The VLT Survey Telescope (VST) is a 2.6m aperture, wide field, UV to I
facility, to be installed at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) on the
Cerro Paranal Chile. VST was primarily intended to ...complement the observing
capabilities of VLT with wide-angle imaging for detecting and
pre-characterising sources for further observations with the VLT.
The VLT Survey Telescope (VST) is a 2.6m aperture, wide field, UV to I facility, to be installed at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) on the Cerro Paranal Chile. VST was primarily intended to ...complement the observing capabilities of VLT with wide-angle imaging for detecting and pre-characterising sources for further observations with the VLT.
The aim of this study was to apply Bayesian models to the Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy spectra of individual sheep milk samples to derive calibration equations to predict traditional and ...modeled milk coagulation properties (MCP), and to assess the repeatability of MCP measures and their predictions. Data consisted of 1,002 individual milk samples collected from Sarda ewes reared in 22 farms in the region of Sardinia (Italy) for which MCP and modeled curd-firming parameters were available. Two milk samples were taken from 87 ewes and analyzed with the aim of estimating repeatability, whereas a single sample was taken from the other 915 ewes. Therefore, a total of 1,089 analyses were performed. For each sample, 2 spectra in the infrared region 5,011 to 925 cm−1 were available and averaged before data analysis. BayesB models were used to calibrate equations for each of the traits. Prediction accuracy was estimated for each trait and model using 20 replicates of a training-testing validation procedure. The repeatability of MCP measures and their predictions were also compared. The correlations between measured and predicted traits, in the external validation, were always higher than 0.5 (0.88 for rennet coagulation time). We confirmed that the most important element for finding the prediction accuracy is the repeatability of the gold standard analyses used for building calibration equations. Repeatability measures of the predicted traits were generally high (≥95%), even for those traits with moderate analytical repeatability. Our results show that Bayesian models applied to Fourier-transform infrared spectra are powerful tools for cheap and rapid prediction of important traits in ovine milk and, compared with other methods, could help in the interpretation of results.
Open reduction and internal fixation of pelvic acetabular fractures are challenging due to the limited surgical exposure from surrounding abdominal tissue. There have been a number of recent trials ...using metallic 3D-printed pelvic fracture plates to simplify and improve various elements of these fracture fixation surgeries; however, the amount of time and accuracy involved in the design and implantation of customised plates have not been well characterised. This study recorded the amount of time related to the design, manufacture and implantation of six customised fracture plates for five cadaveric pelvic specimens with acetabular fracture, while manufacturing, and surgical accuracy was calculated from computed tomography imaging. Five of the fracture plates were designed within 9.5 h, while the plate for a pelvis with a pre-existing fracture plate took considerably longer (20.2 h). Manufacturing comprised 3D-printing the plates in Ti6Al4V with a sintered laser melting (SLM) 3D-printer and post-processing (heat treatment, smoothing, tapping threads). The manufacturing times varied from 27.0 to 32.5 h, with longer times related to machining a thread for locking-head screws with a multi-axis computer numerical control (CNC) mill. For the surface of the plate in contact with the bone, the root-mean-square errors of the print varied from 0.10 to 0.49 mm. The upper range of these errors was likely the result of plate designs that were relatively long with thin cross-sections, a combination that gives rise to high thermal stresses when using a SLM 3D-printer. A number of approaches were explored to control the trajectories of locking or non-locking head screws including guides, printed threads or hand-taps; however, the plate with CNC-machined threads was clearly the most accurate with screw angulation errors of 2.77° (range 1.05-6.34°). The implanted position of the plates was determined visually; however, the limited surgical exposure and lack of intra-operative fluoroscopy in the laboratory led to high inaccuracies (translational errors of 1.74-13.00 mm). Plate mal-positioning would lead to increased risk of surgical injury due to misplaced screws; hence, it is recommended that technologies that can control plate positioning such as fluoroscopy or alignment guides need to be implemented into customised plate design and implantation workflow. Due to the plate misalignment and the severe nature of some acetabular fractures comprising numerous small bone fragments, the acetabular reduction exceeded the clinical limit of 2 mm for three pelvises. Although our results indicate that customised plates are unsuitable for acetabular fractures comprising six or more fragments, confirmation of this finding with a greater number of specimens is recommended. The times, accuracy and suggested improvements in the current study may be used to guide future workflows aimed at producing customised pelvic fracture plates for greater numbers of patients.
