1,721,134 research outputs found
Biomedical and clinical engineering contribution in WHO response for Covid-19 pandemic
No full textFor the first time after decades, the Covid-19 pandemic exposed to a scenario of limited resources also high-income countries such as Europe or USA. This made even more clear the importance of disaster preparedness and responsible innovation. After providing a quick summary of the World Health Organization (WHO) response to the Covid-19, this chapiter introduces the concept of preparedness, leading the readers into the USA Centre for Disease Control (CDC) Hierarchy of Control model applied to Covid-19, and the need for medical intelligence in order to prevent future disasters. The chapiter focuses on the WHO priorities for innovations, analysing the limits of regulatory frameworks and international standards for medical devices and PPE. Finally, the last section reports few considerations about ethical issues as faced by the authors
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Assessment of kidney volumes in polycystic kidney disease from coronal and axial MR images
No full textInnovative Solutions in Health Monitoring at Home: The Real-Time Assessment of Serum Potassium Concentration from ECG
No full textMaintenance of normal potassium homeostasis is increasingly an
important limiting factor in the therapy of several diseases including patients
with heart failure. Nowadays, quantification of potassium concentration in the
blood ([K+]) is invasive and laboratory-based. The aims of the study were to
develop a method quantifying [K+] from the electrocardiogram (ECG) and
validate it on 13 hemodialysis (HD) and 7 congenital long-QT type 2 (LQT2)
patients. Reference values were obtained from blood samples. An ECG-based
potassium estimator (KECG) was defined and compared to the reference values.
Data from 33/39 HD sessions gave consistent results. In 6 sessions, the
presence of a systematic error inhibited reliable estimates. Patient specific
calibration allowed good agreement in all HD patients (error: -0.04±0.61mM).
As expected, [K+] was significantly underestimated in LQT2 patients (error:
1.24±0.75mM, p<0.01). Preliminary results show KECG estimates can be an
effective tool for hyper/hypokalemic risk patient monitoring at home
Heterogeneous Ensemble of Classifiers for Sub-Cellular Image Classification Based on Local Ternary Patterns
No full textIn this chapter we make an extensive study of different state-of-the-art classifiers for building an heterogeneous ensemble for sub-cellular image classification. As features for representing each image we used local ternary patterns. Our aim is to show that it is possible to boost the performance of a stand-alone texture descriptor (here we use the high performance method named local ternary patterns) by an heterogeneous ensemble. First, we compare different classification approaches (different kind of boosting; SVM with various kernels; diverse recent ensemble of decision trees.) in five datasets; then, we show that an heterogeneous ensemble, based on the fusion of different classifiers, performs consistently well across all the tested datasets. The most important result is showing that some very recent approaches and our proposed ensemble outperform also SVM classifier (the well known and widely used LibSVM implementation), even when both kernel selection and the various SVM parameters are carefully tuned. Finally we validated our ensemble also using several datasets from the UCI Repository and other standard pattern classification problems. The Matlab code of the classifiers used in the proposed ensemble is available at bias.csr.unibo.it/nanni/HET.rar. © 2014 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
The effect of channel spatial correlation on physical layer security in multi-antenna scenarios
No full textInformation-theoretic security at the physical layer
has been proposed to increase the privacy of wireless communications
due to its achievable characteristics: unbreakability,
provability, and quantifiability. An accurate and powerful analytical
framework aimed at deriving the achievable security level
provided by Gaussian channels is presented and validated. Its
accuracy is assessed by mean of a narrowband fading scenario
simulator with multi-antenna transceivers. The impact on the
security level of a number of aspects, such as the Eavesdropper’s
distance as well as the number and distance of antennas in MIMO
systems is finally discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
- …
