Search

Zusammenfassung Ziel Analyse der Wirkungen sensomotorischen Trainings in Kombination mit einem gerätegestützten Krafttraining auf das Gleichgewicht, die Kraft der unteren Extremitäten sowie polyneuropathische Beschwerden bei Brustkrebspatientinnen in der Rehabilitation. Methoden Brustkrebspatientinnen (n=52) wurden während einer dreiwöchigen stationären Anschlussheilbehandlung in der medizinischen Trainingstherapie (3 TE/Woche) in zwei Gruppen randomisiert. Die Untersuchungsgruppe (n=27) absolvierte ein sensomotorisches Training mit einem anschließenden gerätegestützten Krafttraining, die Kontrollgruppe (n=25) nur ein gerätegestütztes Krafttraining. Vor Beginn und nach Beendigung des Trainingszeitraums wurden das dynamische und funktionelle Gleichgewicht sowie die isokinetische Maximalkraft gemessen. Zudem wurden anhand einer Skala die polyneuropathischen Beschwerden der Patientinnen (n=31 mit diagnostizierter Polyneuropathie; davon: SMT=19; KG=12) erhoben. Ergebnisse Im Trainingsexperiment zeigte sich ein signifikanter Haupteffekt, d. h., dass sowohl die Trainings- als auch die Kontrollgruppe signifikante Verbesserungen bezüglich der Gleichgewichts- und Kraftleistung sowie der polyneuropathischen Beschwerden erreichten. Allerdings konnte kein Interaktionseffekt nachgewiesen werden, die Kombination aus sensomotorischem und gerätegestütztem Training zeigte folglich keine Vorteile. Demgegenüber erwiesen sich Alter, Körpergröße und teilweise der BMI als relevante Kovariate. Dies erlaubt die Schlussfolgerung, dass einerseits in der Trainingstherapie Methodenvielfalt möglich, andererseits aber das jeweils ausgewählte Trainingsprogramm individuell anzupassen ist. Schlussfolgerung Bei einem geringen Zeit- und Kostenaufwand entsteht durch sensomotorisches Training ein erkennbarer Effekt auf das Wohlbefinden von Krebskranken, speziell bei Polyneuropathie. Insofern ist es erstrebenswert, dass sporttherapeutisches Personal Krebskranke über die Vorteile sensomotorischen Trainings aufklärt und sie in entsprechenden Übungen unterweist.

Phenytoin (PHT) is one of the most often used critical dose drugs, where insufficient or excessive dosing can have severe consequences such as seizures or toxicity. Thus, the monitoring and precise measuring of PHT concentrations in patients is crucial. This study develops and validates an LC-MS/MS method for the measurement of phenytoin concentrations in different body compartments (i.e., human brain dialysate, blood, and saliva) and compares it with a formerly developed GC-MS method that measures PHT in the same biological matrices. The two methods are evaluated and compared based on their analytical performance, appropriateness to analyze human biological samples, including corresponding extraction and cleanup procedures, and their validation according to ISO 17025/FDA Guidance for Industry. The LC-MS/MS method showed a higher performance compared with the GC-MS method. The LC-MS/MS was more sensitive, needed a smaller sample volume (25 µL) and less chemicals, was less time consuming (cleaning up, sample preparation, and analysis), and resulted in a better LOD (r2 > 0.995 for all tested matrices (blood, saliva, and dialysate). For larger sample numbers as in pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamic studies and for bedside as well as routine analyses, the LC-MS/MS method offers significant advantages over the GC-MS method.

Key Clinical Message Acute life‐threatening intoxications with insecticides are rare. We report a case of accidental near‐fatal thiacloprid intoxication with mass spectrometry‐based analytical confirmation. The initial clinical presentation resembled imminent brain death and/or severe postanoxic encephalopathy. Prolonged supportive treatment resulted in full recovery underlining intoxication as an important differential diagnosis in unclear coma.

For driving aptitude assessment (DAA), the analysis of several alcohol biomarkers is essential for the detection of alcohol intake besides psycho-medical exploration. In Switzerland, EtG in hair (hEtG) is often the only direct marker for abstinence monitoring in DAA. Therefore, the suitability of phosphatidylethanol (PEth) was investigated as additional biomarker. PEth 16:0/18:1 and 16:0/18:2 were determined by online-SPE-LC-MS/MS in 136 blood samples of persons undergoing DAA and compared to hEtG, determined in hair segments taken at the same time. With a PEth 16:0/18:1 threshold of 210 ng/mL for excessive alcohol consumption, all (n = 30) but one tested person also had hEtG values ≥30 pg/mg. In 54 cases, results are not in contradiction to an abstinence as neither PEth (

