Electronic Arts (United Kingdom)

Few studies have examined and compared neonatal physicians' and nurses' attitudes toward palliative care. This comparative study sought to evaluate attitudes toward neonatal palliative care in neonatal nurses and physicians and identify associated facilitators and barriers. This comparative, cross-sectional study included 173 neonatal intensive care unit staff (149 neonatal nurses and 24 neonatal physicians) in 2 hospitals in Istanbul, Turkey. Data were collected using the Turkish version of the Neonatal Palliative Care Attitude Scale. The results of the study revealed 8 facilitators and 9 barriers to neonatal palliative care. Nurses were significantly more likely than physicians to agree that parents are informed about palliative care options in their unit ( P = .008), that caring for dying infants is traumatic ( P = .007), and that their willingness to provide palliative care is influenced by their personal attitudes toward death ( P = .015). This study demonstrates the importance of parents' active involvement in the palliative care process, the establishment of standard policies and guidelines, and the provision of vocational and in-service education programs to support palliative care. Initiatives to strengthen facilitators and mitigate barriers are needed to optimize the implementation of palliative care in NICUs.

Study of trajectory of care is attractive for predicting medical outcome. Models based on machine learning (ML) techniques have proven their efficiency for sequence prediction modeling compared to other models. Introducing pattern mining techniques contributed to reduce model complexity. In this respect, we explored methods for medical events' prediction based on the extraction of sets of relevant event sequences of a national hospital discharge database. It is illustrated to predict the risk of in-hospital mortality in acute coronary syndrome (ACS). We mined sequential patterns from the French Hospital Discharge Database. We compared several predictive models using a text string distance to measure the similarity between patients' patterns of care. We computed combinations of similarity measurements and ML models commonly used. A Support Vector Machine model coupled with edit-based distance appeared as the most effective model. Indeed discrimination ranged from 0.71 to 0.99, together with a good overall accuracy. Thus, sequential patterns mining appear motivating for event prediction in medical settings as described here for ACS.

Le présent article entend examiner les rapports entre « traduire » et « convaincre », à la lumière de l’approche pragmatique de la traduction. En se fondant sur la distinction heuristique entre « sens » et « signification », il s’agira d’analyser la manière dont le traducteur-réenonciateur, qu’est souvent le scripteur médiéval, s’y prend pour inscrire dans le texte source les marques de son propre projet d’écriture. Ce faisant, ce traducteur s’essaie à convaincre son lecteur de la pertinence de sa lecture et de la nécessaire actualisation de sa source. La fable du coq et du saphir du Libro de buen amor constituera le corpus de base et sera analysé à partir des connecteurs.

In this paper, we initiated new types of near open and closed sets called higher order sets. These sets generated by much iteration of topological interior and closure operations for a given set. These new sets are the terms of many sequences of topological near open and near closed sets. We studied many generalizations of the classical near open sets to these sequences. This paper is the starting point of a new way for researchers to study the high order topology.

<em>The development of intellectual skills is always a topical issue among scholars. At the same time, the rapid development of information technology allows them to actively involve them in the process of forming new methods and forms of organization of educational activities. Since future specialists must receive knowledge at the junction of certain scientific fields, in particular natural sciences, it is necessary to look for new approaches that will allow it to be done. One such modern approach is STEM-education. The most successful introduction of STEM education in the learning process is robotics. The article presents the results of a pedagogical experiment, which made it possible to conclude that the use of robotics in the educational activities of adolescents is appropriate in solving problems of improving intellectual development.</em>

