Revisión sistemática de literatura de la neumonía lipoidea exógena (nle) por exposición laboral

Objetivo Realizar una revisión sistemática de la neumonía lipoidea exógena (NLE) con el propósito de compactar y sintetizar los conocimientos fragmentados, así como el de informar el estado actual de este tema como riesgo laboral. Metodología La neumonía lipoidea es una condición poco común que resulta de la presencia de lípidos en el interior del espacio alveolar, se desconoce su actual incidencia. La neumonía lipoidea exógena se produce por aspiración o inhalación de sustancias oleosas, es una patología rara en pacientes sin enfermedades de base que predispongan a la broncoaspiración y cuando se presenta en individuos sanos se debe sospechar un origen ocupacional. Se realizó una revisión de literatura según la metodología estandarizada, incluyendo en la búsqueda: reporte de casos, descripciones de la enfermedad y el uso de técnicas diagnósticas. Las bases de datos fueron OVID además de GOOGLE ACADÉMICO; buscadores específicos: MEDLINE, CHEST, PUB MED, REDALYC, SCIELO, Europe PubMed Central (Europe PMC) y ELSEVIER. La búsqueda estuvo además, orientada por una serie de preguntas orientadoras sobre la neumonía lipoidea exógena (NLE) como riesgo laboral. Los artículos que cumplieron con los criterios de inclusión, se clasificaron de acuerdo con tipo de estudio, la calidad del artículo y finalmente se evaluaron con base en una lista de chequeo ajustada para este fin. Resultados Se seleccionó un total de 71 estudios incluyendo reporte de casos, descripciones de la enfermedad y técnicas diagnósticas; publicaciones provenientes de 21 países. Un total de 63 casos, 31 en mujeres (49,20%) y 32 en hombres (50,8%) fueron reportados; el 7,93% de los casos fueron atribuidos a la exposición de agentes en el ambiente laboral: combustibles, parafina/pintura/ pulverizaciones oleosas y diésel, ambientes propios de trabajadores de almacenes de pinturas y conductores de vehículos. Los síntomas de la neumonía lipoidea exógena (NLE) descritos fueron muy variables, puede cursar asintomática o con presencia de fiebre, disnea y tos irritativa; dolor torácico, en algunos casos hemoptisis, cianosis y pérdida de peso; El examen físico generalmente es normal, aunque puede revelar sibilancias o roncus. En pruebas de función respiratoria tales como la espirometría, se presenta un patrón restrictivo, además puede hallarse un descenso en la capacidad de difusión para el monóxido de carbono. En el hemograma puede detectarse leucocitosis con predominio de neutrófilos y aumento de la velocidad de sedimentación globular, hallazgos que también pueden ser producidos por una infección concomitante. Conclusiones Se destaca el hallazgo en la literatura de los diferentes agentes causales presentes en el ambiente laboral que pueden incidir en la aparición de la enfermedad: combustibles, parafina/pintura/ pulverizaciones oleosas y diésel, ambientes propios de trabajadores de almacenes de pinturas y conductores de vehículos. Se presentó neumonía lipoidea exógena (NLE) de tipo agudo después de 30 minutos a 24 horas de exposición masiva a aceites y sustancias oleosas, luego de de ocho meses a 9,5 años de inhalación continua secundaria. Los métodos más para de la diagnóstico enfermedad incluyen el lavado broncoalveolar (BAL), la biopsia de pulmón y la con radiografía torácica. Finalmente, es posible que en pacientes con neumonía lipoidea exógena, puedan presentarse complicaciones asociadas tales como: sobreinfección, fibrosis, retracción de las lesiones, cáncer de pulmón, bronconeumonías recurrentes e hipercalcemia.