Phosphatidylethanol (PEth) is considered as specific biomarker of alcohol consumption. Due to accumulation after repeated drinking, PEth is suitable to monitor long-term drinking behavior. To examine the applicability of PEth in "driving under the influence of alcohol" cases, 142 blood samples with blood alcohol concentrations (BAC) ranging from 0.0-3.12 ‰ were analyzed for the presence of PEth homologues 16:0/18:1 (889 ± 878 ng/mL; range

In this article, we elaborate on 10 current research questions related to the “teaching games for understanding” (TGfU) approach with the objective of both developing the model itself and fostering game understanding, tactical decision making, and game-playing ability in invasion and net/wall games: (1) How can existing scientific approaches from different disciplines be used to enhance game play for beginners and proficient players? (2) How can state-of-the-art technology be integrated to game-play evaluations of beginners and proficient players by employing corresponding assessments? (4) How can complexity thinking be utilized to shape day-to-day physical education (PE) and coaching practices? (5) How can game making/designing be helpfully utilized for emergent learning? (6) How could purposeful game design create constraints that enable tactical understanding and skill development through adaptive learning and distributed cognition? (7) How can teacher/coach development programs benefit from game-centered approaches? (8) How can TGfU-related approaches be implemented in teacher or coach education with the goal of facilitating preservice and in-service teachers/coaches’ learning to teach and thereby foster their professional development from novices to experienced practitioners? (9) Can the TGfU approach be considered a helpful model across different cultures? (10) Can physical/psychomotor, cognitive, affective/social, and cultural development be fostered via TGfU approaches? The answers to these questions are critical not only for the advancement of teaching and coaching in PE and sport-based clubs, but also for an in-depth discussion on new scientific avenues and technological tools.

The aim of this study was to investigate coaching performance in team sports taking leadership behaviours into focus. To do so, coaching performance was put in a literature-based frame and analysed with reference to a task structure based on the idea of hierarchical planning. The focus of the paper is on a mixed methods multi-strand study using qualitative as well as quantitative threads to develop and verify a set of coaching strategies focussing on teambuilding and team leadership. Qualitative analyses showed that coaches do have a clear understanding of forming and leading a team, which could be shown by a specific set of strategies being used by high performance coaches from different team sports (basketball, football, handball, and volleyball). These strategies could be confirmed in a sequential quantitative study analysing coaches’ and players’ attitudes towards the previously analysed schemes. The results of this study are discussed in terms of methodical and practical implications.

This paper examines the role of trust and reputation in Grid environments. As Grid technology becomes standardized and stable, business models are invented and increasingly applied, and economic implications can be observed. Asymmetrically distributed information may allow for opportunistic behavior of service providers or users who opportunistically exploit the information gap between providers and consumers on the quality of services. The paper takes up these economic issues by proposing a reputation-based conceptual framework for enabling future open Grid markets, to recommend the most promising Grid architecture and a corresponding reputation approach in a particular case.

The paper describes an approach for a management system for railway freight traffic by using agent technology. It is designed to allow small and autonomous transport units - so-called module trains - to operate in a flexible way besides conventional trains. It enables trains to be operated with short-termed planning horizons and improves exploitation of track capacity by making up so-called virtual trains sets during operation. The paper gives a system overview and describes the main tasks of agent based transport planning and operation, including the description of an improved headway control system as an extension to ETCS level 3.

A 16-year-old Caucasian male with a known history of depressive disorders but no other diseases was found at home unconscious (Glasgow Coma Scale score, 7), bradycardic (heart rate, 45 b.p.m.), tachypnoic (respiratory rate, 30/min), and cyanotic. At admission to the emergency department of a regional hospital, the patient was hypotensive (70/30 mmHg), and his electrocardiogram revealed a broad-complex tachycardia with a heart rate of 155 b.p.m. The patient was endotracheally intubated and underwent repeated electrical and pharmacological (amiodarone, 300 mg i.v.; magnesium, 2 g i.v.) cardioversion attempts. Subsequently, tachycardia degenerated into bradycardic sinus rhythm with atrioventricular blockade and finally asystole. Following 30 min of cardiopulmonary resuscitation including 6 mg epinephrine i.v. and 3 mg atropine i.v., return of spontaneous circulation was achieved. Since broad-complex brady-/tachyarrhythmia persisted (Figure 1), and the patient required high-dosed epinephrine (3600 µg/h), he was transferred to the intensive care unit of a tertiary care university hospital. Activated charcoal (75 g) was administered by nasogastric tube because of a high suspicion of intoxication. Shortly after arrival at the admitting intensive care unit, the patient repeatedly needed mechanical and pharmacological resuscitation because of intermittent bradycardic episodes/asystoles. Since external pacing failed, a transvenous pacemaker was inserted, and mild hypothermia (33°C) was induced for neuroprotection. In view of the ongoing need for high-epinephrine dosages (1200–2000 µg/h), aggravating lactic acidosis (pH, 7.24; ![Graphic][1] , 16.2 mmol/L; base deficit, −10.7 mmol/l; lactate, 12.3 mmol/l) and persistent hypokalaemia (3.2 mmol/l), a 4.5 h haemodialysis session with a high-flux filter was … [1]: /embed/inline-graphic-1.gif

