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OBJECTIVES To detect ultrasonographic inflammatory signs in the lacrimal, parotid, and submandibular glands in cosmetic fillers (CFs) users. METHODS A prospective and cross-sectional ultrasound study of the glands in cases with CFs was performed. The sample included users of hyaluronic acid, silicone oil, polymethylmethacrylate, polycaprolactone, calcium hydroxyapatite, and polyacrylamide. Abnormalities of the parenchyma and hypervascularity signs of the glands were compared with a control group (n = 10), evaluated by 2 observers, and correlated with the type, number, and location of the facial CFs. Cohen's kappa test and logistic regression models with odds ratios (OR) adjusted by age with 95% CI were performed. RESULTS Sixty-three patients with CFs met the criteria. Parotid and submandibular glands had the highest percentage of parenchymal involvement: 87.3 and 88.9%, respectively (p

Background: Bronchopulmonary dysplasia (BPD) is the most common cause of chronic lung disease in children born prematurely. There is little information about the epidemiology and severity of BPD places with high altitude. This study aimed to evaluate the frequency of BPD severity levels and the associated risk factors with severity in a cohort of preterm newborns ≤34 weeks of gestational age born in Rionegro, Colombia Materials and methods: We carried out a retrospective analytical cohort of preterm newborns without major malformations from Rionegro, Colombia between 2011-2018 admitted to neonatal intensive unit at high altitude (2200m above sea level). The main outcomes were the incidence and severity of bronchopulmonary dysplasia. Results: The bronchopulmonary dysplasia incidence was 25.7% (95% CI, 21.6-29.9). Bronchopulmonary dysplasia was moderate in 62.1% of patients and severe in 26.7%. After modeling regression analysis, the final variables associated with BPD severity levels were: sepsis (OR 2.37 CI 95% 1.04-5.40) and pulmonary hypertension (OR 3.79 CI95% 1.19-12). Conclusion: The incidence of BPD was higher and similar to cities with higher altitudes. In our population, the variables associated with BPD severity levels were: duration of oxygen therapy and pulmonary hypertension. It is necessary to increase the awareness of risk factors, the effect of clinical practices, and early recognition of bronchopulmonary dysplasia to reduce morbidity in patients with this pathology.

In this chapter, material balance and its importance in the field of food science/engineering have been discussed. To do this, first, material balance is explained in detail using mass, i.e., mass flows and not volumetric flows. It must be remembered that masses are additive, but volumes are not always additive. Then, we provide a brief explanation of what is a process and state that the chapter focuses on continuous material balance problems under steady-state conditions. The core of the chapter details a proposed strategy to solve simple and complex material balance problems. We developed a five-step procedure, which is explained and then applied in examples. The chapter concludes with 3 solved problems and then proposes 24 problems, each one with the corresponding answer.

Cartagena de Indias, Colombia, is a place with large tortoiseshell handicraft stores on the streets, after Nicaragua, the place with the largest offer of products. Also, it is the first of nine countries evaluated in the region with the highest economic income for its commercialization. For 5 years (between 2008 and 2012), we recorded and characterized tortoiseshell traffic in the city, and this helped us to understand in detail the local problem. In 2013, we started looking for national and international stakeholders to stop the illegal trafficking of tortoiseshell handicrafts. Twelve years later, from inter-institutional, collaborative, and continuous work, we have managed to reduce the commercialization of the tortoiseshell handicrafts by 90%–95% compared to the characterization data in the first phase of the project. In this chapter we will showcase this successful project and how it can serve as a model for others in the countries and regions where the illegal trafficking exists.

