Development and testing of an efficient micropollutant monitoring strategy across a large watershed.

In recent decades, extensive monitoring programmes have been conducted at the national, international, and project levels with the objective of expanding our understanding of the contamination of surface waters with micropollutants, which are often referred to as hazardous substances (HS). It has been demonstrated that HS enter surface waters via a number of pathways, including groundwater, atmospheric deposition, soil erosion, and urban systems. Given the ever-growing list of substances and the high resource demand associated with laboratory analysis, it is common practice to quantify the listed pathways based on emission factors derived from temporally and spatially constrained monitoring programmes.

Economic evaluation of high tibial osteotomy: Closing wedge is more cost-effective than open wedge technique when analysing the KOOS-12 improvement.

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to compare the cost-effectiveness of two techniques for performing a knee valgus osteotomy: opening wedge high tibial osteotomy (OW-HTO) vs closing wedge high tibial osteotomy (CW-HTO).

Methods: In this economic evaluation study, a cost-effectiveness analysis from the perspective of the Spanish public healthcare system was performed, comparing OW-HTO with CW-HTO. All patients with medial knee osteoarthritis who underwent one of these procedures between 2018 and 2020 in our institution were included.

An Unusual Cause of Right Heart Dysfunction and High Output Heart Failure in a Young Woman.

A 35-year-old female presented to our emergency department with clinical signs of acute heart failure. Clinical workup identified severe right heart (RH) dilation and dysfunction with a crossing membrane structure in the right atrium. Right heart catheterization confirmed high output heart failure (HOHF), pulmonary hypertension (PH), and left-to-right blood shunting followed by the documentation of multiple liver and pulmonary arteriovenous malformations (AVMs).

Coupling a pathway-oriented approach with tailor-made monitoring as key to well-performing regionalized modelling of PFAS emissions and river concentrations.

Surface water pollution with poly- and perfluorinated compounds (PFAS) is a well-recognized problem, but knowledge about contribution of different emission pathways, especially diffuse ones, is very limited. This study investigates the potential of the pathway oriented MoRE model in shedding light on the relevance of different emission pathways on regional scale and in predicting concentrations and loads in unmonitored rivers. Modelling was supported with a tailor-made monitoring programme aimed to fill gaps on PFAS concentration in different environmental compartments.

Observational Study of Total Knee Arthroplasty in Aseptic Revision Surgery: Clinical Results.

Objective: To review the long-term clinical results after revision surgery and the relationship between the different clinical variables involved with a failed total knee arthroplasty (TKA) and its evolution to provide a better understanding of the current treatment methods.

Methods: The present study involved 89 subjects with a failed knee arthroplasty that ended up requiring revision surgery and component replacement between 2011 and 2015. The study included patients with pain remaining after TKA and indication from the knee unit surgeon to review the implant, without presenting with thromboembolic or neurological changes that could bias the results.

Occurrence and levels of micropollutants across environmental and engineered compartments in Austria.

Occurrence and concentration of a broad spectrum of micropollutants are investigated in Austrian river catchments, namely polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs), organotin compounds, perfluoroalkyl acids (PFAAs) and metals. The parallel analysis across multiple environmental and engineered compartments sheds light on the ratio of dissolved and particulate transport and on differences in concentration levels between point and diffuse emission pathways. It is found that some PAHs and organotins are present in rivers, groundwater and bulk deposition at higher concentrations than in municipal wastewater effluents.

A comparative study of the neuromuscular response during a dynamic activity after anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction.

Background: Injury to the anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) not only causes mechanical instability but also produces proprioceptive deficit with an altered neuromuscular response. After ACL reconstruction, patients in general continue to complain of a feeling of knee instability. The objective of our study was to assess patient proprioception and its evolution over time by measuring the muscle latency time during a dynamic activity.

Multi-Robot Coalitions Formation with Deadlines: Complexity Analysis and Solutions.

Multi-robot task allocation is one of the main problems to address in order to design a multi-robot system, very especially when robots form coalitions that must carry out tasks before a deadline. A lot of factors affect the performance of these systems and among them, this paper is focused on the physical interference effect, produced when two or more robots want to access the same point simultaneously. To our best knowledge, this paper presents the first formal description of multi-robot task allocation that includes a model of interference.

High-Resolution Underwater Mapping Using Side-Scan Sonar.

The goal of this study is to generate high-resolution sea floor maps using a Side-Scan Sonar(SSS). This is achieved by explicitly taking into account the SSS operation as follows. First, the raw sensor data is corrected by means of a physics-based SSS model.

Trajectory-based visual localization in underwater surveying missions.

We present a new vision-based localization system applied to an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) with limited sensing and computation capabilities. The traditional EKF-SLAM approaches are usually expensive in terms of execution time; the approach presented in this paper strengthens this method by adopting a trajectory-based schema that reduces the computational requirements. The pose of the vehicle is estimated using an extended Kalman filter (EKF), which predicts the vehicle motion by means of a visual odometer and corrects these predictions using the data associations (loop closures) between the current frame and the previous ones.

Screening of prevailing processes that drive surface water quality of running waters in a cultivated wetland region of Germany - a multivariate approach.

The Spreewald wetland is a large, peaty, inland delta wetland in which the water level is managed by weirs in cascade belts across an extensive, partly channelized running water system. To model the quality of the water, 946 surface water samples from 43 sites were analyzed for 29 water quality parameters in two monitoring programs spanning a period of six years. In this study, we pursued a multivariate approach using nonlinear principal component analysis (Isomap) to identify the prevailing processes that control the water quality of the complex surface water system.

The uspIC: performing scan matching localization using an imaging sonar.

This paper presents a novel approach to localize an underwater mobile robot based on scan matching using a Mechanically Scanned Imaging Sonar (MSIS). When used to perform scan matching, this sensor presents some problems such as significant uncertainty in the measurements or large scan times, which lead to a motion induced distortion. This paper presents the uspIC, which deals with these problems by adopting a probabilistic scan matching strategy and by defining a method to strongly alleviate the motion induced distortion.

Upgrading Vienna's wastewater treatment plant - linking point source emissions to Environmental Quality Standards.

The new water quality protection approach of the EU combines the control of emissions with instream Environmental Quality Standards (=EQS). Since 1 April 2006 and actually relevant in the version of 2010 in Austria, priority substances from list A of the EUROPEAN DIERECTIVE 76/464 and further EQS of relevant chemical substances (list B), identified by a national risk assessment, have to be reached to achieve a good ecological state in the surface water (Edict for Water Quality Standards, 2006; changes to the Edict for Water Quality Standards 2010). The practical assessment of these substances after point source emissions is prescribed in the Edict, but rarely carried out.

Lake restoration by hypolimnetic Ca(OH)2 treatment: impact on phosphorus sedimentation and release from sediment.

A whole-lake hypolimnetic Ca(OH)(2) addition, that induced calcium carbonate precipitation, combined with deep water aeration has been applied to eutrophic Lake Luzin, Germany during 1996-1998. In this study we investigated the dynamic of phosphorus and its binding forms in seston and sediment before and during the treatment. The sedimentation rates of phosphorus increased within three years of induced calcite precipitation.

Sonar sensor models and their application to mobile robot localization.

This paper presents a novel approach to mobile robot localization using sonar sensors. This approach is based on the use of particle filters. Each particle is augmented with local environment information which is updated during the mission execution.