Cette étude 2 mesure et interprète l’évolution de la protection du marché du travail dans 21 pays à revenu élevé sur trois décennies, en utilisant les concepts de « diversité institutionnelle » et de ...« trajectoire de changement » déjà développés dans la littérature, notamment par G. Esping-Andersen. Le niveau de protection du marché du travail est évalué en tenant compte de quatre dimensions institutionnelles (protection de l’emploi, protection contre le chômage, maintien du revenu, politique active de l’emploi) et du changement de la composition de la force de travail. Il tient compte de l’évolution conjointe des institutions du marché du travail, de leurs complémentarités et de leurs relations avec le système social. La nature multidimensionnelle de la protection du marché du travail est traitée à l’aide d’une analyse en composantes principales et les caractéristiques des trajectoires de changement des pays avec un score composite. La contribution à la littérature scientifique est triple. Premièrement, une typologie révisée tient compte des processus de changement entre 1990 et 2015 et regroupe les pays sur la base des niveaux de coordination et de solidarité. Deuxièmement, nous constatons que malgré un écart persistant, une grande majorité des économies coordonnées, qui ont connu une baisse du niveau de protection du marché du travail, se sont rapprochées des économies libérales. Enfin, une taxonomie à cinq catégories des trajectoires de changement (libéralisation, dualisation, flexicurité, dé-dualisation, protection renforcée) montre que ces trajectoires ne sont pas toujours dépendantes ni cohérentes avec les variétés institutionnelles précédemment développées dans la littérature scientifique.
Driven by the large amount of goat milk destined for cheese production, and to pioneer the goat cheese industry, the objective of this study was to assess the effect of farm in predicting goat ...milk-coagulation and curd-firmness traits via Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy. Spectra from 452 Sarda goats belonging to 14 farms in central and southeast Sardinia (Italy) were collected. A Bayesian linear regression model was used, estimating all spectral wavelengths' effects simultaneously. Three traditional milk-coagulation properties rennet coagulation time (min), time to curd firmness of 20 mm (min), and curd firmness 30 min after rennet addition (mm) and 3 curd-firmness measures modeled over time rennet coagulation time estimated according to curd firmness change over time (RCTeq), instant curd-firming rate constant, and asymptotical curd firmness were considered. A stratified cross validation (SCV) was assigned, evaluating each farm separately (validation set; VAL) and keeping the remaining farms to train (calibration set) the statistical model. Moreover, a SCV, where 20% of the goats randomly taken (10 replicates per farm) from the VAL farm entered the calibration set, was also considered (SCV80). To assess model performance, coefficient of determination (R2VAL) and the root mean squared error of validation were recorded. The R2VAL varied between 0.14 and 0.45 (instant curd-firming rate constant and RCTeq, respectively), albeit the standard deviation was approximating half of the mean for all the traits. Although average results of the 2 SCV procedures were similar, in SCV80, the maximum R2VAL increased at about 15% across traits, with the highest observed for time to curd firmness of 20 mm (20%) and the lowest for RCTeq (6%). Further investigation evidenced important variability among farms, with R2VAL for some of them being close to 0. Our work outlined the importance of considering the effect of farm when developing Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy prediction equations for coagulation and curd-firmness traits in goats.
Durant les trois dernières décennies, les politiques familiales des pays riches ont connu un essor qui contraste avec le mouvement global d’austérité engagé par les États-providence. Les régimes de ...politiques familiales semblent converger progressivement vers le modèle Earning Carer et le schéma suédois – caractérisé par des dépenses élevées dans les services publics de garde d’enfants et un partage plus égalitaire des congés parentaux. Ce modèle semble aussi promouvoir la participation des femmes au marché du travail. Dans ce contexte, cet article vise principalement à discuter de ces évolutions selon les concepts que Polanyi emploie dans son ouvrage majeur, La Grande Transformation. Suivant son approche analytique, nous suggérons que l’essor des politiques familiales peut être compris en lien avec le désengagement de l’État-providence et le développement global de l’économie politique (political economy), et qu’il génère deux mouvements de sens opposés. D’un côté, l’accroissement des politiques familiales – parallèlement au désengagement de l’État-providence – semble inciter les mères à accepter plus facilement des salaires modestes dans une économie fondée sur les services. De l’autre, il contribue en partie à les libérer des activités de soins et d’accompagnement (care). Une première interprétation considère les politiques familiales comme un nouvel outil de promotion du capitalisme néolibéral, tandis qu’une seconde y voit une assistance essentielle aux parents de jeunes enfants pour surmonter la hausse des coûts de prise en charge. Ces deux phénomènes interagissent, mais sous l’impact croissant du désengagement de l’État-providence, le premier mouvement semble plus déterminant que le second.
Abstract
Background
The surgical site infection (SSI) occurs in the part of the body where the surgery took place within 30 days. In Europe, 1-10% of surgical patients develop a SSI. Clinical ...reporting can play an important role in identifying SSIs, but these clinical data should be integrated into surveillance systems to increase their performances. We aim at developing an automated surveillance system to identify SSIs from unstructured text of hospital discharge letters (HDLs).