BACKGROUND: The use of artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms for the diagnosis of skin diseases has shown promise in experimental settings but has not been yet tested in real-life conditions. OBJECTIVE: To assess the diagnostic performance and potential clinical utility of a 174-multiclass AI algorithm in a real-life telemedicine setting. METHODS: Prospective, diagnostic accuracy study including consecutive patients who submitted images for teledermatology evaluation. The treating dermatologist chose a single image to upload to a web application during teleconsultation. A follow-up reader study including nine healthcare providers (3 dermatologists, 3 dermatology residents and 3 general practitioners) was performed. RESULTS: A total of 340 cases from 281 patients met study inclusion criteria. The mean (SD) age of patients was 33.7 (17.5) years; 63% (n = 177) were female. Exposure to the AI algorithm results was considered useful in 11.8% of visits (n = 40) and the teledermatologist correctly modified the real-time diagnosis in 0.6% (n = 2) of cases. The overall top-1 accuracy of the algorithm (41.2%) was lower than that of the dermatologists (60.1%), residents (57.8%) and general practitioners (49.3%) (all comparisons P < 0.05, in the reader study). When the analysis was limited to the diagnoses on which the algorithm had been explicitly trained, the balanced top-1 accuracy of the algorithm (47.6%) was comparable to the dermatologists (49.7%) and residents (47.7%) but superior to the general practitioners (39.7%; P = 0.049). Algorithm performance was associated with patient skin type and image quality. CONCLUSIONS: A 174-disease class AI algorithm appears to be a promising tool in the triage and evaluation of lesions with patient-taken photographs via telemedicine.

Research Summary: We evaluate how the value appropriated by employees varies in response to an exogenous shock to the price of the firm's product and how this variation depends on institutional and ownership structures. Institutional and ownership structures that favor employees can influence firms’ location decisions and shareholders’ incentives to invest. Using data from the main copper mines in the world, we show that the value appropriated by employees rises in response to an exogenous increase in the price of minerals. Our results indicate that the magnitude of the increment in the value captured by employees is larger in stated‐owned companies, when labor regulations promote productivity‐based payments, when wages are determined through a centralized bargaining process, and when regulations associated with hiring and firing are more flexible. Managerial Summary: We show how labor regulations and state ownership affect the value appropriated by employees when there are exogenous changes in the price of the firm's products. Since the value generated by a firm is distributed among different stakeholders, a higher appropriation of value by employees results in lower appropriation by another party. Therefore, by changing the distribution of value, managerial decisions about location and entry could be affected. For instance, shareholders of firms with positive future expectations about the prices of their products might prefer to enter markets in which salary negotiations are not centralized or where partnership with the local government is not mandatory. Overall, our analysis calls for the consideration of the external environment when evaluating value appropriation by different types of stakeholders.

Greater vertical pay disparity is associated with compensation schemes that reward relative performance. Considering tournament theory as a leading framework for those schemes, along with boosting productivity, they are likely to increase workers’ willingness to exert effort at the risk of injuries or occupational sickness. We find evidence of such pervasive effect on a novel database that includes more than 110,000 Chileans firms. For workers in the bottom half of the wage distribution, an increment of one standard deviation in within-firm vertical pay disparity is associated with an increase of around 10% in the number of injuries and almost 19% in the number of days lost. These results are negatively moderated by the proportion of female employees and state ownership.

Furan and its derivates are present in a wide range of thermally processed foods and are of significant concern in jarred baby and toddler foods. Furan formation is attributed to chemical reactions between a variety of precursors and a high processing temperature. Also, some kinetic models to represent its formation in different food materials have been studied and could predict the furan formation under simulated operating conditions. Therefore, this review aims to analyze and visualize how thermally processed foods might be improved based on optimal control of processing temperature and package design (e.g., retort pouches) to diminish furan formation and maximize quality retention. Many strategies have been studied and applied to reduce furan levels. However, an interesting approach that has not been explored is the thermal process design based on optimum variable retort temperature profiles (VRTPs) and the use of retortable pouches considering the microstructural changes of food along the process. The target of process optimization would be developed by minimizing the microstructural damage of the food product. It could be possible to reduce the furan level and simultaneously preserve the nutritional value through process optimization.

International audience; Scene understanding of large-scale 3D point clouds of an outer space is still a challenging task. Compared with simulated 3D point clouds, the raw data from LiDAR scanners consist of tremendous points returned from all possible reflective objects and they are usually non-uniformly distributed. Therefore, it's cost-effective to develop a solution for learning from raw large-scale 3D point clouds. In this track, we provide large-scale 3D point clouds of street scenes for the semantic segmentation task. The data set consists of 80 samples with 60 for training and 20 for testing. Each sample with over 2 million points represents a street scene and includes a couple of objects. There are five meaningful classes: building, car, ground, pole and vegetation. We aim at localizing and segmenting semantic objects from these large-scale 3D point clouds. Four groups contributed their results with different methods. The results show that learning-based methods are the trend and one of them achieves the best performance on both Overall Accuracy and mean Intersection over Union. Next to the learning-based methods, the combination of hand-crafted detectors are also reliable and rank second among comparison algorithms.

