Comparison of albicans vs. non-albicans candidemia in French intensive care units

The AmarCand Study Group (ICU physicians): Drs. Allaouchiche (Lyon), Amigues (Montpellier), Ausseur (Saint Herblain), Azoulay (Paris), Badet (Lyon), Baldesi (Aix-en-Provence), Bastien (Bron), Baudin (Paris), Bayle (Lyon), Bazin (Clermont-Ferrand), Benayoun (Clichy), Blondeau (Roubaix), Bodin (Paris), Bollaert (Nancy), Bonadona (La Tronche), Bonnaire (Aulnay Sous Bois), Bonnivard (Montauban), Borne (Paris), Brabet (Montpellier), Branche (Lyon), Braud (Rouen), Bret (Lyon), Bretonnière (Nantes), Brocas (Evry), Brun (Bron), Bruneel (Versailles), Canevet (Armentières), Cantais (Toulon Armées), Carlet (Paris), Charbonneau (Caen), Charles (Dijon), Chastagner (Chamberry), Corne (Montpellier), Courte (Saint-Brieuc), Cousson (Reims), Cren (Morlaix), Diconne (Saint Etienne), Drouet (Saint-Denis), Dube (Angers), Duguet (Paris), Dulbecco (Antibes), Dumenil (Clamart), Dupont (Amiens), Durand (Grenoble), Durand-Gasselin (Toulon), Durocher (Lille), Fangio (Poissy), Fattouh (Mulhouse), Favier (Metz Armées), Fieux (Paris), Fleureau (Pessac), Freys (Strasbourg), Fulgencio (Paris), Gally (Mulhouse), Garnaud (Orléans), Garot (Tours), Gilhodes (Créteil), Girault (Rouen), Gouin (Marseille), Gouin (Rouen), Guidon (Marseille), Hérault (Grenoble), Hyvernat (Nice), Jobard (Monaco), Jospe (Saint Etienne), Kaidomar (Fréjus), Karoubi (Bobigny), Kherchache (Agen), Lacherade (Poissy), Lakermi (Paris), Lambiotte (Maubeuge), Lamia (Le Kremlin-Bicêtre), Lasocki (Paris), Launoy (Strasbourg), Le Guillou (Paris), Lefort (Saint-Denis), Lefrant (Nîmes), Lemaire (Roubaix), Lepape (Pierre-Bénite), Lepoutre (Lomme), Leroy (Lille), Leroy (Tourcoing), Loriferne (Bry-sur-Marne), Mahe (Nantes), Mandin (Gap), Marighy (Saint- Denis), Mathieu (Lille), Mathonnet (Paris), Megarbane (Paris), Mercat (Angers), Michel (Saint Herblain), Michelet (Marseille), Mimoz (Poitiers), Mohammedi (Lyon), Mouquet (Paris), Mourvillier (Paris), Navellou (Besançon), Novara (Paris), Obadia (Montreuil), Perrigault (Montpellier), Perrin (Marseille), Petit (Valence), Poussel (Metz), Rahmani (Strasbourg), Renard (La Roche sur Yon), Robert (Poitiers), Robert (Lyon), Saliba (Villejuif ), Sannini (Marseille), Santré (Annecy), Seguin (Rennes), Souweine (Clermont-Ferrand), Trouillet (Paris), Valentin (Besançon), Volatron (Rennes), Voltz (Vandoeuvre les Nancy), Winer (Saint Pierre), and Winnock (Bordeaux).International audienceINTRODUCTION: Candidemia raises numerous therapeutic issues for intensive care physicians. Epidemiological data that could guide the choice of initial therapy are still required. This analysis sought to compare the characteristics of intensive care unit (ICU) patients with candidemia due to non-albicans Candida species with those of ICU patients with candidemia due to Candida albicans. METHODS: A prospective, observational, multicenter, French study was conducted from October 2005 to May 2006. Patients exhibiting candidemia developed during ICU stay and exclusively due either to one or more non-albicans Candida species or to C. albicans were selected. The data collected included patient characteristics on ICU admission and at the onset of candidemia. RESULTS: Among the 136 patients analyzed, 78 (57.4%) had candidemia caused by C. albicans. These patients had earlier onset of infection (11.1 +/- 14.2 days after ICU admission vs. 17.4 +/- 17.7, p = 0.02), higher severity scores on ICU admission (SOFA: 10.4 +/- 4.7 vs. 8.6 +/- 4.6, p = 0.03; SAPS II: 57.4 +/- 22.8 vs. 48.7 +/- 15.5, P = 0.015), and were less often neutropenic (2.6% vs. 12%, p = 0.04) than patients with candidemia due to non-albicans Candida species. CONCLUSIONS: Although patients infected with Candida albicans differed from patients infected with non-albicans Candida species for a few characteristics, no clinical factor appeared pertinent enough to guide the choice of empirical antifungal therapy in ICU

