OBJECTIVE To analyze prospectively the factors related to the success of noninvasive ventilation (NIV) in the treatment of acute exacerbations of chronic airflow limitation (CAFL) and to generate a multiple regression model in order to detect which patients can be successfully treated by this method. SETTING A respiratory medicine ward of a referral hospital. METHODS AND PRINCIPAL RESULTS I...

An adaptive parallel ant colony optimisation (PACO) algorithm on massively parallel processors (MPPs) is presented. In the algorithm, we propose a strategy for information exchange between processors that makes each processor choose a partner to communicate with and update their pheromone adaptively. We also propose a method of adaptively adjusting the time interval for the exchange of informat...

The OpenFlow-based SDN is widely studied to better network performance through planning fine-grained paths. However, being designed to configure path hop-by-hop, it faces the scalability issue—both the flow table overhead and path setup delay are unacceptable for large-scale networks. In this paper, we propose PACO, a framework based on Source Routing to address that problem through pre-install...

BACKGROUND Sleep-disordered breathing (SDB) induces nighttime disturbance of arterial gases, such as carbon dioxide. However, it is still unclear whether nighttime SDB-related gas abnormality is related to respiratory dysregulation in daytime. Therefore, we examined the relationship between the arterial partial pressure of carbon dioxide (PaCO(2)) at nighttime and the respiratory response to ex...

A b st ra ct Objectives: To correlate the degree of encephalopathy, baseline values of PaCO and pH, and their early 2 response to NIV with eventual in-hospital outcome in patients of severe acute-on-chronic hypercapnic respiratory failure in COPD. Design: Retrospective review. Setting: Intensive care unit. Material and methods: 24 episodes of acute exacerbation of COPD in 17 patients (10 female...

BACKGROUND Heat and moisture exchangers (HME) are often used to maintain humidity of breathing circuits during anesthesia. It is also known to increase dead space ventilation in respiratory distress syndromes. However, the effect of a pediatric HME in healthy pediatric patients has not yet been clarified. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effect of a pediatric HME on dead space in h...

Spatiotemporal context is crucial in modern mobile applications that utilize increasing amounts of context to better predict events and user behaviors, requiring rich records of users’ or devices’ spatiotemporal histories. Maintaining these rich histories requires frequent sampling and indexed storage of spatiotemporal data that pushes the limits of resource-constrained mobile devices. Today’s ...

Helping teachers in their activities has been an issue more and more explored in Computer Science. However, in order to support teachers effectively, it is necessary to understand their needs and to design tools that they can easily manage. One of those needs is undoubtedly to put in practice pedagogical principles. This paper presents the design of PACO-T, a tool for helping teachers in planni...