This case report describes the long-term success of a subcutaneous ureteral bypass device in a dog for treatment of a ureteral obstruction. The suspected xanthine urolithiasis was secondary to ...treatment with allopurinol for leishmaniasis. The dog presented initially with lethargy, anuria and abdominal pain. Mild azotemia was found on biochemical analysis and abdominal ultrasound revealed bilateral ureteral obstruction. A subcutaneous ureteral bypass was subsequently placed using a standard surgical technique. The dog recovered uneventfully and the azotemia resolved within days. Follow-up examinations were performed every trimester for over three years and no complications like obstruction of the bypass tubes, urinary tract infection or azotemia were recognized during this follow-up period. Allopurinol was replaced with domperidone as long-term treatment against Leishmaniasis which resulted in a mild increase of the leishmania serum antibody titer. The subcutaneous ureteral bypass placement was successful and safe in this dog and is a valuable alternative in cases of ureteral obstruction also in dogs.
•Motor learning induces an enlargement of dendritic branches in M1 layer V motor neurons.•This increment in dendritic length reflects an expansion of the distal dendritic compartment.•The increase in ...dendritic length occurs faster in basal than in apical dendrites.•After four weeks of growth, a pruning occurs even though animals retain task performance.•Dendritic plasticity has a biphasic course with initial expansion and subsequent shrinkage.
Motor learning is associated with plastic reorganization of neural networks in primary motor cortex (M1) that advances through stages. An initial increment in spine formation is followed by pruning and maturation one week after training ended. A similar biphasic course was described for the size of the forelimb representation in M1. This study investigates the evolution of the dendritic architecture in response to motor skill training using Golgy–Cox silver impregnation in rat M1. After learning of a unilateral forelimb-reaching task to plateau performance, an increase in dendritic length of layer V pyramidal neurons (i.e. motor neurons) was observed that peaked one month after training ended. This increment in dendritic length reflected an expansion of the distal dendritic compartment. After one month dendritic arborization shrinks even though animals retain task performance. This pattern of evolution was observed for apical and basal dendrites alike – although the increase in dendritic length occurs faster in basal than in apical dendrites. Dendritic plasticity in response to motor training follows a biphasic course with initial expansion and subsequent shrinkage. This evolution takes fourth as long as the biphasic reorganization of spines or motor representations.
Objectives
To determine the diagnostic performance of two patient‐side tests (RDT‐1: Test‐it™ and RDT‐2 Witness®Lepto) in the early diagnosis of canine leptospirosis.
Methods
Retrospective study of ...108 dogs with leptospirosis and 53 controls. Leptospirosis was diagnosed based on compatible clinical and clinicopathologic signs and either a single microscopic agglutination test titre_ >800 (n=49), seroconversion (n=53), positive urine real time PCR (RT‐PCR) (n=1), evidence of spirochaetes in silver‐stained tissues (n=1) or a combination of these (n=4). Leptospirosis was excluded in dogs with a convincing alternative diagnosis and single microscopic agglutination testing titres _<200 (n=46) or lack of seroconversion (n=7). Indices of diagnostic accuracy of the rapid diagnostic tests were calculated by comparing admission rapid diagnostic test results to the final disease status.
Results
Rapid diagnostic test‐1 was performed in 118 dogs, rapid diagnostic test‐2 in 69 dogs and both tests in 26 dogs. Weak positive results occurred frequently representing 22·6% (rapid diagnostic test‐1) and 32·3% (rapid diagnostic test‐2) of all positive tests in dogs with leptospirosis. If weak positive rapid diagnostic tests were considered positive, rapid diagnostic test‐1 and rapid diagnostic test‐2 had sensitivities of 82 and 76%, specificities of 91 and 100%, positive predictive values of 94% and 100% and negative predictive values of 73% and 74%, respectively. There were some technical problems with rapid diagnostic test‐1.
Clinical Significance
The diagnostic performance of the rapid diagnostic tests is similar to that reported for the microscopic agglutination test. Both can support a diagnosis of leptospirosis with high specificity but leptospirosis cannot be excluded based on a negative admission test result. Both RDTs are useful in conjunction with other confirmatory tests.
The Tokamak à Configuration variable (TCV) is equipped with two neutral beam injection (NBI) systems delivering up to 1.2 MW each for pulse durations of up to 2 s. The first system (NBI1), designed ...for an injection energy in the range of 25 to 30 keV has been operational since 2016. The existing concrete neutron shielding of the experimental hall proved insufficient for fully protecting human accessible areas, limiting the number of daily plasma pulses using NBI1. The recently commissioned second system (NBI2) is designed for injection synergies in the range 50 to 60 keV. Both systems are tangentially oriented in opposite directions in order to permit experiments with low or no net torque.
