Search

Background: The burden of musculoskeletal conditions continues to grow in low‐ and middle‐income countries. Among thousands of surgical outreach trips each year, few organizations electronically track patient data to inform real‐time care decisions and assess trip impact. We report the implementation of an electronic health record (EHR) system utilized at point of care during an orthopedic surgical outreach trip. Methods: In March 2023, we implemented an EHR on an orthopedic outreach trip to guide real‐time care decisions. We utilized an effectiveness‐implementation hybrid type 3 design to evaluate implementation success. Success was measured using outcomes adopted by the World Health Organization, including acceptability, appropriateness, feasibility, adoption, fidelity, and sustainability. Clinical outcome measures included adherence to essential quality measures and follow‐up numerical rating system (NRS) pain scores. Results: During the 5‐day outreach trip, 76 patients were evaluated, 25 of which underwent surgery beforehand. The EHR implementation was successful as defined by: mean questionnaire ratings of acceptability (4.26), appropriateness (4.12), feasibility (4.19), and adoption (4.33) at least 4.00, WHO behaviorally anchored rating scale ratings of fidelity (6.8) at least 5.00, and sustainability (80%) at least 60% follow‐up at 6 months. All clinical quality measures were reported in greater than 80% of cases with all measures reported in 92% of cases. NRS pain scores improved by an average of 2.4 points. Conclusions: We demonstrate successful implementation of an EHR for real‐time clinical use on a surgical outreach trip. Benefits of EHR utilization on surgical outreach trips may include improved documentation, minimization of medical errors, and ultimately improved quality of care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Face Morphing Attacks pose a threat to the security of identity documents, especially with respect to a subsequent access control process, because they allow both involved individuals to use the same document. Several algorithms are currently being developed to detect Morphing Attacks, often requiring large data sets of morphed face images for training. In the present study, face embeddings are used for two different purposes: first, to pre-select images for the subsequent large-scale generation of Morphing Attacks, and second, to detect potential Morphing Attacks. Previous studies have demonstrated the power of embeddings in both use cases. However, we aim to build on these studies by adding the more powerful MagFace model to both use cases, and by performing comprehensive analyses of the role of embeddings in pre-selection and attack detection in terms of the vulnerability of face recognition systems and attack detection algorithms. In particular, we use recent developments to assess the attack potential, but also investigate the influence of morphing algorithms. For the first objective, an algorithm is developed that pairs individuals based on the similarity of their face embeddings. Different state-of-the-art face recognition systems are used to extract embeddings in order to pre-select the face images and different morphing algorithms are used to fuse the face images. The attack potential of the differently generated morphed face images will be quantified to compare the usability of the embeddings for automatically generating a large number of successful Morphing Attacks. For the second objective, we compare the performance of the embeddings of two state-of-the-art face recognition systems with respect to their ability to detect morphed face images. Our results demonstrate that ArcFace and MagFace provide valuable face embeddings for image pre-selection. Various open-source and commercial-off-the-shelf face recognition systems are vulnerable to the generated Morphing Attacks, and their vulnerability increases when image pre-selection is based on embeddings compared to random pairing. In particular, landmark-based closed-source morphing algorithms generate attacks that pose a high risk to any tested face recognition system. Remarkably, more accurate face recognition systems show a higher vulnerability to Morphing Attacks. Among the systems tested, commercial-off-the-shelf systems were the most vulnerable to Morphing Attacks. In addition, MagFace embeddings stand out as a robust alternative for detecting morphed face images compared to the previously used ArcFace embeddings. The results endorse the benefits of face embeddings for more effective image pre-selection for face morphing and for more accurate detection of morphed face images, as demonstrated by extensive analysis of various designed attacks. The MagFace model is a powerful alternative to the often-used ArcFace model in detecting attacks and can increase performance depending on the use case. It also highlights the usability of embeddings to generate large-scale morphed face databases for various purposes, such as training Morphing Attack Detection algorithms as a countermeasure against attacks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The incidence of candidemia in healthcare centers is associated with high morbidity and mortality. Frequency varies significantly among regions, with some species being more prevalent than others in Latin America. In this study, 191 clinical Candida isolates were collected from a major hospital in Ecuador from January 2019 to February 2020 aiming to assess their prevalence and distribution. After data processing, 168 isolates characterized by the VITEK 2 system were subsequently identified by ITS sequencing. Results showed diverse Candida species distributions, with C. albicans and C. tropicalis being the most prevalent across different clinical sources. In hospitalized individuals, C. tropicalis (38%) and C. albicans (37%) were the most prevalent, followed by, C. parapsilosis (16%), C. glabrata (5%), and other non-Candida albicans (NCA) species (6%). Conversely, C. parapsilosis (48%), C. albicans (20%), and C. glabrata (14%), associated with candidemia, were the most common in blood and CSF. Additionally, uncommon NCA species such as C. haemulonii, C. kefyr, and C. pelliculosa were identified in Ecuador for the first time. Discrepancies in species identification were observed between the VITEK 2 system and ITS sequencing, coinciding at 85%. This highlights the need for ongoing surveillance and identification efforts in Ecuador's clinical and epidemiological settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this contribution, the use of glycidyl methacrylate and styrene copolymers synthesized by nitroxide-mediated polymerization (NMP) as chain extenders of postconsumer Polyethylene terephthalate) waste (r-PET) is described. Our observations revealed that the copolymers synthesized by NMP act as efficient chain extenders for the regeneration of PET waste. Epoxide groups in the copolymers react with PET end reactive groups producing chain extended PET with higher molecular weight and improving performance. The increase in molecular weight of PET waste results in important improvement in both, elongation-at-break, and strength impact. r-PET complex viscosity and rheological moduli are also greatly improved as the epoxide content in the chain extenders increases. The loss tangent and phase angle versus angular frequency plots for chain-extended r-PET reveal that melt elasticity is also improved. These results confirm that use of NMP-synthesized copolymers is a plausible solution for the recycling of PET., INTRODUCTION Polyethylene terephthalate) (PET) is one of the most widely used engineering polymers because of its lightness, low-cost and processing low energy requirements [1]. However, the worldwide excessive production of [...]

