 (neuropathy and foot deformity or previous history of ulceration or partial foot amputation) were randomized into a standard therapy group (n = 41) or an enhanced therapy group (n = 44). Standard therapy consisted of therapeutic footwear, diabetic foot education, and regular foot evaluation by a podiatrist. Enhanced therapy included the addition of a handheld infrared skin thermometer to measure temperatures on the sole of the foot in the morning and evening. Elevated temperatures (>4°F compared with the opposite foot) were considered to be "at risk" of ulceration due to inflammation at the site of measurement. When foot temperatures were elevated, subjects were instructed to reduce their activity and contact the study nurse. Study subjects were followed for 6 months. RESULTS - The enhanced therapy group had significantly fewer diabetic foot complications (enhanced therapy group 2% vs. standard therapy group 20%, P = 0.01, odds ratio 10.3, 95% CI 1.2-85.3). There were seven ulcers and two Charcot fractures among standard therapy patients and one ulcer in the enhanced therapy group. CONCLUSIONS - These results suggest that at-home patient self-monitoring with daily foot temperatures may be an effective adjunctive tool to prevent foot complications in individuals at high risk for lower-extremity ulceration and amputation

Efficient sorting of free electron orbital angular momentum

We propose a method for sorting electrons by orbital angular momentum (OAM). Several methods now exist to prepare electron wavefunctions in OAM states, but no technique has been developed for efficient, parallel measurement of pure and mixed electron OAM states. The proposed technique draws inspiration from the recent demonstration of the sorting of OAM through modal transformation. We show that the same transformation can be performed on electrons with electrostatic optical elements. Specifically, we show that a charged needle and an array of electrodes perform the transformation and phase correction necessary to sort OAM states. This device may enable the analysis of the spatial mode distribution of inelastically scattered electrons

Experimental Demonstration of Geometrically-Shaped Constellations Tailored to the Nonlinear Fibre Channel

A geometrically-shaped 256-QAM constellation, tailored to the nonlinear optical fibre channel, is experimentally demonstrated. The proposed constellation outperforms both uniform and AWGN-tailored 256-QAM, as it is designed to optimise the trade-off between shaping gain, nonlinearity and transceiver impairments

Unraveling proteins: A molecular mechanics study

An internal coordinate molecular mechanics study of unfolding peptide chains by external stretching has been carried out to predict the type of force spectra that may be expected from single-molecule manipulation experiments currently being prepared. Rather than modeling the stretching of a given protein, we have looked at the behavior of simple secondary structure elements (alpha-helix, beta-ribbon, and interacting alpha-helices) to estimate the magnitude of the forces involved in their unfolding or separation and the dependence of these forces on the way pulling is carried out as well as on the length of the structural elements. The results point to a hierarchy of forces covering a surprisingly large range and to important orientational effects in the response to external stress

MB2.1 - Coherent Technologies for Passive Optical Networks (Invited)

To date, optical access networks have been exclusively based on intensity modulation with direct detection. However, recent advances in coherent transceivers offer the potential to overcome the many limitations of these systems. This work reviews such candidate technologies for low complexity coherent optical access networks

DNA: From rigid base-pairs to semiflexible polymers

The sequence-dependent elasticity of double-helical DNA on a nm length scale can be captured by the rigid base-pair model, whose strains are the relative position and orientation of adjacent base-pairs. Corresponding elastic potentials have been obtained from all-atom MD simulation and from high-resolution structural data. On the scale of a hundred nm, DNA is successfully described by a continuous worm-like chain model with homogeneous elastic properties characterized by a set of four elastic constants, which have been directly measured in single-molecule experiments. We present here a theory that links these experiments on different scales, by systematically coarse-graining the rigid base-pair model for random sequence DNA to an effective worm-like chain description. The average helical geometry of the molecule is exactly taken into account in our approach. We find that the available microscopic parameters sets predict qualitatively similar mesoscopic parameters. The thermal bending and twisting persistence lengths computed from MD data are 42 and 48 nm, respectively. The static persistence lengths are generally much higher, in agreement with cyclization experiments. All microscopic parameter sets predict negative twist-stretch coupling. The variability and anisotropy of bending stiffness in short random chains lead to non-Gaussian bend angle distributions, but become unimportant after two helical turns.Comment: 13 pages, 6 figures, 6 table

Searching (the) FIRST radio arcs near ACO clusters

Gravitational lensing (GL) of distant radio sources by galaxy clusters should produce radio arc(let)s. We extracted radio sources from the FIRST survey near Abell cluster cores and found their radio position angles to be uniformly distributed with respect to the cluster centres. This result holds even when we restrict the sample to the richest or most centrally condensed clusters, and to sources with high S/N and large axial ratio. Our failure to detect GL with statistical methods may be due to poor cluster centre positions. We did not find convincing candidates for arcs either. Our result agrees with theoretical estimates predicting that surveys much deeper than FIRST are required to detect the effect. This is in apparent conflict with the detection of such an effect claimed by Bagchi & Kapahi (1995).Comment: 6 pages; 8 figures and 1 style file are included; to appear in Proc. "Observational Cosmology with the New Radio Surveys", eds. M. Bremer, N. Jackson & I. Perez-Fournon, Kluwer Acad. Pres