Percutaneous aspiration for shortening time to blood cultures sterilization in right-sided infective endocarditis and vegetations.

Background: Surgical intervention is associated with earlier clearance of bacteremia in infective endocarditis (IE).

Aim: We hypothesized that vegetectomies using percutaneous aspiration shortens time to sterilization of blood cultures in patients with right-sided IE and vegetations.

Results: The cohort included 37 patients, 23 treated conservatively, and 14 underwent percutaneous vegetectomy.

Government veterinarians' perceptions of routine biosecurity focused on dairy cattle farms in north-western and north-eastern Spain.

The implementation of biosecurity measures in livestock production systems can be affected by the psychosocial factors of its stakeholders, which can be observed through their knowledge, attitudes and perceptions/practices. In Spain, there are no regulations to promote biosecurity. Of all stakeholders, farmers and veterinarians have been addressed in previous biosecurity studies, but not veterinarians belonging specifically to the government services.

Biopolitics and speculative objects in Chilean health projects.

'Biopolitics' is a much-used concept in recent academic literature. One of its main fields of application is in the analysis of public health projects. This article analyses the national Explicit Health Guarantees project in Chile from that perspective.

Influence on the implementation of biosecurity measures in dairy cattle farms: Communication between veterinarians and dairy farmers.

This study was carried out in two regions in Spain (Catalonia and Galicia) through eight focus groups; four for dairy farmers and four for veterinarians. The results showed that dairy farmers and veterinarians attributed responsibility to one another for not following biosecurity practices. The study brings to light contradictions among veterinarians and certain individual veterinary practices that participated in the study, which lead to doubt and confusion on the part of dairy farmers.

First-year health degree students in the dissection room: Analysis of adaptation to practical classes.

Human anatomy is a core subject that students of all health degrees are required to pass. Practical classes with human cadavers are a widely used educational resource in medicine, but are less frequent in other health degrees. Determining how first-year podiatry, nursing, and physiotherapy students cope with human anatomy practical classes and identifying the presence of physical reactions and possible causes of distress they experience in the dissection room are essential steps in designing a guidance plan to address students' needs.

Dairy farmers' decision-making to implement biosecurity measures: A study of psychosocial factors.

Biosecurity measures are a set of management procedures that prevent the risk of introducing and spreading infectious diseases to a farm, although these measures are rarely implemented in dairy farms. There are some studies that have identified that the decision to implement biosecurity measures can be influenced by several psychosocial factors (attitudes and behaviours). Thus, the objective of this study was to examine the psychosocial factors (and their interactions) influencing the implementation of biosecurity measures in dairy farms in Spain, through the views of dairy farmers and veterinarians from Catalonia (northeast Spain) and Galicia (northwest Spain).

NMF-mGPU: non-negative matrix factorization on multi-GPU systems.

Background: In the last few years, the Non-negative Matrix Factorization ( NMF ) technique has gained a great interest among the Bioinformatics community, since it is able to extract interpretable parts from high-dimensional datasets. However, the computing time required to process large data matrices may become impractical, even for a parallel application running on a multiprocessors cluster. In this paper, we present NMF-mGPU, an efficient and easy-to-use implementation of the NMF algorithm that takes advantage of the high computing performance delivered by Graphics-Processing Units ( GPUs ).

The global condition of epidemics: Panoramas in A (H1N1) influenza and their consequences for One World One Health programme.

Among the most relevant elements contributing to define the One World One Health programme we find epidemics. The reason is that in recent decades, infectious diseases such as HIV/SIDA, SARS and Influenza have shown that we need new approaches and concepts in order to understand how biological emergencies and health alerts deploy new scales of action. Especially relevant has been the case of A(H1N1) influenza.

Offset printing plate quality sensor on a low-cost processor.

The aim of this work is to develop a microprocessor-based sensor that measures the quality of the offset printing plate through the introduction of different image analysis applications. The main features of the presented system are the low cost, the low amount of power consumption, its modularity and easy integration with other industrial modules for printing plates, and its robustness against noise environments. For the sake of clarity, a viability analysis of previous software is presented through different strategies, based on dynamic histogram and Hough transform.

A low cost matching motion estimation sensor based on the NIOS II microprocessor.

This work presents the implementation of a matching-based motion estimation sensor on a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) and NIOS II microprocessor applying a C to Hardware (C2H) acceleration paradigm. The design, which involves several matching algorithms, is mapped using Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) technology. These algorithms, as well as the hardware implementation, are presented here together with an extensive analysis of the resources needed and the throughput obtained.

MARQ: an online tool to mine GEO for experiments with similar or opposite gene expression signatures.

The enormous amount of data available in public gene expression repositories such as Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) offers an inestimable resource to explore gene expression programs across several organisms and conditions. This information can be used to discover experiments that induce similar or opposite gene expression patterns to a given query, which in turn may lead to the discovery of new relationships among diseases, drugs or pathways, as well as the generation of new hypotheses. In this work, we present MARQ, a web-based application that allows researchers to compare a query set of genes, e.

GeneCodis: interpreting gene lists through enrichment analysis and integration of diverse biological information.

GeneCodis is a web server application for functional analysis of gene lists that integrates different sources of information and finds modular patterns of interrelated annotations. This integrative approach has proved to be useful for the interpretation of high-throughput experiments and therefore a new version of the system has been developed to expand its functionality and scope. GeneCodis now expands the functional information with regulatory patterns and user-defined annotations, offering the possibility of integrating all sources of information in the same analysis.

SENT: semantic features in text.

We present SENT (semantic features in text), a functional interpretation tool based on literature analysis. SENT uses Non-negative Matrix Factorization to identify topics in the scientific articles related to a collection of genes or their products, and use them to group and summarize these genes. In addition, the application allows users to rank and explore the articles that best relate to the topics found, helping put the analysis results into context.

GENECODIS: a web-based tool for finding significant concurrent annotations in gene lists.

We present GENECODIS, a web-based tool that integrates different sources of information to search for annotations that frequently co-occur in a set of genes and rank them by statistical significance. The analysis of concurrent annotations provides significant information for the biologic interpretation of high-throughput experiments and may outperform the results of standard methods for the functional analysis of gene lists. GENECODIS is publicly available at http://genecodis.

bioNMF: a versatile tool for non-negative matrix factorization in biology.

Background: In the Bioinformatics field, a great deal of interest has been given to Non-negative matrix factorization technique (NMF), due to its capability of providing new insights and relevant information about the complex latent relationships in experimental data sets. This method, and some of its variants, has been successfully applied to gene expression, sequence analysis, functional characterization of genes and text mining. Even if the interest on this technique by the bioinformatics community has been increased during the last few years, there are not many available simple standalone tools to specifically perform these types of data analysis in an integrated environment.