Integration of knowledge-based, qualitative and numeric tools for real time dynamic systems supervision

The proposal presented in this thesis is to provide designers of knowledge based supervisory systems of dynamic systems with a framework to facilitate their tasks avoiding interface problems among tools, data flow and management. The approach is thought to be useful to both control and process engineers in assisting their tasks. The use of AI technologies to diagnose and perform control loops and, of course, assist process supervisory tasks such as fault detection and diagnose, are in the scope of this work. Special effort has been put in integration of tools for assisting expert supervisory systems design. With this aim the experience of Computer Aided Control Systems Design (CACSD) frameworks have been analysed and used to design a Computer Aided Supervisory Systems (CASSD) framework. In this sense, some basic facilities are required to be available in this proposed framework: ·

Distributional semantics and machine learning for statistical machine translation

[EU]Lan honetan semantika distribuzionalaren eta ikasketa automatikoaren erabilera aztertzen dugu itzulpen automatiko estatistikoa hobetzeko. Bide horretan, erregresio logistikoan oinarritutako ikasketa automatikoko eredu bat proposatzen dugu hitz-segiden itzulpen- probabilitatea modu dinamikoan modelatzeko. Proposatutako eredua itzulpen automatiko estatistikoko ohiko itzulpen-probabilitateen orokortze bat dela frogatzen dugu, eta testuinguruko nahiz semantika distribuzionaleko informazioa barneratzeko baliatu ezaugarri lexiko, hitz-cluster eta hitzen errepresentazio bektorialen bidez. Horretaz gain, semantika distribuzionaleko ezagutza itzulpen automatiko estatistikoan txertatzeko beste hurbilpen bat lantzen dugu: hitzen errepresentazio bektorial elebidunak erabiltzea hitz-segiden itzulpenen antzekotasuna modelatzeko. Gure esperimentuek proposatutako ereduen baliagarritasuna erakusten dute, emaitza itxaropentsuak eskuratuz oinarrizko sistema sendo baten gainean. Era berean, gure lanak ekarpen garrantzitsuak egiten ditu errepresentazio bektorialen mapaketa elebidunei eta hitzen errepresentazio bektorialetan oinarritutako hitz-segiden antzekotasun neurriei dagokienean, itzulpen automatikoaz haratago balio propio bat dutenak semantika distribuzionalaren arloan.

Translating climate forecasts into agricultural terms: advances and challenges

Seasonal climate prediction offers the potential to anticipate variations in crop production early enough to adjust critical decisions. Until recently, interest in exploiting seasonal forecasts from dynamic climate models (e.g. general circulation models, GCMs) for applications that involve crop simulation models has been hampered by the difference in spatial and temporal scale of GCMs and crop models, and by the dynamic, nonlinear relationship between meteorological variables and crop response. Although GCMs simulate the atmosphere on a sub-daily time step, their coarse spatial resolution and resulting distortion of day-to-day variability limits the use of their daily output. Crop models have used daily GCM output with some success by either calibrating simulated yields or correcting the daily rainfall output of the GCM to approximate the statistical properties of historic observations. Stochastic weather generators are used to disaggregate seasonal forecasts either by adjusting input parameters in a manner that captures the predictable components of climate, or by constraining synthetic weather sequences to match predicted values. Predicting crop yields, simulated with historic weather data, as a statistical function of seasonal climatic predictors, eliminates the need for daily weather data conditioned on the forecast, but must often address poor statistical properties of the crop-climate relationship. Most of the work on using crop simulation with seasonal climate forecasts has employed historic analogs based on categorical ENSO indices. Other methods based on classification of predictors or weather types can provide daily weather inputs to crop models conditioned on forecasts. Advances in climate-based crop forecasting in the coming decade are likely to include more robust evaluation of the methods reviewed here, dynamically embedding crop models within climate models to account for crop influence on regional climate, enhanced use of remote sensing, and research in the emerging area of 'weather within climate'.

