Oerlikon (Switzerland)

Patients with supraventricular tachycardia (SVT) are often symptomatic, but frequency of symptoms is very variable. Definition of tachycardia mechanism and diagnosis is dependent on documentation of the arrhythmia by electrocardiogram (ECG), but this documentation is often missed by standard evaluation with a Holter ECG. Wearable smart devices with ECG function are valuable diagnostic tools in such patients. We describe a case of a 59-year-old male patient who suffered from infrequent palpitations, where documentation of two distinct tachycardia ECG tracings with a wearable smart device led to the correct diagnosis. One tracing showed an episode of narrow QRS complex tachycardia at a heart rate of 200 b.p.m. and the other a broad complex tachycardia with left bundle branch block morphology at a slower heart rate. Based on these findings, which demonstrate Coumel's sign, atrioventricular re-entrant tachycardia with left lateral accessory pathway was suspected. Electrophysiological study confirmed the diagnosis, and an accessory pathway located at the lateral mitral isthmus was successfully ablated. Aberrant ventricular conduction due to functional bundle branch block is an important finding during SVT. In the presented case, a wearable smart device was able to document two episodes of tachycardia with two distinct ECG morphologies, one with broad QRS complexes at a slower heart rate and the other with a faster episode of narrow QRS complexes. Therefore, the wearable device was not only able to document an episode of symptomatic tachycardia, but it also additionally offered important keys to the correct diagnosis.

The Swiss Narcolepsy Network (SNaNe) was founded in 2017 as a non-profit organization with the vision of improving the care of patients with narcolepsy, central disorders of hypersomnolence (CDH), and rare sleep disorders. The SNaNe aims at maximizing the speed of diagnosis, minimizing difficulties stemming from the rare nature of these conditions, and providing patients with optimum health care throughout the course of their disease. In addition, the SNaNe promotes education, awareness, and research on CDH and rare sleep disorders. The article reports the current structure, organization, and the following main activities of the SNaNe: (1) the discussion of complex patient cases; (2) the organization of the Swiss Narcolepsy Days; (3) the coordination of multicenter research projects (e.g., SPHYNCS and iSPHYNCS studies); (4) the establishment of an anonymous Swiss registry for CDH patients (SNaNe Data Registry); (5) the collaboration with the national patients’ organization (SNAG); and (6) the collaboration with other national and international scientific, professional, and patients’ (eNAP) organizations.

Achieving target coating thickness is one of the main objectives in thermal spraying. Despite this, there is a lack of measurement methods that could evaluate in situ the coating thickness with a sufficient accuracy that could be used as a robust feedback signal for online, closed-loop process control. This paper presents a novel approach for in situ spatially resolved coating thickness measurements. The measurement technique is based on a high-resolution 3D camera to capture the surface topography and include it in the thickness measurement. The technique provides results of total coating thickness with excellent accuracy when compared to the reference microscopical method. It also gives a 3D view of the coating thicknesses around the observed area as well as information about the thickness of individual coating layers. Moreover, the approach enables in situ evaluation of surface roughness, and a nondestructive estimation of coating porosity.

This paper presents, in a unified fashion, deterministic as well as statistical Lagrangian-verification techniques. They formally quantify the behavioral robustness of any time-continuous process, formulated as a continuous-depth model. To this end, we review LRT-NG, SLR, and GoTube, algorithms for constructing a tight reachtube, that is, an over-approximation of the set of states reachable within a given time-horizon, and provide guarantees for the reachtube bounds. We compare the usage of the variational equations, associated to the system equations, the mean value theorem, and the Lipschitz constants, in achieving deterministic and statistical guarantees. In LRT-NG, the Lipschitz constant is used as a bloating factor of the initial perturbation, to compute the radius of an ellipsoid in an optimal metric, which over-approximates the set of reachable states. In SLR and GoTube, we get statistical guarantees, by using the Lipschitz constants to compute local balls around samples. These are needed to calculate the probability of having found an upper bound, of the true maximum perturbation at every timestep. Our experiments demonstrate the superior performance of Lagrangian techniques, when compared to LRT, Flow*, and CAPD, and illustrate their use in the robustness analysis of various continuous-depth models.

Abstract In this paper we present a new, lexicon-based phylogeny of 34 Southern Bantu languages, and combine it with previous insights from linguistics, archaeology, and genetics to study the history of Southern Bantu languages and their speakers. Our phylogeny shows all Southern Bantu languages to derive from a single, direct ancestor, which contrasts with archaeological evidence indicating separate migrations of Bantu speakers into southern Africa. This suggests that the Bantu languages spoken by the first migrants became extinct, and the ancestor of present-day Southern Bantu languages only emerged in southern Africa during the second millennium CE. We also map the distribution of previously established or suspected Khoisan-derived linguistic features in Southern Bantu languages onto this phylogeny. Evidence for intensive contact with speakers of Khoisan languages also comes from population genetics, which shows that Khoisan linguistic influence is mainly seen in languages spoken by populations displaying a higher degree of genetic admixture.