The marination of meat takes many hours to attain the required salt content. Vacuum impregnation (VI) and CO2-laser microperforation have been studied to accelerate the mass transfer process and show promising results. The objective of this study was to investigate the feasibility of reducing the pork marinating time by coupling CO2-laser microperforation and VI processes and mathematically with Fick's second law and anomalous diffusion models. Pork cylinders were microperforated and marinated with a solution containing NaCl (8% w/w) and Na5P3O10 (0.3% w/w) at 6 °C for 60 h. The marinating process was modeled using Fick's second law and anomalous diffusion models. The marinating process coupling VI and microperforations significantly accelerated the mass transfer compared with that of the conventional salting process, reducing the marinating processing time by 47.8%. The anomalous diffusion model was better at representing and adjusting the experimental data compared than the model based on Fick's second law. Industrial application The marinating of meat is a process commonly applied in the meat industry, which focuses on enhancing the flavor, tenderness and juiciness of meat. However, it is a time-consuming process. Laser microperforation is a pretreatment performed on the meat in which the laser acts as a drill, creating micropores in the meat, which coupled with vacuum impregnation can be applied to accelerate the marinating process of pork meat. Applying both technologies, it is possible to reduce the processing time by almost 48%, which can relevantly and significantly increase plant productivity.

An interesting potential improvement and challenge in thermal processing of packaged foods is the implementation of simultaneous multi-product sterilization. The aim of this research was to analyze, explore, and optimize simultaneous multi-product sterilization through thermal processing simulation of packaged foods considering both constant (CRT) and variable retort temperature (VRT) profiles. The research was approached through three main tasks, which were defined to discover potential opportunities for simultaneous multi-product sterilization with the attempt to recommend the steps to follow to practically implement it. In most cases, simultaneous multi-product sterilization for CRT processing was feasible, however, it was limited to low retort temperature and restricted to products with similar fh. In contrast, in VRT profiles a higher flexibility for simultaneous multi-product sterilization was found. The opportunity to carry out simultaneous multi-product sterilization provides flexibility to optimize retort utilization, reduce energy consumption, and increase processing plant productivity.

The productive chain of a dairy industry contemplates the pasteurization of milk, in which the temperature has the main role, therefore the quality of the final product depends on this variable. This evidences the need to continuously monitor the temperature value in each of the tanks belonging to the pasteurization process. Based on the above, the objective of this paper is to propose an architecture applied to remote temperature monitoring in storage silos of dairy products. As a result, a functional prototype was developed and evaluated in the ECOLAC industry. The IoT prototype captures the temperature data by means of thermocouples, digitizes them and sends them to a web server via WiFi connection, the user can access the data through web-browser on a computer or on a Smartphone. In the evaluation of the behavior of the prototype, a maximum relative error of 3% was obtained.

The present work seeks to develop an autonomous system for the release of steam from a boiler, with the aim of automating and monitoring the operation of a Turkish bath located in a hostel in the town, the system allows to eliminate the intervention of people. That is why the following work addresses the design, simulation and implementation of a temperature control and monitoring system within a Turkish bath, seeking the comfort of users. The system consists of a sensor module which provides an input signal of RTD PT100 temperature sensor. Subsequently, the acquisition card processes the data to then send a signal when the temperature inside the Turkish bath reaches the maximum threshold established, consequently the valve releases the steam to reduce the temperature to the minimum threshold, once this lower threshold has been reached the valve closes the steam release. Finally, the system was developed and implemented, being evaluated in the hostel “Mi compadre” fulfilling the proposed objectives, to give security and comfort to the users.

The growing consumption of bottled water is the result of the lack of healthiness of the water provided by the company that distributes drinking water. In our environment the consumption of bottled water is the healthiest option for users. Therefore it is necessary that there are enough water purification plants in the locality, so that its production can supply the growing demand, however local companies have a manual and inefficient process. Based on the above, the design of an architecture of an automation system is proposed, which has two main functions: 1) control the level of liquid in the main storage tank, and 2) automate the process of packing the commercial drums by means of time-based dosing. The proposed system is based on an embedded system whose core is the ATMega32A microcontroller, float level sensors and an actuator system based on electrovalves. The performance of the prototype of the automation system was satisfactory since it avoided 100% of stockouts and overshoots of the liquid. In addition, the correction constants of the fluid dosing process were generated in order to obtain errors of less than 5% of the nominal volume of commercial water drums.