Translating climate forecasts into agricultural terms: advances and challenges

Seasonal climate prediction offers the potential to anticipate variations in crop production early enough to adjust critical decisions. Until recently, interest in exploiting seasonal forecasts from dynamic climate models (e.g. general circulation models, GCMs) for applications that involve crop simulation models has been hampered by the difference in spatial and temporal scale of GCMs and crop models, and by the dynamic, nonlinear relationship between meteorological variables and crop response. Although GCMs simulate the atmosphere on a sub-daily time step, their coarse spatial resolution and resulting distortion of day-to-day variability limits the use of their daily output. Crop models have used daily GCM output with some success by either calibrating simulated yields or correcting the daily rainfall output of the GCM to approximate the statistical properties of historic observations. Stochastic weather generators are used to disaggregate seasonal forecasts either by adjusting input parameters in a manner that captures the predictable components of climate, or by constraining synthetic weather sequences to match predicted values. Predicting crop yields, simulated with historic weather data, as a statistical function of seasonal climatic predictors, eliminates the need for daily weather data conditioned on the forecast, but must often address poor statistical properties of the crop-climate relationship. Most of the work on using crop simulation with seasonal climate forecasts has employed historic analogs based on categorical ENSO indices. Other methods based on classification of predictors or weather types can provide daily weather inputs to crop models conditioned on forecasts. Advances in climate-based crop forecasting in the coming decade are likely to include more robust evaluation of the methods reviewed here, dynamically embedding crop models within climate models to account for crop influence on regional climate, enhanced use of remote sensing, and research in the emerging area of 'weather within climate'.

Perspectives on experiences of innovation: the development of an assessment methodology appropriate to construction project organizations

The UK construction industry is in the process of trying to adopt a new culture based on the large-scale take up of innovative practices. Through the Demonstration Project process many organizations are implementing changed practices and learning from the experiences of others. This is probably the largest experiment in innovation in any industry in recent times. The long-term success will be measured by the effectiveness of embedding the new practices in the organization. As yet there is no recognized approach to measuring the receptivity of the organization to the innovation process as an indication of the likelihood of long-term development. The development of an appropriate approach is described here. Existing approaches to the measurement of the take up of innovation were reviewed and where appropriate used as the base for the development of a questionnaire. The questionnaire could be applicable to multi-organizational construction project situations such that the output could determine an individual organization's innovative practices via an innovation scorecard, a project team's approach or it could be used to survey a wide cross-section of the industry.

Steady-spectrum contexts and perceptual compensation for reverberation in speech identification

Perceptual compensation for reverberation was measured by embedding test words in contexts that were either spoken phrases or processed versions of this speech. The processing gave steady-spectrum contexts with no changes in the shape of the short-term spectral envelope over time, but with fluctuations in the temporal envelope. Test words were from a continuum between "sir" and "stir." When the amount of reverberation in test words was increased, to a level above the amount in the context, they sounded more like "sir." However, when the amount of reverberation in the context was also increased, to the level present in the test word, there was perceptual compensation in some conditions so that test words sounded more like "stir" again. Experiments here found compensation with speech contexts and with some steady-spectrum contexts, indicating that fluctuations in the context's temporal envelope can be sufficient for compensation. Other results suggest that the effectiveness of speech contexts is partly due to the narrow-band "frequency-channels" of the auditory periphery, where temporal-envelope fluctuations can be more pronounced than they are in the sound's broadband temporal envelope. Further results indicate that for compensation to influence speech, the context needs to be in a broad range of frequency channels. (c) 2007 Acoustical Society of America.

The VERA information environment

We present three components of a virtual research environment developed for the ongoing Roman excavation at Silchester. These components — Recycle Bridge, XDB cross-database search, and Arch3D — provide additional services around the existing core of the system, run on the Integrated Archaeological Database (IADB). They provide, respectively, embedding of legacy applications into portals, cross-database searching, and 3D visualisation of stratigraphic information.

Information system evolvability, feedback and pattern languages

Information systems for business are frequently heavily reliant on software. Two important feedback-related effects of embedding software in a business process are identified. First, the system dynamics of the software maintenance process can become complex, particularly in the number and scope of the feedback loops. Secondly, responsiveness to feedback can have a big effect on the evolvability of the information system. Ways have been explored to provide an effective mechanism for improving the quality of feedback between stakeholders during software maintenance. Understanding can be improved by using representations of information systems that are both service-based and architectural in scope. The conflicting forces that encourage change or stability can be resolved using patterns and pattern languages. A morphology of information systems pattern languages has been described to facilitate the identification and reuse of patterns and pattern languages. The kind of planning process needed to achieve consensus on a system's evolution is also considered.