Gender classification on normalized iris images has been previously attempted with varying degrees of success. In these previous studies, it has been shown that occlusion masks may introduce gender information; occlusion masks are used in iris recognition to remove non-iris elements. When, the goal is to classify the gender using exclusively the iris texture, the presence of gender information in the masks may result in apparently higher accuracy, thereby not reflecting the actual gender information present in the iris. However, no measures have been taken to eliminate this information while preserving as much iris information as possible. We propose a novel method to assess the gender information present in the iris more accurately by eliminating gender information in the masks. This consists of pairing iris with similar masks and different gender, generating a paired mask using the OR operator, and applying this mask to the iris. Additionally, we manually fix iris segmentation errors to study their impact on the gender classification. Our results show that occlusion masks can account for 6.92% of the gender classification accuracy on average. Therefore, works aiming to perform gender classification using the iris texture from normalized iris images should eliminate this correlation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Business & SMEs is the property of ECORFAN-Mexico S.C. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

BACKGROUND: Children from pregnancies affected by preeclampsia have an increased risk of cognitive and behavioral alterations via unknown pathophysiology. We tested the hypothesis that preeclampsia generated reduced brain cortex angiogenesis in the offspring. METHODS: The preeclampsia-like syndrome (PELS) mouse model was generated by administering the nitric oxide inhibitor NG-nitroarginine methyl ester hydrochloride. Confirmatory experiments were done using 2 additional PELS models. While in vitro analysis used mice and human brain endothelial cells exposed to serum of postnatal day 5 pups or umbilical plasma from preeclamptic pregnancies, respectively. RESULTS: We report significant reduction in the area occupied by blood vessels in the motor and somatosensory brain cortex of offspring (postnatal day 5) from PELS compared with uncomplicated control offspring. These data were confirmed using 2 additional PELS models. Furthermore, circulating levels of critical proangiogenic factors, VEGF (vascular endothelial growth factor), and PlGF (placental growth factor) were lower in postnatal day 5 PELS. Also we found lower VEGF receptor 2 (KDR [kinase insert domain-containing receptor]) levels in mice and human endothelial cells exposed to the serum of postnatal day 5 PELS or fetal plasma of preeclamptic pregnancies, respectively. These changes were associated with lower in vitro angiogenic capacity, diminished cell migration, larger F-actin filaments, lower number of filopodia, and lower protein levels of F-actin polymerization regulators in brain endothelial cells exposed to serum or fetal plasma of offspring from preeclampsia. CONCLUSIONS: Offspring from preeclampsia exhibited diminished brain cortex angiogenesis, associated with lower circulating VEGF/PlGF/KDR protein levels, impaired brain endothelial migration, and dysfunctional assembly of F-actin filaments. These alterations may predispose to structural and functional alterations in long-term brain development [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this work, we design a control strategy to be applied in a port-Hamilton representation of a liquid-mirror telescope for an alt-azimuth configuration. Starting from a dynamical model for an alt-azimuth liquid-mirror telescope based on Lagrange mechanics, a transformation to the port-Hamilton form is made. Such a dynamical model is obtained by computing the kinetic and potential energy of the telescope and substituting them in the Euler–Lagrange equation of motion. Then, for the transformation to the port-Hamiltonian form, we obtain the relation between the Hamiltonian and the Lagrangian. The resulting open-loop model based on the Hamiltonian function is controlled using an extension of the interconnection and damping-assignment passivity-based control aiming for a robust and accurate steady behavior in the closed loop while tracking a star's position. For comparison purposes, two different control strategies are applied to the Lagrangian model, inverse-dynamics control and sliding mode super-twisting control. Since the light is collected by the principal mirror of the telescope while tracking a star, we make a description of the liquid mirror's behavior. The tracking star's position is described as a function of the observer's position and the star's coordinates as well as the date of observation. The simulations' results show that the port-Hamilton control has a good transitory and steady response as well as great accuracy competing with that of inverse-dynamics control but with greater robustness and no chattering drawback. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Human Resources Training / Revista de Formación de Recursos Humanos is the property of ECORFAN-Mexico S.C. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This study compares ripple port, stacked switched capacitor, and capacitive energy storage architectures for active power decoupling, comparing the number of components, performance, energy density, DC-link capacitor reduction, efficiency, and frequency operation to highlight their main benefits and drawbacks for single-phase grid-connected applications. The overview reveals equivalent effective energy density without electrolytic capacitors, as well as enhanced simplicity, performance, and durability, thereby providing stacked switched capacitors as an attractive power-decoupling alternative for multi-stage connected applications, based on the principle that its individual buffer capacitors absorb and deliver energy without tightly constraining their individual terminal voltages, while maintaining a narrow range voltage at the buffer DC port. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