Couplage par composants logiciels de codes d'hydrogéologie

National audienceNotre objectif est d'étudier la modélisation de phénomènes couplés et leur mise en oeuvre sur une grille de calcul, en développant quatre applications. Les deux premiers couplages sont de type physico-chimique et physico-physique (couplage algébrique d'équations). Ils sont appliqués respectivement à la contamination d'aquifères et à l'intrusion d'eau salée. Les deux autres couplages sont géométriques de type multidomaines ou multi-échelles et sont appliqués au stockage profond de déchets radioactifs, d'une part dans un milieu peu fracturé, d'autre part dans un réseau de fractures.Nous choisissons une approche par composants logiciels, qui permet d'encapsuler chaque code modélisant un phénomène physique. Les interfaces des composants permettent d'eectuer les échanges de données nécessaires au couplage numérique.L'exécutif PadicoTM garantit un calcul à haute performances sur une grille de calcul avec différents types de réseaux, grâce notamment à un modèle de composants parallèles, qui permet de passer à l'échelle

Megathrust friction determined from mechanical analysis of the forearc in the Maule earthquake area

The seismogenic potential of a given fault depends essentially on its frictional properties and on the mechanical properties of the medium. Determining the spatio-temporal variations of frictional properties is therefore a key issue in seismotectonics. This study aims to characterize the friction on the South America megathrust in the 2010 Mw 8.8 Maule earthquake area from mechanical analysis of the forearc structure and morphology. Based on the critical taper theory, we first show that the rupture area of the Maule earthquake, also shown to be locked in the interseismic period, coincides with the stable part of the wedge. In the surrounding area, the wedge is critical, a finding consistent with various evidence for active deformation there. This is in particular true for the Arauco Peninsula area which seems to have arrested the Maule earthquakeʼs rupture to the South. This observation lends support to the view that the seismic rupture is inhibited when propagating beneath a critical area. The geometry of the critical portion of the wedge suggests a standard internal friction (μ_(int)=0.7±0.13) and a hydrostatic pore pressure within the wedge. The effective friction beneath the critical outer wedge is estimated to be µ^(eff)_b = 0.7 ± 0.13. This could be related to intrinsically low friction minerals (clay) or high pore pressure along the megathrust. We next use the limit analysis approach to constrain the variation of the effective friction along the megathrust based on the location and geometry of internal faulting within the forearc. A low effective friction is found within the rupture area (µ^(eff)_b ≤ 0.14) to explain the reactivation of thrust fault such as the Santa Maria, updip of the coseismic rupture, or the activation of normal splay faults downdip of the rupture area. The low effective friction found there could reflect strong dynamic weakening

Medical image computing and computer-aided medical interventions applied to soft tissues. Work in progress in urology

Until recently, Computer-Aided Medical Interventions (CAMI) and Medical Robotics have focused on rigid and non deformable anatomical structures. Nowadays, special attention is paid to soft tissues, raising complex issues due to their mobility and deformation. Mini-invasive digestive surgery was probably one of the first fields where soft tissues were handled through the development of simulators, tracking of anatomical structures and specific assistance robots. However, other clinical domains, for instance urology, are concerned. Indeed, laparoscopic surgery, new tumour destruction techniques (e.g. HIFU, radiofrequency, or cryoablation), increasingly early detection of cancer, and use of interventional and diagnostic imaging modalities, recently opened new challenges to the urologist and scientists involved in CAMI. This resulted in the last five years in a very significant increase of research and developments of computer-aided urology systems. In this paper, we propose a description of the main problems related to computer-aided diagnostic and therapy of soft tissues and give a survey of the different types of assistance offered to the urologist: robotization, image fusion, surgical navigation. Both research projects and operational industrial systems are discussed

Divergent IR gluon propagator from Ward-Slavnov-Taylor identities?

