One-lung ventilation with a bronchial blocker in thoracic patients.

Background: Lung isolation is a technique used in a multitude of surgeries to ensure single-lung ventilation with collapse of the contralateral lung, as to achieve improved access and visualization of relevant anatomical structures. Despite being accepted and having favorable outcomes, bronchial blockers (BBs) are not to this day the main device of choice among anaesthesiologists.

Methods: In this retrospective and descriptive study, we analyzed the safety and efficacy of a BB in all types of thoracic surgeries in our centre between 2015 and 2022, excluding patients with massive hemoptysis or empyema, or who had undergone a prior pneumonectomy.

Simulation System of Electric-Powered Wheelchairs for Training Purposes.

For some people with severe physical disabilities, the main assistive device to improve their independence and to enhance overall well-being is an electric-powered wheelchair (EPW). However, there is a necessity to offer users EPW training. In this work, the Simcadrom is introduced, which is a virtual reality simulator for EPW driving learning purposes, testing of driving skills and performance, and testing of input interfaces.

[Norovirus detection in children with community-acquired or nosocomial diarrhea at Guillermo Grant Benavente Hospital in Concepción, Chile].

Introduction: Norovirus (NoV) are RNA viruses highly contagious, stable in the environment, genetically variable, and the most common cause of viral sporadic acute gastroenteritis worldwide. This is the first study carried out in Concepcion, Chile, to investigate the presence of NoV as an etiologic agent of viral diarrheas in hospitalized children. Objective.

Bare bones particle swarm optimization with scale matrix adaptation.

Bare bones particle swarm optimization (BBPSO) is a swarm algorithm that has shown potential for solving single-objective unconstrained optimization problems over continuous search spaces. However, it suffers of the premature convergence problem that means it may get trapped into a local optimum when solving multimodal problems. In order to address this drawback and improve the performance of the BBPSO, we propose a variant of this algorithm, named by us as BBPSO with scale matrix adaptation (SMA), SMA-BBPSO for short reference.