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Copyright of Revista de Odontopediatría Latinoamericana is the property of Asociacion Latinoamericana de Odontopediatria and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Breathing rate monitoring is a must for hospitalized patients with the current coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). We review in this paper recent implementations of breathing monitoring techniques, where both contact and remote approaches are presented. It is known that with non-contact monitoring, the patient is not tied to an instrument, which improves patients’ comfort and enhances the accuracy of extracted breathing activity, since the distress generated by a contact device is avoided. Remote breathing monitoring allows screening people infected with COVID-19 by detecting abnormal respiratory patterns. However, non-contact methods show some disadvantages such as the higher set-up complexity compared to contact ones. On the other hand, many reported contact methods are mainly implemented using discrete components. While, numerous integrated solutions have been reported for non-contact techniques, such as continuous wave (CW) Doppler radar and ultrawideband (UWB) pulsed radar. These radar chips are discussed and their measured performances are summarized and compared. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we present a digital signal processor (DSP) capable of monitoring the urinary bladder volume through afferent neural pathways. The DSP carries out real-time detection and can discriminate extracellular action potentials, also known as on-the-fly spike sorting. Next, the DSP performs a decoding method to estimate either three qualitative levels of fullness or the bladder volume value, depending on the selected output mode. The proposed DSP was tested using both realistic synthetic signals with a known ground-truth, and real signals from bladder afferent nerves recorded during acute experiments with animal models. The spike sorting processing circuit yielded an average accuracy of 92% using signals with highly correlated spike waveforms and low signal-to-noise ratios. The volume estimation circuits, tested with real signals, reproduced accuracies achieved by offline simulations in Matlab, i.e., 94% and 97% for quantitative and qualitative estimations, respectively. To assess feasibility, the DSP was deployed in the Actel FPGA Igloo AGL1000V2, which showed a power consumption of 0.5 mW and a latency of 2.1 ms at a 333 kHz core frequency. These performance results demonstrate that an implantable bladder sensor that perform the detection, discrimination and decoding of afferent neural activity is feasible. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Refractive urinary dysfunction in individuals suffering from neurogenic bladder syndrome can be treated with implanted neurostimulators that restore, to some degree, the control of the urinary bladder. A sensor capable of relaying feedback from bladder activity to the implanted neurostimulator is required to implement a closed-loop system to improve overall implant efficacy and minimize deleterious effects to neural tissue caused by continuous electrical stimulation. In this paper, we present a method that allows real-time estimation of bladder volume from the primary afferent activity of bladder mechanoreceptors. Our method was validated with data acquired from anesthetized rats in acute experiments. It was possible to qualitatively estimate three states of bladder fullness in 100% of trials when the recorded afferent activity exhibited a Spearman's correlation coefficient of 0.6 or better. Furthermore, we could quantitatively estimate bladder volume, and also its pressure, using timeframes of properly chosen duration. The mean volume estimation error was 5.8 \pm 3.1\\%. Our results also demonstrate that it is possible to quantify both phasic and tonic bladder responses during slow filling and isovolumetric measurements, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The role of leukotrienes (LTs) in airway inflammatory diseases, such as asthma, has been extensively reported. The measurement of LTs in sputum supernatants, which is commonly done via enzyme immunoassays (EIAs), may prove to be useful for assessing airway inflammation. Despite the many advantages of EIA, these methods suffer from a lack of selectivity. Therefore, a selective and reliable method for the analysis of LTs in human sputum is needed. In this study we developed and validated a sensitive and specific method using ultra high pressure liquid chromatography–tandem mass spectrometry (UHPLC–MS/MS), to measure simultaneously cysteinyl leukotrienes (CysLTs) and leukotriene B4 (LTB4) in human sputum. Sputum supernatants obtained by ultracentrifugation were stabilized by protease inhibitors, spiked with stable isotopic internal standards, and subjected to solid phase extraction (SPE) and UHPLC separation. Multiple reaction monitoring (MRM) transitions were optimized and measured on a mass spectrometer. The limit of detection (LOD) for LTE4 and LTB4 was 9.8 and 19.5pg/mL, respectively. The lower limit of quantitation (LLOQ) for LTE4 and LTB4 was 19.5 and 39.0pg/mL, respectively. The dynamic range of the LTE4 assay was from 9.8 to 5000pg/mL, whereas for the LTB4 assay was from 19.5 to 10,000pg/mL. The intra- and inter-day % coefficient of variation (%CV) was <6.5% and <10%, for both LTE4 and LTB4, respectively. Spike recovery ranged from 105% to 111% for both analytes. In addition, twenty-two sputum samples were analyzed for cysLTs and LTB4. Fourteen of these samples were purchased commercially and eight were collected during the course of a clinical trial. LTB4 was detectable in all samples tested and it ranged from 79 to 7220pg/mL. LTE4 was detectable in most of the sputum samples (12.3–891pg/mL), whereas LTC4 and LTD4 were below limit of detection for majority of sputum samples. The in vitro conversion of LTC4 and LTD4 into LTE4 was observed. The measurement of LTB4 was sensitive to low pH and high temperature. The use of UHPLC–MS/MS method will allow a more accurate and reliable quantitation of LTs in human sputum, which in turn, may lead to a better understanding of the role of LTs in airway disease pathways and the application in associated clinical treatments. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]