Publications by authors named "Jaime Riera"

The performance of first-year students in electromagnetism (E&M) courses of different engineering degrees at a Spanish public university was measured using the Brief Electricity and Magnetism Assessment (BEMA), a standard research-based instrument to assess students' understanding after attending introductory courses in electricity and magnetism. In all cases, Flipped classroom (FC) built on information and communications technology was used. The objective of this paper is to analyse if the gain in the BEMA pre and post-test results is influenced by several factors such as the degree, the students' academic grade, and gender.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

This paper shows the data of the Flip Teaching and Traditional Methodology on the laboratory practice in two subjects, Physics and Electricity, of a technical degree. The laboratory and final grades of these subjects were shown in four consecutive years. The characteristics of all four years were quite similar, except that the Traditional teaching Methodology (TM) was used in two, while Flip Teaching methodology (FT) was applied in the other two.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: The respiratory epithelium is frequently infected by the respiratory syncytial virus, resulting in inflammation, a reduction in cilia activity and an increase in the production of mucus.

Methods: In this study, an automatic method has been proposed to characterize the ciliary motility from cell cultures by means of a motility index using a dense optical flow algorithm. This method allows us to determine the ciliary beat frequency (CBF) together with a ciliary motility index of the cells in the cultures.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Primary ciliary dyskinesia implies cilia with defective or total absence of motility, which may result in sinusitis, chronic bronchitis, bronchiectasis and male infertility. Diagnosis can be difficult and is based on an abnormal ciliary beat frequency (CBF) and beat pattern. In this paper, we present a method to determine CBF of isolated cells through the analysis of phase-contrast microscopy images, estimating cilia motion by means of an optical flow algorithm.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Persistent respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) infections have been associated with the exacerbation of chronic inflammatory diseases, including chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). This virus infects the respiratory epithelium, leading to chronic inflammation, and induces the release of mucins and the loss of cilia activity, two factors that determine mucus clearance and the increase in sputum volume. In this study, an automatic method has been established to determine the ciliary motility activity from cell cultures by means of optical flow computation, and has been applied to 136 control cultures and to 144 RSV-infected cultures.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF