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Implantable cardioverter-defibrillator (ICD) is considered as first line therapy for patient with idiopathic ventricular fibrillation (IVF). Recurrent event rate is estimated to be 31% during an average of 5 years follow-up. Careful analysis of ICD EGM. A 42-year old man with past history of IVF and ICD implantation, presented to the emergency department for syncope while walking followed by an electrical shock from his ICD. The 12-lead ECG, the cerebral scan and the blood sample were normal. The interrogation of the defibrillator (dual chamber, BOSTON) showed that the device was programmed in RYTHMIC algorithm (AAIR–ADIR 80–120 bm). The syncope was related to a ventricular fibrillation (VF) stopped by electrical shock. We can see (Fig. 1) a premature ventricular contraction (PVC) that happens in the ventricular noise window and marked in brackets [VS] like ventricular sense. Ventricular noise window represents the last 40 ms of nominal 65 ms of ventricular blanking after atrial pacing. When an event is sensed in the noise portion of a blanking window, event is not used for timing or detection, which explains that the VVI backup pacing occurs on T-wave initiating VF. Initiation of VF with pacing on T-wave is a rare event with a few reported cases in the literature. Despite the high risk of ventricular arrythmia among people with IVF, this case shows that VF can unfortunately be provoked by the ICD itself. In our example a PVC occurring during the noise window iniates the VF by pacing on T-wave. After introducing Verapamil PVCs has diseappeared and no further arrhythmia has been noticed till now. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The automatic ontology enrichment consists of automatic knowledge extraction from texts related to a domain of discourse in the aim to enrich automatically an initial ontology of the same domain. However, the passage, from a plain text to an enriched ontology requires a number of steps. In this paper, we present a three steps ontology enrichment approach. In the first step, we apply natural language processing techniques to obtain tagged sentences. The second step allows us to reduce each extracted sentence to an SVO (Subject, Verb, and Object) sentence, supposed to preserve main information carried by the original sentence(s) from which it is extracted. Finally, in the third step, we proceed to enrich an initial ontology built manually by adding extracted terms in the generated SVO as new concepts or instances of concepts and new relations. To validate our approach, we have used "Phytotherapy" domain because of the availability of related texts on the WWW and also because its usefulness for pharmaceutical industry. The first results obtained, after experiments on a set of different texts, testify the performance of the proposed approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pickup and Delivery Problem (PDP) consists of searching an optimal set of vehicles and an optimal set of routes, one route by each vehicle, in order to pickup items from a set of origins and deliver them to another set of destinations. Pickup and delivery problem is a class of complex systems whose complexity is NP Hard. In PDP real life applications, heuristics and meta heuristics methods are used in order to obtain an acceptable solution in reasonable execution time. When unpredictable events, like for example path cut and vehicles failure, may occur during the PDP schedule execution, we say that the PDP is dynamic (DPDP) and in this case we have to revise this schedule. In this paper, we propose a multi agent architecture for DPDP based on an organizational architecture. Supported by a formal framework, the proposed architecture allows us to show, through a case study that computed solution for the studied problem could be done in a parallel manner which attenuates substantially the problem complexity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT: The aryltetralin-type lignan podophyllotoxin, the main agent present in the resin extracted from the rhizomes of different podophyllum species, possesses important antineoplastic and antiviral properties and has been widely used in diverse cultures since ancient times for medicinal purposes as a cathartic and antihelminthic agent. Today, podophyllotoxin serves as the starting material for the preparation of the well-known cytostatic agents: etoposide and teniposide which are used in combination therapies with other drugs for the treatment of a variety of malignancies. The present review focuses on the lead compound, that is, podophyllotoxin and summarizes its structural characteristics, natural sources, biological activities, novel derivatives, medicinal applications and future perspectives. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]