El Cubío del Escalón es una pequeña cueva localizada en Matienzo, Cantabria, donde en el año 2009 se hallaron algunos restos humanos. Una intervención arqueológica cuatro años más tarde documentó los restos de un mínimo de seis individuos, cinco adultos y un niño. Prácticamente todos los huesos se encontraban en mal estado de conservación, debido a las remociones que el yacimiento había sufrido. Junto con los restos óseos, se recogieron unas pocas piezas de sílex, cerámica y fauna. Este sitio se encaja dentro de cierto modelo de cueva sepulcral que se usaba con frecuencia en el Calcolítico y la Edad del Bronce. El estudio de los yacimientos funerarios de ese periodo en Cantabria ha determinado que 55% de los mismos poseen una boca de menos de 2,5 m de ancho y su anchura media es inferior a los 3,5 m. Sin embargo, dentro de una diversidad de prácticas sepulcrales, en el mismo periodo también se utilizaban cavidades grandes, aunque las inhumaciones en cueva conocidas seguramente corresponderían a una parte pequeña de la población, por lo que podrían existir otros ritos.

Xanthogranulomatous pyelonephritis (XGP) is an uncommon chronic granulomatous infection of renal parenchyma. XGP is often associated with long-term urinary tract obstruction due to stones and infection. We aimed to analyze the clinical, laboratory, and microbial culture profiles from bladder and kidney urine of patients who were diagnosed with XGP. Databases of patients with histopathological diagnosis of XGP from 10 centers across 5 countries were retrospectively reviewed between 2018 and 2022. Patients with incomplete medical records were excluded. A total of 365 patients were included. There were 228 (62.5%) women. The mean age was 45 ± 14.4 years. The most common comorbidity was chronic kidney disease (71%). Multiple stones were present in 34.5% of cases. Bladder urine culture results were positive in 53.2% of cases. Kidney urine culture was positive in 81.9% of patients. Sepsis and septic shock were present in 13.4% and 6.6% of patients, respectively. Three deaths were reported. Escherichia coli was the most common isolated pathogen in both urine (28.4%) and kidney cultures (42.4%), followed by Proteus mirabilis in bladder urine cultures (6.3%) and Klebsiella pneumoniae (7.6%) in kidney cultures. Extended-spectrum beta-lactamases producing bacteria were reported in 6% of the bladder urine cultures. On multivariable analysis, urosepsis, recurrent urinary tract infections, increased creatinine, and disease extension to perirenal and pararenal space were independent factors associated with positive bladder urine cultures. On multivariable analysis, only the presence of anemia was significantly more frequent in patients with positive kidney cultures. Our results can help urologists counsel XGP patients undergoing nephrectomy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Axial Flux Permanent Magnet (AFPM) machines with ironless rotors are an attractive and recently studied solution in low-speed applications, due to their potentially high power/weight ratio, high aspect ratio, and high efficiency. Nevertheless, these machines are prone to be affected by manufacturing tolerance during its fabrication process and consequently, the magnets may move freely inside the rotor structure. This work presents a statistical analysis of manufacturing tolerances of an AFPM machine with an ironless rotor, considering several magnet fault types. A computationally efficient superposition method is developed and implemented to obtain both the cogging torque and rated torque considering several tolerance combinations with acceptable accuracy. The results obtained from a statistical analysis of 10,000 designs of a two-stator one rotor tooth coil winding AFPM (TCW-AFPM) machine allowed us to identify the parameters with the most impact on relevant performance indicators and disclosed a substantial increase in cogging and ripple torque when unavoidable combined tolerances are present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a discrete skew methodology is presented to understand the effect of skewing angle on electromagnetic torque in SynRM design. A new approach is proposed to estimate the amplitude of each torque ripple component as a function of skewing angle. The reduction factor for each harmonic component is derived in general form, allowing for the determination of overall torque ripple waveform. The validity of the proposed method is evaluated through the examination of two SynRMs, resulting in a torque ripple reduction of up to 70%. The results obtained through the use of a proposed analytical ripple reduction estimator and FEA evaluation showed good agreement. The proposed skewing technique was applied on a previously optimized triple-barrier SynRM with a positive outcome: a consistent torque ripple reduction tackling relevant harmonic components. The analysis of harmonic distribution of torque ripple is mandatory for the selection of the optimal skewing strategy when following the proposed method, with two-step skewing recommended for mostly-purely-sinusoidal torque waveforms, and multi-step skewing recommended for machines with multiple higher-magnitude harmonic components. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]