In the dairy industry, pasteurization is a very important process since it guarantees the flavor, yield and quality of the final product. Consequently, monitoring of temperature and time is very important during the pasteurization process. If this monitoring is done manually, this negatively affects the quality of the product and the safety of the operating personnel of the process. Based on the previous problem, the purpose of this project is to design a low cost and portable architecture for temperature monitoring in dairy product silos. As results obtained, a functional prototype was developed and evaluated in the Lactofino industry. The prototype captures the data by means of an RTD sensor, conditions them, visualizes them and finally identifies and alerts the operator about the stage of the process in which the dairy product is located. For the evaluation of the prototype, the comparison of the temperature measured by the prototype and by a reference instrument was made, the maximum absolute error obtained was 1° C.

The size of the world market for essential oils has been constantly growing in the last decade, with an increase of between 10% and 15% of production per year. Among the most used techniques to extract essential oils is distillation by water-steam drag, however to guarantee safety in terms of work accidents, and, in order to homogenize the quality of the extracted oil, there is evidence of the need for these processes to have an automatic temperature controller, which governs the process. Based on the previous problem, the objective of the present project is to develop an architecture for automatic regulation of temperature in processes of extraction of essential oils. As a result of the present project, a prototype temperature controller was implemented and its behavior was evaluated in a laboratory distiller. In the evaluation of the behavior of the temperature controller, a rise time (Tr) of approximately 15 min., settling time (Ts) greater than 40 min., and steady state error (Ess) less than 2 °C were obtained.

The pumping system of the Administration Board of Drinking Water and Sanitation of the Algarrobera (JAAPS-LA) is made up of a cylindrical aquifer with dimensions of 70 meters deep and 0.305 meters in diameter, the central element of this system is the submersible pump electrical, which is controlled by time. This current system has some deficiencies, among them the shortage of drinking water when the demand of the users is higher than the nominal one; and the large waste of potable water when the demand is lower than the nominal one. The present work proposes the design, implementation and integration of a monitoring and automation system applied to the JAAPS-LA pumping system, based on a wireless sensor network, open hardware and a PLC. As a result, all the modules of the system were implemented: the liquid level acquisition module in the distribution tank by means of liquid level sensors; the wireless data transmission and reception module; the drive module of the pump by means of the Programmable logic controller (PLC); and, finally, the solar-photovoltaic energy capture module. To evaluate the performance of the monitoring and automation system implemented, the behavior was monitored for 4 days, with the data obtained it was possible to verify the correct pump drive logic and the high efficiency (100%) of the communication system.

The early and long-term effects of coronary artery ligation on the plasma and left ventricular angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE and ACE2) activities, ACE and ACE2 mRNA levels, circulating angiotensin (Ang) levels [Ang I, Ang-(1-7), Ang-(1-9), and Ang II], and cardiac function were evaluated 1 and 8 weeks after experimental myocardial infarction in adult Sprague Dawley rats. Sham-operated rats were used as controls. Coronary artery ligation caused myocardial infarction, hypertrophy, and dysfunction 8 weeks after surgery. At week 1, circulating Ang II and Ang-(1-9) levels as well as left ventricular and plasma ACE and ACE2 activities increased in myocardial-infarcted rats as compared with controls. At 8 weeks post-myocardial infarction, circulating ACE activity, ACE mRNA levels, and Ang II levels remained higher, but plasma and left ventricular ACE2 activities and mRNA levels and circulating levels of Ang-(1-9) were lower than in controls. No changes in plasma Ang-(1-7) levels were observed at any time. Enalapril prevented cardiac hypertrophy and dysfunction as well as the changes in left ventricular ACE, left ventricular and plasmatic ACE2, and circulating levels of Ang II and Ang-(1-9) after 8 weeks postinfarction. Thus, the decrease in ACE2 expression and activity and circulating Ang-(1-9) levels in late ventricular dysfunction post-myocardial infarction were prevented with enalapril. These findings suggest that in this second arm of the renin-angiotensin system, ACE2 may act through Ang-(1-9), rather than Ang-(1-7), as a counterregulator of the first arm, where ACE catalyzes the formation of Ang II.