Rejoinder to 'Performance of different synchronisation measures in real data: A case study on electroencephalograhic signals

We agree with Duckrow and Albano [Phys. Rev. E 67, 063901 (2003)] and Quian Quiroga et al. [Phys. Rev. E 67, 063902 (2003)] that mutual information (MI) is a useful measure of dependence for electroencephalogram (EEG) data, but we show that the improvement seen in the performance of MI on extracting dependence trends from EEG is more dependent on the type of MI estimator rather than any embedding technique used. In an independent study we conducted in search for an optimal MI estimator, and in particular for EEG applications, we examined the performance of a number of MI estimators on the data set used by Quian Quiroga et al. in their original study, where the performance of different dependence measures on real data was investigated [Phys. Rev. E 65, 041903 (2002)]. We show that for EEG applications the best performance among the investigated estimators is achieved by k-nearest neighbors, which supports the conjecture by Quian Quiroga et al. in Phys. Rev. E 67, 063902 (2003) that the nearest neighbor estimator is the most precise method for estimating MI.

Comment on "Performance of different synchronization measures in real data: A case study on electroencephalographic signals"

We agree with Duckrow and Albano [Phys. Rev. E 67, 063901 (2003)] and Quian Quiroga [Phys. Rev. E 67, 063902 (2003)] that mutual information (MI) is a useful measure of dependence for electroencephalogram (EEG) data, but we show that the improvement seen in the performance of MI on extracting dependence trends from EEG is more dependent on the type of MI estimator rather than any embedding technique used. In an independent study we conducted in search for an optimal MI estimator, and in particular for EEG applications, we examined the performance of a number of MI estimators on the data set used by Quian Quiroga in their original study, where the performance of different dependence measures on real data was investigated [Phys. Rev. E 65, 041903 (2002)]. We show that for EEG applications the best performance among the investigated estimators is achieved by k-nearest neighbors, which supports the conjecture by Quian Quiroga in Phys. Rev. E 67, 063902 (2003) that the nearest neighbor estimator is the most precise method for estimating MI.

Fault tolerance of Mobius cubes under two forbidden fault set models

An n-dimensional Mobius cube, 0MQ(n) or 1MQ(n), is a variation of n-dimensional cube Q(n) which possesses many attractive properties such as significantly smaller communication delay and stronger graph-embedding capabilities. In some practical situations, the fault tolerance of a distributed memory multiprocessor system can be measured more precisely by the connectivity of the underlying graph under forbidden fault set models. This article addresses the connectivity of 0MQ(n)/1MQ(n), under two typical forbidden fault set models. We first prove that the connectivity of 0MQ(n)/1MQ(n) is 2n - 2 when the fault set does not contain the neighborhood of any vertex as a subset. We then prove that the connectivity of 0MQ(n)/1MQ(n) is 3n - 5 provided that the neighborhood of any vertex as well as that of any edge cannot fail simultaneously These results demonstrate that 0MQ(n)/1MQ(n) has the same connectivity as Q(n) under either of the previous assumptions.

Locally twisted cubes are 4-pancyclic

The locally twisted cube is a newly introduced interconnection network for parallel computing. Ring embedding is an important issue for evaluating the performance of an interconnection network. In this paper, we investigate the problem of embedding rings into a locally twisted cube. Our main contribution is to find that, for each integer l is an element of (4,5,...,2(n)}, a ring of length I can be embedded into an n-dimensional locally twisted cube so that both the dilation and the load factor are one. As a result, a locally twisted cube is Hamiltonian. We conclude that a locally twisted cube is superior to a hypercube in terms of ring embedding capability. (C) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

A comparison-based diagnosis algorithm tailored for crossed cube multiprocessor systems

Comparison-based diagnosis is an effective approach to system-level fault diagnosis. Under the Maeng-Malek comparison model (NM* model), Sengupta and Dahbura proposed an O(N-5) diagnosis algorithm for general diagnosable systems with N nodes. Thanks to lower diameter and better graph embedding capability as compared with a hypercube of the same size, the crossed cube has been a promising candidate for interconnection networks. In this paper, we propose a fault diagnosis algorithm tailored for crossed cube connected multicomputer systems under the MM* model. By introducing appropriate data structures, this algorithm runs in O(Nlog(2)(2) N) time, which is linear in the size of the input. As a result, this algorithm is significantly superior to the Sengupta-Dahbura's algorithm when applied to crossed cube systems. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.