Calculations with the TRANSP and ORBIS heating codes show that neutron rates from deuterium-deuterium fusion reactions may be as high as 10
14
n/s, up to 10 times higher than with the lower energy beam only. This is due both to the ~five times larger beam-plasma neutron rates from the higher energy beam and to an exceptionally high contribution from beam-beam reactions between the opposing beams. The radiation protection policy at the Swiss Plasma Center is that all staff members be considered as members of the general public, limiting the daily personal dose to 4 µSv. This is also the maximum admissible daily dose in any publicly accessible zone, whether occupied or not.
Currently, with only the lower energy beam, this limit can be attained in the control room adjacent to the device hall after only five NBI pulses out of a possible 30 daily pulses. To allow for exploitation of the two beams at full specifications, the source side of the existing barite concrete walls of the 15 × 20 × 8 m large TCV hall will be covered with 20-cm-thick polythene (PE) cladding and a ceiling made of 35-cm-thick PE will be added. The total mass of PE will be 200 tons. The usage of PE at this scale for neutron shielding is unprecedented at any fusion research facility.
The Intergenerational Report (IGR) released by the Department of the Treasury of the Commonwealth of Australia in 2002 highlighted pressures that in the future would threaten the sustainability of ...the Australian government's budget balance. These pressures result from the growing needs of an aging population and labor shortages that will limit economic growth and taxation revenue. The IGR has become a driving force in planning government policy. The Treasurer has recently said that "the whole economic agenda of the government at the moment is drawn from the IGR." In response, the Prime Minster and Treasurer have promoted deferred or gradual retirement as part of the solution. However, about 50% of men and 20% of women retire early as a result of ill health, indicating that poor health is potentially a limiter of economic growth. This paper reports lower labor force participation among persons with poorer health and that these persons move out of the labor force at a faster rate as they age. A range of measures suggests some decline in health in the pre-retirement age group (those aged from 40 to 64 years). This indicates that better health may be a facilitator of greater labor force participation in the baby boomer cohort. However, there is evidence that improving economic conditions in Australia leading to low unemployment has created an environment more favorable to the employment of older workers with health problems as there has been a rise in labor force participation in these groups, and measures to prevent chronic disease may further increase the employment prospects.
Many modern video processing pipelines rely on edge-aware (EA) filtering methods. However, recent high-quality methods are challenging to run in real-time on embedded hardware due to their ...computational load. To this end, we propose an area-efficient and real-time capable hardware implementation of a high quality EA method. In particular, we focus on the recently proposed permeability filter (PF) that delivers promising quality and performance in the domains of high dynamic range (HDR) tone mapping, disparity and optical flow estimation. We present an efficient hardware accelerator that implements a tiled variant of the PF with low on-chip memory requirements and a significantly reduced external memory bandwidth (6.4× w.r.t. the non-tiled PF). The design has been taped out in 65 nm CMOS technology, is able to filter 720p grayscale video at 24.8 Hz and achieves a high compute density of 6.7GFLOPS/mm 2 (12× higher than embedded GPUs when scaled to the same technology node). The low area and bandwidth requirements make the accelerator highly suitable for integration into systems-on-chip (SoCs) where silicon area budget is constrained and external memory is typically a heavily contended resource.
Are We Getting Healthier As We Grow Older? SCHOFIELD, DEBORAH J.; PASSEY, MEGAN E.; EARNEST, ARUL ...
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences,
10/2007, Letnik:
1114, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
: The Intergenerational Report (IGR) released by the Department of the Treasury of the Commonwealth of Australia in 2002 highlighted pressures that in the future would threaten the sustainability of ...the Australian government's budget balance. These pressures result from the growing needs of an aging population and labor shortages that will limit economic growth and taxation revenue. The IGR has become a driving force in planning government policy. The Treasurer has recently said that “the whole economic agenda of the government at the moment is drawn from the IGR.” In response, the Prime Minster and Treasurer have promoted deferred or gradual retirement as part of the solution. However, about 50% of men and 20% of women retire early as a result of ill health, indicating that poor health is potentially a limiter of economic growth. This paper reports lower labor force participation among persons with poorer health and that these persons move out of the labor force at a faster rate as they age. A range of measures suggests some decline in health in the pre‐retirement age group (those aged from 40 to 64 years).
This indicates that better health may be a facilitator of greater labor force participation in the baby boomer cohort. However, there is evidence that improving economic conditions in Australia leading to low unemployment has created an environment more favorable to the employment of older workers with health problems as there has been a rise in labor force participation in these groups, and measures to prevent chronic disease may further increase the employment prospects.
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