Unexpected postmortem diagnosis of Acanthamoeba meningoencephalitis following allogeneic peripheral blood stem cell transplantation.

Meningoencephalitis caused by pathogenic free-living amebas is usually fatal. Only a few cases of Acanthamoeba meningoencephalitis, diagnosed at autopsy, have been reported following hematopoietic stem cell transplantation. We here report a case of Acanthamoeba meningoencephalitis following allogeneic peripheral blood stem cell transplantation with rapidly evolving neurologic symptoms that remained unexplained.

SINERGIA laparoscopic virtual reality simulator: didactic design and technical development.

VR laparoscopic simulators have demonstrated its validity in recent studies, and research should be directed towards a high training effectiveness and efficacy. In this direction, an insight into simulators' didactic design and technical development is provided, by describing the methodology followed in the building of the SINERGIA simulator. It departs from a clear analysis of training needs driven by a surgical training curriculum.

Ultrasonic velocity measurements as a method for investigating phase transitions of monoglyceride emulsifier systems in pearlescent cosmetic creams.

The phase transitions of monoglyceride emulsifier systems and pearlescent effects in cosmetic creams are investigated using ultrasonic velocity measurements. The transitions between the different phases of monoglyceride emulsifier systems--the coagel, liquid-crystalline lamellar phase, and gel phase--are detected in creams by changes in the ultrasonic velocity with variation of the temperature. The phase transition temperatures correspond to DSC results.

Nonrigid registration of 3D tensor medical data.

New medical imaging modalities offering multi-valued data, such as phase contrast MRA and diffusion tensor MRI, require general representations for the development of automated algorithms. In this paper we propose a unified framework for the registration of medical volumetric multi-valued data using local matching. The paper extends the usual concept of similarity between two pieces of data to be matched, commonly used with scalar (intensity) data, to the general tensor case.