A simple, economical, and effective portable paediatric mock circulatory system

Ventricular assist devices (VADs) and total artificial hearts have been in development for the last 50 years. Since their inception, simulators of the circulation with different degrees of complexity have been produced to test these devices in vitro. Currently, a new path has been taken with the extensive efforts to develop paediatric VADs, which require totally different design constraints. This paper presents the manufacturing details of an economical simulator of the systemic paediatric circulation. This simulator allows the insertion of a paediatric VAD, includes a pumping ventricle, and is adjustable within the paediatric range. Rather than focusing on complexity and physiological simulation, this simulator is designed to be simple and practical for rapid device testing. The simulator was instrumented with medical sensors and data were acquired under different conditions with and without the new PediaFlowTM paediatric VAD. The VAD was run at different impeller speeds while simulator settings such as vascular resistance and stroke volume were varied. The hydraulic performance of the VAD under pulsatile conditions could be characterized and the magnetic suspension could be tested via manipulations such as cannula clamping. This compact mock loop has proven to be valuable throughout the PediaFlow development process and has the advantage that it is uncomplicated and can be manufactured cheaply. It can be produced by several research groups and the results of different VADs can then be compared easily.

Isothermal loop-mediated amplification (LAMP) for diagnosis of contagious bovine pleuro-pneumonia.

BACKGROUND Contagious Bovine Pleuropneumonia (CBPP) is the most important chronic pulmonary disease of cattle on the African continent causing severe economic losses. The disease, caused by infection with Mycoplasma mycoides subsp. mycoides is transmitted by animal contact and develops slowly into a chronic form preventing an early clinical diagnosis. Because available vaccines confer a low protection rate and short-lived immunity, the rapid diagnosis of infected animals combined with traditional curbing measures is seen as the best way to control the disease. While traditional labour-intensive bacteriological methods for the detection of M. mycoides subsp. mycoides have been replaced by molecular genetic techniques in the last two decades, these latter approaches require well-equipped laboratories and specialized personnel for the diagnosis. This is a handicap in areas where CBPP is endemic and early diagnosis is essential. RESULTS We present a rapid, sensitive and specific diagnostic tool for M. mycoides subsp. mycoides detection based on isothermal loop-mediated amplification (LAMP) that is applicable to field conditions. The primer set developed is highly specific and sensitive enough to diagnose clinical cases without prior cultivation of the organism. The LAMP assay detects M. mycoides subsp. mycoides DNA directly from crude samples of pulmonary/pleural fluids and serum/plasma within an hour using a simple dilution protocol. A photometric detection of LAMP products allows the real-time visualisation of the amplification curve and the application of a melting curve/re-association analysis presents a means of quality assurance based on the predetermined strand-inherent temperature profile supporting the diagnosis. CONCLUSION The CBPP LAMP developed in a robust kit format can be run on a battery-driven mobile device to rapidly detect M. mycoides subsp. mycoides infections from clinical or post mortem samples. The stringent innate quality control allows a conclusive on-site diagnosis of CBPP such as during farm or slaughter house inspections.

Supersymmetric quantum mechanics on the lattice: I. Loop formulation

Simulations of supersymmetric field theories on the lattice with (spontaneously) broken supersymmetry suffer from a fermion sign problem related to the vanishing of the Witten index. We propose a novel approach which solves this problem in low dimensions by formulating the path integral on the lattice in terms of fermion loops. For N=2 supersymmetric quantum mechanics the loop formulation becomes particularly simple and in this paper – the first in a series of three – we discuss in detail the reformulation of this model in terms of fermionic and bosonic bonds for various lattice discretisations including one which is Q-exact.

All-loop anomalous dimensions in integrable λ-deformed σ-models

We calculate the all-loop anomalous dimensions of current operators in λ-deformed σ-models. For the isotropic integrable deformation and for a semi-simple group G we compute the anomalous dimensions using two different methods. In the first we use the all-loop effective action and in the second we employ perturbation theory along with the Callan–Symanzik equation and in conjunction with a duality-type symmetry shared by these models. Furthermore, using CFT techniques we compute the all-loop anomalous dimension of bilinear currents for the isotropic deformation case and a general G . Finally we work out the anomalous dimension matrix for the cases of anisotropic SU(2) and the two couplings, corresponding to the symmetric coset G/H and a subgroup H, splitting of a group G.