Luminescent Composite Carbon/SiO Structures: Synthesis and Applications.

Luminescent carbon nanostructures (CNSs) have attracted great interest from the scientific community due to their photoluminescent properties, structural features, low toxicity, and a great variety of possible applications. Unfortunately, a few problems hinder their further development. These include the difficulties of separating a mixture of nanostructures after synthesis and the dependence of their properties on the environment and the aggregate state.

2B-Alert App: A mobile application for real-time individualized prediction of alertness.

Knowing how an individual responds to sleep deprivation is a requirement for developing personalized fatigue management strategies. Here we describe and validate the 2B-Alert App, the first mobile application that progressively learns an individual's trait-like response to sleep deprivation in real time, to generate increasingly more accurate individualized predictions of alertness. We incorporated a Bayesian learning algorithm within the validated Unified Model of Performance to automatically and gradually adapt the model parameters to an individual after each psychomotor vigilance test.

Tachycardic and non-tachycardic responses in trauma patients with haemorrhagic injuries.

Background: Analyses of large databases have demonstrated that the association between heart rate (HR) and blood loss is weaker than what is taught by Advanced Trauma Life Support training. However, those studies had limited ability to generate a more descriptive paradigm, because they only examined a single HR value per patient.

Methods: In a comparative, retrospective analysis, we studied the temporal characteristics of HR through time in adult trauma patients with haemorrhage, based on documented injuries and transfusion of ≥3 units of red blood cells (RBCs).

PC-PVT 2.0: An updated platform for psychomotor vigilance task testing, analysis, prediction, and visualization.

Background: The psychomotor vigilance task (PVT) has been widely used to assess the effects of sleep deprivation on human neurobehavioral performance. To facilitate research in this field, we previously developed the PC-PVT, a freely available software system analogous to the "gold-standard" PVT-192 that, in addition to allowing for simple visual reaction time (RT) tests, also allows for near real-time PVT analysis, prediction, and visualization in a personal computer (PC).

New Method: Here we present the PC-PVT 2.

Automated analysis of vital signs to identify patients with substantial bleeding before hospital arrival: a feasibility study.

Trauma outcomes are improved by protocols for substantial bleeding, typically activated after physician evaluation at a hospital. Previous analysis suggested that prehospital vital signs contained patterns indicating the presence or absence of substantial bleeding. In an observational study of adults (aged ≥18 years) transported to level I trauma centers by helicopter, we investigated the diagnostic performance of the Automated Processing of the Physiological Registry for Assessment of Injury Severity (APPRAISE) system, a computational platform for real-time analysis of vital signs, for identification of substantial bleeding in trauma patients with explicitly hemorrhagic injuries.

Development and validation of a portable platform for deploying decision-support algorithms in prehospital settings.

Background: Advanced decision-support capabilities for prehospital trauma care may prove effective at improving patient care. Such functionality would be possible if an analysis platform were connected to a transport vital-signs monitor. In practice, there are technical challenges to implementing such a system.

PC-PVT: a platform for psychomotor vigilance task testing, analysis, and prediction.

Using a personal computer (PC) for simple visual reaction time testing is advantageous because of the relatively low hardware cost, user familiarity, and the relative ease of software development for specific neurobehavioral testing protocols. However, general-purpose computers are not designed with the millisecond-level accuracy of operation required for such applications. Software that does not control for the various sources of delay may return reaction time values that are substantially different from the true reaction times.

Safety evaluation of a Medical Device Data System.

Our hospital became interested in the extraction of electronic data from our bedside monitor network to enrich clinical care, and enable various quality improvement projects, research projects, and future applications involving advanced decision-support. We conducted a range of tests to confirm the safety of deploying BedMaster (Excel Medical Electronics, Jupiter FL, USA), which is third-party software sold expressly to provide electronic data extraction and storage from networked General Electric Healthcare bedside patient monitors. We conducted a series of tests examining the changes in network performance when the BedMaster system was on our isolated patient monitor network.

AGeS: a software system for microbial genome sequence annotation.

Background: The annotation of genomes from next-generation sequencing platforms needs to be rapid, high-throughput, and fully integrated and automated. Although a few Web-based annotation services have recently become available, they may not be the best solution for researchers that need to annotate a large number of genomes, possibly including proprietary data, and store them locally for further analysis. To address this need, we developed a standalone software application, the Annotation of microbial Genome Sequences (AGeS) system, which incorporates publicly available and in-house-developed bioinformatics tools and databases, many of which are parallelized for high-throughput performance.

A platform for testing and comparing of real-time decision-support algorithms in mobile environments.

The unavailability of a flexible system for realtime testing of decision-support algorithms in a pre-hospital clinical setting has limited their use. In this study, we describe a plug-and-play platform for real-time testing of decision-support algorithms during the transport of trauma casualties en route to a hospital. The platform integrates a standard-of-care vital-signs monitor, which collects numeric and waveform physiologic time-series data, with a rugged ultramobile personal computer.

[Prenatal ultrasonic diagnosis of fetal lung maturity].

Possible echographic prognosis of neonatal respiratory distress syndrome is explored. Echographic assessment of the risk of neonatal respiratory distress is an effective, simple, quick and noninvasive procedure of antenatal diagnosis that can de conducted on an outpatient basis.