Sepsis and hyperglycemia are highly associated with increases in mortality rates, particularly in the critically ill patients. Sepsis diagnosis has been proven challenging due to delay in getting the blood culture results. Thus, often clinical experiences overrule the protocol to prevent the worsening outcome of the patients. In some cases, the erroneous clinical judgement cause antibiotic resistance and even adverse clinical outcomes. This paper investigates the correlation between two parameters; insulin sensitivity and blood glucose level among sepsis patients. The blood glucose level is measured at the bedside during the patient’s stay, whereas insulin sensitivity is obtained using the validated glucose-insulin model. Thus, the insulin sensitivity is a specific parameter of the patient, unregimented of the protocol given to the patient. The same parameters, blood glucose and insulin sensitivity, are also compared to the non-sepsis patients to establish a relationship that can be used for sepsis diagnosis. Given the availability of these two parameters that can be captured rapidly and instantly, a significant relationship can, therefore, help clinicians to identify sepsis at an early stage without second-guessing.
Chronic ankle pain are reasonably common among sports injuries that leads to chronic ankle instability (CAI). When ankle gives way, pain and recurrent sprains are the characteristics of CAI reported among repeated ankle injuries. This situation may bring down life's quality that possibly leads to neurophysiological changes due to depression, anxiety and stress. Mindfulness for pain management has been popular in recent decades. Here, we aim to employ a new and standardization on the tool for the recruited participants to do the mindful deep breathing. Therefore, a validated method video assisted mindful deep breathing (VAMDB) can improve on conflict monitoring, to modulate brain network dynamics underlying in the pain waves experience in this study. Characterization on brainwaves changes with electroencephalogram (EEG) study for the pre-and post-intervention on the neurophysiological response of brain among collegiate athletes are reported here. A total of 12 participants aged between 18 and 25 years were recruited. 8 participants with chronic ankle pain from INTI physiotherapy centre were grouped into intervention (INT) n=4, and nonintervention (NINT) n=4 respectively. Another 4 participants without pain and intervention was assigned as control group (CONT). The data was processed with MATLAB and analysed by ANCOVA within the group (INT, NINT and CONT). The pre-and post-treatment effect was significant within the subject factor. Delta, theta, alpha, beta and gamma bandwidths in occipital region shows significant effect on VAMDB between pre and post intervention. This pilot study is the first to explore the 3-min short duration VADMB among ankle pain participants.
Cardiovascular disease is a major health problem in developing countries. The risk factors include hypertension, diabetes mellitus, hypercholesterolemia, sedentary lifestyle and smoking. Many parameters had been produced to monitor cardiovascular disease risk. Finger photoplethysmography (PPG) is a simple, low-cost and non-invasive optical method that detects blood volume change in the microvascular bed of the finger. PPG fitness index (PPGF), vascular risk prediction index (VRPI) and estimated vascular age were derived from PPG wave and proposed for assessment of cardiovascular risk. PPGF was produced from AC component of PPG morphological changes against a healthy 19-year-old reference identified from Malaysia population. AC is component of PPG records physiological properties of the arteries. Heart rate (HR) is a known factor that influences vascular function and this factor may affect the PPG parameters. It is important to determine the effect of HR variation on PPGF and to confirm PPGF stability across variable HR so that it will be a valid marker for cardiovascular disease risk. This study aims to develop and validate heart rate-incorporated PPGF algorithm for cardiovascular disease risk assessment. This new algorithm expected to assist in cardiovascular risk monitoring in extensive community setting.
Stent implantation alters coronary artery hemodynamic and wall shear stress during cardiac cycles. In this study, three dimensional models were used to analyze the effects of different stent designs and strut thicknesses on the hemodynamic of the artery. The flow was assumed to be pulsatile and stent models were expanded in the artery the same as angioplasty procedure that uses balloon. The data was applied to Fluent-ANSYS package as a UDF MATLAB code. A non-slip condition was applied to the artery walls. The pressure variation in different stents and the wall shear stress distribution were studied. Furthermore, the hemodynamic effects on the flow were investigated for two different thickness values of the same stent design. These results showed that stent implanting is one of the main parameters of pressure drop in the artery. Moreover, the surface of the stent is the location of maximum wall shear stress and the thicker stent strut did not vary this stress much. Our study implies that some design parameters such as thickness affect the hemodynamic factors of blood after stent implantation. Even, stent implanting cause re stenosis in the coronary artery. Using new real models is suggested to investigate the new aspects of stent design and related effects on the hemodynamic of coronary arteries.
Based on GPU computing, a fast computing using multi-GPU is proposed for the alignment of vast amounts of T-cell receptor (TCR) nucleotide sequences. Using CUDA-enabled Fermi GPU and CUDA toolkit 4.0 provided by NVIDIA, we design a faster and more effective sequence alignment process based on CPU and multi-GPU: CPU is responsible for logic control, GPU responsible for parallel computing. Inter-task parallel strategy is applied in the part of parallel computing, which not only bring high parallelism, but also make the alignment process not confined to a specific parallel alignment algorithm. Under the same hardware condition, the alignment computing of mouse TCR nucleotide sequences were carried out by multi-GPU computing, single-GPU computing and only-CPU computing respectively. The results show that multi-GPU computing has the best performance considering alignment efficiency and the cost.