Proper hemodynamics is a major issue in research of heart valve bio-prostheses. In the examination of these, the bending deformation and fluttering of heart valve cusps is an interesting and influential aspect. An analysis of the deformation can support the understanding of correlations between hemodynamics and occurring mechanical stress. This contribution describes an approach to determine the dynamic bending deformation of aortic heart valve bio-prostheses in high speed video recordings and to compare different fluttering characteristics. The bioprostheses are recorded in an artificial circulation setup and observed during the opening and closure of a systolic phase. Based on a segmentation of the orifice area, a distance signal is derived for each cusp relative to a base line given by the commissure points. This distance signal describes the static bending deformation of the cusps in one image frame. By observing the deformation during the phase of maximal flow, the dynamics of the cusps can be determined over time. The resulting fluttering is quantified by a frequency analysis of the time dependent distance signal. Thus, significant fluttering characteristics can be modeled and compared.

Lipocalin-2 (Lcn2) expression contributes to ischemia and reperfusion injury (IRI) by enhancing pro-inflammatory responses. The aim of this work was to elucidate the regulation of Lcn2 during hypoxia and its effects on the expression of key chemokines and adhesion molecules. Lcn2 wt and Lcn2(-/-) mice were used in a heterotopic heart transplantation model. Quantitative RT-PCR was applied for chemokine gene expression analysis. Reporter gene studies were used to elucidate the regulation of the Lcn2 promoter by hypoxia. HIF-1β expression led to a 2.4-fold induction of the Lcn2 promoter. Apart from an earlier onset of granulocyte infiltration in the Lcn2 wt setting after 2 h of reperfusion compared with the Lcn2(-/-) setting (P < 0.013), exogenous application of recombinant Lcn2 revealed a trend toward increase of granulocyte infiltration. Analyzed chemokines were expressed significantly higher in the Lcn2 wt setting at 2 h of reperfusion (P ≤ 0.05). The number of apoptotic cells observed in Lcn2(-/-) grafts was significantly higher than in the Lcn2 wt setting. Our results indicate that Lcn2 affects granulocyte infiltration in the reperfused graft by modulating the expression of chemokines, their receptors and the apoptotic rate.

Smart connected electromobility will leverage the cross-domain cooperation along a new value chain of stakeholders from the automotive and energy industry. Intelligent charge management, i.e. charging the electric vehicle as a tradeoff between charging costs and personal or operational constraints, represents an important service in an electronic service market for electromobility. The market features the energy supplier as a service provider, the electric vehicle as a service consumer along with intermediate brokers in between. All of them continuously interact to exchange data, thus implementing the vision of an open and global Internet of Services in an electromobile ecosystem. A joint service life cycle management which considers both, the build-time and the runtime view of a service, is essential for such a service market. It allows the service provider to design, implement and deploy services while investigating systems of deployed services and their on-demand consumption at run-time. In this paper we present such an integrated service life cycle model for electronic electromobility market places. The life cycle model will be elaborated by means of an intelligent charge management use case.

Electron tomography is becoming an increasingly important tool in materials science for studying the three-dimensional morphologies and chemical compositions of nanostructures. The image quality obtained by many current algorithms is seriously affected by the problems of missing wedge artefacts and nonlinear projection intensities due to diffraction effects. The former refers to the fact that data cannot be acquired over the full 180 degrees tilt range; the latter implies that for some orientations, crystalline structures can show strong contrast changes. To overcome these problems we introduce and discuss several algorithms from the mathematical fields of geometric and discrete tomography. The algorithms incorporate geometric prior knowledge (mainly convexity and homogeneity), which also in principle considerably reduces the number of tilt angles required. Results are discussed for the reconstruction of an InAs nanowire. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

The fluttering of heart valve leaflets is an important aspect regarding the hemodynamics of biological artificial heart valves. Endoscopic high speed recordings allow capturing, visualization and analysis of heart valve movements with significant temporal resolution. In this contribution, a method is presented to determine the fluttering of the leaflets by analyzing the pixel frequency. The intensity value of each image pixel is observed over time and analyzed using Fourier transform. With synthetic sequences the reliability of the method has been proven. First results with ex-vivo recordings show the feasibility to determine fluttering of heart valve leaflets.

