Aerocrine (Sweden)

The UK Refractory Asthma Stratification Programme (RASP-UK) will explore novel biomarker stratification strategies in severe asthma to improve clinical management and accelerate development of new therapies. Prior asthma mechanistic studies have not stratified on inflammatory phenotype and the understanding of pathophysiological mechanisms in asthma without Type 2 cytokine inflammation is limited. RASP-UK will objectively assess adherence to corticosteroids (CS) and examine a novel composite biomarker strategy to optimise CS dose; this will also address what proportion of patients with severe asthma have persistent symptoms without eosinophilic airways inflammation after progressive CS withdrawal. There will be interactive partnership with the pharmaceutical industry to facilitate access to stratified populations for novel therapeutic studies.

: The present paper aims to review the advantages and limitations of sputum cell counts and exhaled nitric oxide (FeNO) levels in the investigation of occupational asthma (OA). The American College of Chest physicians held a course on occupational and Environmental Lung Diseases in Toronto in 2013. A summary of the session on non-invasive measures of airway inflammation in OA is presented here. Occupational asthma is associated with an increase in sputum eosinophil percentage during periods at work or after positive specific inhalation challenges. Changes in FeNO are less sensitive than sputum eosinophil counts for predicting OA. In settings where this tool is available, sputum eosinophil counts may complement the current investigation of OA. The interpretation of FeNO remains sometimes difficult. The phenotypes of patients who may benefit from this measure needs to be better defined.

Abstract Traditionally the implementation of Telemetry Encoders and Telecommand Decoders for space has been made in hardware, at least for the last two decades. This was also the approach that was envisaged when these OBC boards had been conceptualized. But with the availability of more processing power (e.g. the LEON3FT 32-bit fault-tolerant SPARCTM V8 processor), more of the encoding and decoding tasks can be moved to software, allowing flexibility for adapting the system to on-going standardization efforts. The approach followed here in this CDPI architecture is that part of the CCSDS decoding/encoding is performed in an IP.core on FPGA hardware on the CCSDS decoder/encoder board and part of the task is done in software using libraries. This firmware and software was provided by Aeroflex Gaisler AB together with the RTEMS realtime operating system for the Aeroflex Processor-Boards cited in Chap. 2.KeywordsDirect Memory AccessCode LayerConvolutional EncoderStart SequenceTransfer FrameThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.