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Ahmed Yamany, Mervat E Behiry, Sahar A Ahmed Faculty of Medicine, Cairo University, Cairo, EgyptCorrespondence: Mervat E Behiry Tel +20 1124205071Fax +20 26 28 884Email lambaa2020@yahoo.comPurpose: Systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) is an autoimmune disease with multi-organ involvement. Hyponatremia is common in inflammatory diseases such as meningitis. Also, it has been found to be strongly associated with the degree of inflammation. However, it has not been fully evaluated in lupus. This study aimed to assess the inflammatory impact of hyponatremia in SLE patients and investigate its relationship with SLE disease activity.Patients and Methods: A total of  101 patients with SLE were enrolled in this study and divided into two groups according to Na level; a normo-natremic group and a hyponatremic group. Demographic and clinical data were collected. SLE activity was assessed by the systemic lupus erythematosus disease activity index (SLEDAI). The estimated sedimentation rate (ESR) as well as levels of C-reactive protein (CRP) and complements (C3 and C4) were measured.Results: The majority of patients were females (98 subjects) (97%) with a mean age of 33± 8 years. Out of 101 participants, 40 patients (39.6%) were hyponatremic with a mean Na level of 131.58± 3.11 mmol/L. There was a statistically negative correlation between both ESR and SLEADI score and Na level (r=− 0.436 and − 0.436, respectively) with p=0.002, whereas Na level was positively correlated with complements, Cl, and albumin levels (r=0.653, 0.314, and 0.460, respectively) (p=0.000, 0.027, and > 0.001, respectively). CRP was not correlated with Na level. ESR was independently correlated with hyponatremia at the 95% CI for Exp B (0.997– 0.058) with a p-value of 0.048.Conclusion: Hyponatremia could be used as an indicator of SLE activity. Also, it might be an easily and rapidly detected as well as a prognostically useful marker

Software testing is a very expensive and time consuming process. It can account for up to 50% of the total cost of the software development. Distributed systems make software testing a daunting task. The research described in this paper investigates a novel multi-agent framework for testing 3-tier distributed systems. This paper describes the framework architecture as well as the communication mechanism among agents in the architecture. Web-based application is examined as a case study to validate the proposed framework. The framework is considered as a step forward to automate testing for distributed systems in order to enhance their reliability within an acceptable range of cost and time.

Several quality evaluation studies have been performed for videoplus- depth coding systems. In these studies, however, the distortions in the synthesized views have been quantified in experimental setups where both the texture and depth videos are compressed. Nevertheless, there are several factors that affect the quality of the synthesized view. Incorporating more than one source of distortion in the study could be misleading; one source of distortion could mask (or be masked by) the effect of other sources of distortion. In this paper, we conduct a quality evaluation study that aims to assess the distortions introduced by the view synthesis procedure and depth map compression in multiview-video-plus-depth coding systems. We report important findings that many of the existing studies have overlooked, yet are essential to the reliability of quality evaluation. In particular, we show that the view synthesis reference software yields high distortions that mask those due to depth map compression, when the distortion is measured by average luma peak signalto-noise ratio. In addition, we show what quality metric to use in order to reliably quantify the effect of depth map compression on view synthesis quality. Experimental results that support these findings are provided for both synthetic and real multiview-video-plusdepth sequences. © 2010 IEEE.