Methods
We extracted a sample of 2020-2021 HDLs from the University Hospital of Pisa (Italy) and we used a set of 60 keywords to select only HDLs including surgery and infection related terms. Using a positive wound swab test as a proxy for suspected SSI, we performed a record-linkage between HDLs and laboratory data for 2021. We compared the number of records with suspected SSIs before and after the filtering, to assess its sensitivity. Filtered HDLs have been manually labeled by qualified operators in 3 classes: SSI, No SSI, or SSI caused by a prior hospitalization.
Results
From 63,609 HDLs in our sample, 22,625 were filtered through keywords. In the pre-filtered dataset (only 2021), 255 patients have at least a positive wound swab test. 92% (235/255) of the patients with a suspected SSI were included after the filtering. In a preliminary analysis, after the labeling of 9,385 HDLs (41% of the dataset) we identified 340 SSIs (3,6%), of which 254 (85%) were caused by a prior hospitalization.
Conclusions
The labeled dataset will be used to train a natural language processing classification algorithm, able to identify suspected SSIs from HDLs. The keyword filtering can be a useful support to reduce the number of HDLs that need to be manually labeled.
Key messages
• Keyword filtering is the first step for an automated surveillance system of surgical site infections from hospital discharge letters.
• Labeling is time-consuming but necessary for the development of a natural-language-processing-based surveillance system for surgical site infections.
Linear time distributed swap edge algorithms Datta, A.K.; Ferragina, P.; Larmore, L. ...
Information processing letters,
September 2020, 2020-09-00, Letnik:
161
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
•We address the failure of an edge e in a 2-connected network X, where communications are routed through its MST T.•The goal is to find an optimal substitute edge e′ to reconnect T after the failure. ...We study three optimization criteria.•We address the problem from time perspective: all algorithms work in linear time with respect to the height of the MST of X.•The presented solutions work in a totally asynchronous distributed system.
In this paper, we consider the all best swap edges problem in a distributed environment. We are given a 2-edge connected positively weighted network X, where all communication is routed through a rooted spanning tree T of X. If a tree edge e={x,y} fails, the communication network will be disconnected. However, since X is 2-edge connected, communication can be restored by replacing e by non-tree edge e′, called a swap edge of e, whose ends lie in different components of T∖{e}. Of all possible swap edges of e, we would like to choose the best, according to four different objective functions.
Overall, the problem is to identify the best swap edge for every tree edge, so that in case of any edge failure, the best swap edge can be activated quickly. There are solutions to this problem for a number of cases in the literature. A major concern for all these solutions is to minimize the number of messages. However, especially in fault-transient environments, time is a crucial factor. In this paper we present a novel technique that addresses this problem from a time perspective; in fact, we present a distributed solution that works in linear time with respect to the height h of T for a number of different criteria, while retaining the optimal number of messages and O(δx) space per each processor x of degree δx.
To the best of our knowledge, there is no prior algorithm for the all best swap edges problem whose asymptotic complexity matches ours in all three measures: time, space, and number of messages.
The importance of milk coagulation properties for milk processing, cheese yield, and quality is widely recognized. The use of traditional coagulation traits presents several limitations for testing ...bovine milk and even more for sheep milk, due to its rapid coagulation and curd firming, and early syneresis of coagulum. The aim of this technical note is to test and improve model fitting for assessing coagulation, curd firming, and syneresis of sheep milk. Using milk samples from 87 Sarda ewes, we performed in duplicate lactodynamographic testing. On each of the 174 analyzed milk aliquots, using 180 observations from each aliquot (one every 15 s for 45 min after rennet addition), we compared 4 different curd firming models as a function of time (CFt, mm) using a nonlinear procedure. The most accurate and informative results were observed using a modified 4-parameter model, structured as follows: CFt=CFP×(1−e−kCF(RCTeq))×ekSR×(t-RCTeq) where t is time, RCTeq (min) is the gelation time, CFP (mm) is the potential asymptotical CF at an infinite time, kCF (%/min) is the curd firming rate constant, and kSR (%/min) is the curd syneresis rate constant. To avoid nonconvergence and computational problems due to interrelations among the equation parameters, CFP was preliminarily defined as a function of maximum observed curd firmness (CFmax, mm) recorded during the analysis. For this model, all the modeling equations of individual sheep milk aliquots were converging, with a negligible standard error of the estimates (coefficient of determination >0.99 for all individual sample equations). Repeatability of the modeled parameters was acceptable, also in the presence of curd syneresis during the lactodynamographic analysis.
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