Researchers and industry envision the next generation Internet to be a global, socio-technical information infrastructure, where humans as well as software agents continuously interact to trade electronic services, forming a digital economy of its own. For an economically successful participation in the IoS a dedicated management approach for electronic services is needed. In this paper we present a proposal for such a service-centric life cycle model acting as a conceptual basis for (automated) service management at both, build and run time. It is used in a second step to define a comprehensive spiral model of service development and usage for electronic service markets. A real-world business case is finally used to demonstrate the benefits of our approach.

The opening and closure intervals of heart valves are important factors regarding an optimal blood flow. Using endoscopic video recordings of heart valves, digital kymography can be a method to visualize and to describe the opening and closure intervals. Based on an adequate segmentation of the kymograms, a quantitative description becomes available for the opening and closure characteristics. Furthermore, by normalizing the measured results, comparisons of mean heart valve oscillations can be achieved. Here, a comparison of artificial with native heart valves obtained under physiological conditions, indicates clear differences in the opening and closure intervals.

The emergence of the Internet leads to a vast increase in the number of interactions between parties that are completely alien to each other. In general, such transactions are likely to be subject to fraud and cheating. If such systems use rational software agents to negotiate and execute transactions, mechanisms that lead to favorable outcomes for all parties instead of giving rise to defective behavior are necessary to make the system work: trust and reputation mechanisms. This paper analyzes different incentive mechanisms helping these trust and reputation mechanisms in eliciting users to report own experiences honestly.

The Internet-of-Services describes a general paradigm of distributed computing with transparent service selection in a shared infrastructure. One particular question to be solved is how to match service supply and demand dynamically, while information is asymmetrically distributed between buyers and sellers (represented by agents). As buyers can not investigate the computation service before use, sellers can behave strategically. Including trust-enhancing market concepts or reputation mechanisms can help to lower this information gap. Researching into this effect requires the setup of simulation environments, that allow to change policies (e.g. market structure or reputation parameters). In this paper, we present an architecture of a simulation environment integrating electronic institutions from multi-agent research to simulate Internet-of-Services systems.

Recent developments have shown the emergence of electronic negotiation systems and electronic markets used to efficiently allocate electronic resources, such as web services. Electronic negotiations exhibit much of the same problems real life negotiations have, such as coalition formation, efficient offer matching etc. However, some problems become more crucial in electronic environments due to the anonymity of the users and the sheer amount of negotiations that can be executed in short time spans. In this paper we investigate the trust issue in electronic negotiations, dealing with how to trust a potential transaction partner and how to choose such partners based on their past behaviour in the system. In particular, we want to investigate the efficiency or even applicability of reputation mechanisms for different negotiation protocols and market flavors. Based on social science findings we derive hypotheses on the effects of various commonly used negotiation protocols on the efficient usage of reputation mechanism. We conclude with a set of such hypotheses that can be used to give recommendations to designers of electronic negotiation systems or markets on which protocols to use, so that they can apply reputation mechanisms and therefore tackle the trusting issue.

Since the last decade reputation management has been examined as a possible foundation for trust establishment and trust dissemination in distributed artificial intelligence. While the systems are distributed the reputation management systems are in most cases centralized. This paper describes the implementation of the ReGreT approach to trust and reputation management in Multi-Agent Systems in a decentralized environment, where the services which provide reputation management are also distributed.

Summary: Purpose: We present three children with severe therapy-refractory epilepsy who tolerated valproate (VPA) well in various combinations with other antiepileptic drugs (AEDs) but developed typical VPA side effects in combination with topiramate (TPM). Methods: The clinical symptoms began with apathy in all three children; two of them also had hypothermia. Furthermore all children had elevated blood ammonia levels, one child in combination with increased liver transaminases and one with thrombocytopenia. Results: All children recovered completely after discontinuation of VPA or TPM. Conclusions: TPM seems likely to enhance the risk of side effects usually attributed to VPA and not described in TPM monotherapy. Our case reports suggest that possible adverse effects of VPA should be given particular attention when VPA is combined with TPM.

Novel types of reflective spiral micro-electro-mechanical systems were used to generate few-cycle vortex pulses of variable topological charge from a Ti:sapphire laser oscillator. The phase profile of these components was controlled by varying the temperature. The temporal properties of the pulses were characterized with spatially resolved nonlinear autocorrelation. The beam structure resembles a slightly distorted Laguerre-Gaussian distribution. The different topological charges were indicated by detecting Poynting-vector maps with a programmable Shack-Hartmann sensor of enhanced angular sensitivity.

Geometric tomography and conventional algebraic tomography algorithms are used to reconstruct cross-sections of an InAs nanowire from a tilt series of experimental annular dark-field images. Both algorithms are also applied to a test object to assess what factors affect the reconstruction quality. When using the present algorithms, geometric tomography is faster, but artifacts in the reconstruction may be difficult to recognize.