PET Textural indices could have an add-on diagnostic value for diagnosis of malignancy in patients with FDG-avid adrenal lesions. Consecutive patients referred for a FDG-PET/CT to our nuclear medicine department from June 2012 to June 2017 were retrospectively screened. Inclusion criteria were: patients with a FDG-avid adrenal lesion (uptake≥liver background); malignant/benign lesion confirmed histologically or with follow-up imaging examination. Pheochromocytomas were not included in the analysis. For each adrenal lesion, 5 quantitative PET parameters (SUV<inf>max</inf>, MTV, TLG, TLR<inf>max</inf> and TLRmean<inf>)</inf> were calculated. Thirty-seven textural indices were extracted using LIFEx software®. Diagnostic performance to determine malignancy was assessed with a ROC analysis. Parameters with a significantly AUC>0.5 were selected and groups of highly correlated (r>0.8) parameters were created. A scoring system combining PET and textural indices was examined. PET textural indices were calculated for 53 lesions (37 malignant, 16 benign). Three PET metabolic parameters (SUV<inf>max</inf>, TLR<inf>max</inf>, TLRmean) and 13 textural indices had an AUC>0.5. Seven groups of highly correlated parameters (r>0.8) were extracted. For PET parameters, SUV<inf>max</inf> had the best AUC (0.89 95% CI [0.79-0.98]; cut-off=7.0). For textural indices, ZLNU had the best AUC (0.87 95% CI [0.78-0.96]; cut-off=34.7) and specificity of 100%. Three scores combining the best four textural indices alone (Contrast<inf>GLCM</inf>, LRHGE, SZE and ZLNU) or with one PET parameters (SUV<inf>max</inf>, TLR<inf>max</inf>) were developed but did not increase the diagnostic performance (AUC≤0.89). ZLNU was the best parameter to distinguish primary adrenal cancer from adrenal metastases in malignant lesions (P<0.001). Our study highlighted excellent diagnostic performance of several PET textural indices comparable to that of PET metabolic parameters. However, our results did not find any additional diagnostic value of textural indices when combined with metabolic parameters.

In this study, a reader antenna including resonators is proposed to improve detection of a small moving tag in the case of tracking a radiofrequency identification (RFID) system. The near‐field RFID technology is based on load modulation, the input impedance on the reader coil and the mutual inductance between the reader and tag coils are the main parameters for performing detection. They are calculated from the impedance matrix parameters. The added resonators change all the parameters of the impedance matrix consequently the input impedance and mutual inductance are also changed. In this study, analytical formulation defining the equivalent impedance matrix parameters is developed. These formulae are used to evaluate the performance of the proposed design according to the tag misalignment (lateral and angular). From the calculation and simulation results, a frequency shift in the equivalent input impedance is found. To avoid this problem, optimising the positioning of the resonators on the reader coil is performed. This study is confirmed by measures of RFID detection for a reader prototype (with and without resonators) and a small commercial tag. Both the surface and volume of detection of the small moving tag (lateral and angular misalignment) are improved by the principle of added resonators.

Cell therapy has been proposed as a salvage limb procedure in critical limb ischemia (CLI). Autologous cell therapy products (CTP) are obtained from patients with advanced peripheral arterial disease to be injected at the site of ischemia. Thrombogenicity of CTPs has not yet been assessed. The objectives were: 1) to assess thrombotic risk in candidates for cell therapy, 2) to evaluate two different CTPs in terms of thrombogenic potential, and 3) to evaluate clinical thrombotic events. In this ancillary study of a Phase I and II clinical trial, bone marrow (BM)-CTPs (n = 20) and CTPs obtained by cytapheresis (peripheral blood [PB]-CTPs; n = 20) were compared. Inflammatory and coagulation markers were measured at baseline and 24 hours after CTP implantation. CTP cell content and tissue factor (TF) expression (mRNA and protein) were analyzed. Thrombin generation assessed CTP-related thrombogenicity. All patients presented cardiovascular risk factors. At baseline, the patients' biologic profile was characterized by high levels of fibrinogen, C-reactive protein (CRP), D-dimer, interleukin (IL)-6, and plasmatic TF, whereas IL-10 was low. Although different in terms of cell composition, both BM- and PB-CTPs support low thrombin generation. Twenty-four hours after implantation, biologic markers remained stable in the PB-CTP group, except for IL-6. In the BM-CTP group, a significant increase of IL-6 but also of CRP and D-dimer was observed. Clinically, one single patient developed deep vein thrombosis 24 hours after the implantation of autologous PB-CTP. CTPs supported low thrombin generation and were well tolerated after calf implantation.

Le point de départ de ce numéro portant en partie sur la réception de Karl May en France a été une question toute simple et qui, semblait-il, n’avait jusqu’alors jamais été soulevée, mais que la convergence de dates – en l’occurrence l’anniversaire du centième anniversaire de sa mort en 2012 – rendait tout-à-coup pertinente : qu’en était-il, et qu’en est-il, de la réception de Karl May en France ? En effet, son succès dans son pays d’origine, sa renommée mondiale, dont le monde de la francoph...