We exploit the Ward-Slavnov-Taylor identity relating the 3-gluons to the ghost-gluon vertices to conclude either that the ghost dressing function is finite and non vanishing at zero momentum while the gluon propagator diverges (although it may do so weakly enough not to be in contradiction with current lattice data) or that the 3-gluons vertex is non-regular when one momentum goes to zero. We stress that those results should be kept in mind when one studies the Infrared properties of the ghost and gluon propagators, for example by means of Dyson-Schwinger equations.Comment: 6 pages, bibte

Non-perturbative Power Corrections to Ghost and Gluon Propagators

We study the dominant non-perturbative power corrections to the ghost and gluon propagators in Landau gauge pure Yang-Mills theory using OPE and lattice simulations. The leading order Wilson coefficients are proven to be the same for both propagators. The ratio of the ghost and gluon propagators is thus free from this dominant power correction. Indeed, a purely perturbative fit of this ratio gives smaller value ($\simeq 270$MeV) of \Lambda_{\ms} than the one obtained from the propagators separately($\simeq 320$MeV). This argues in favour of significant non-perturbative $\sim 1/q^2$ power corrections in the ghost and gluon propagators. We check the self-consistency of the method.Comment: 14 pages, 4 figures; replaced with revised version, to appear in JHE

SHOWMe: Benchmarking Object-agnostic Hand-Object 3D Reconstruction

Recent hand-object interaction datasets show limited real object variability and rely on fitting the MANO parametric model to obtain groundtruth hand shapes. To go beyond these limitations and spur further research, we introduce the SHOWMe dataset which consists of 96 videos, annotated with real and detailed hand-object 3D textured meshes. Following recent work, we consider a rigid hand-object scenario, in which the pose of the hand with respect to the object remains constant during the whole video sequence. This assumption allows us to register sub-millimetre-precise groundtruth 3D scans to the image sequences in SHOWMe. Although simpler, this hypothesis makes sense in terms of applications where the required accuracy and level of detail is important eg., object hand-over in human-robot collaboration, object scanning, or manipulation and contact point analysis. Importantly, the rigidity of the hand-object systems allows to tackle video-based 3D reconstruction of unknown hand-held objects using a 2-stage pipeline consisting of a rigid registration step followed by a multi-view reconstruction (MVR) part. We carefully evaluate a set of non-trivial baselines for these two stages and show that it is possible to achieve promising object-agnostic 3D hand-object reconstructions employing an SfM toolbox or a hand pose estimator to recover the rigid transforms and off-the-shelf MVR algorithms. However, these methods remain sensitive to the initial camera pose estimates which might be imprecise due to lack of textures on the objects or heavy occlusions of the hands, leaving room for improvements in the reconstruction. Code and dataset are available at https://europe.naverlabs.com/research/showmeComment: Paper and Appendix, Accepted in ACVR workshop at ICCV conferenc

The Gaia satellite: a tool for Emission Line Stars and Hot Stars

The Gaia satellite will be launched at the end of 2011. It will observe at least 1 billion stars, and among them several million emission line stars and hot stars. Gaia will provide parallaxes for each star and spectra for stars till V magnitude equal to 17. After a general description of Gaia, we present the codes and methods, which are currently developed by our team. They will provide automatically the astrophysical parameters and spectral classification for the hot and emission line stars in the Milky Way and other close Local Group galaxies such as the Magellanic Clouds.Comment: SF2A2008, session GAIA, invited tal

AGATHE: A tool for personalized rehabilitation of cognitive functions

Stroke, traumatic brain injury, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's... Every year in France, tens of thousands of people fall victim to one of those neurological pathologies. Acquired brain injury leads to cognitive impairment and heavy loss of autonomy. Rehabilitation interventions are needed to enable people to recover capacity and return to Activities of Daily Living (ADL), such as grocery shopping. Unfortunately, the resources made available in cognitive rehabilitation are insufficient for the growing needs of victims of brain damage. The assets of virtual reality to address this big problem of public health are today scientifically recognized [Rizzo and Kim 2005; Klinger, et al. 2010]. In this context, we designed the AGATHE tool (Adaptable, configurable and upgradable tool for the generation of personalized therapeutic applications in cognitive rehabilitation) (AGATHE project, ANR-09-TECS-002).French National Research Agency (ANR) Laval Agglomération et Conseil Général de la Mayenn