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Recent studies have shown that SARS-CoV-2 is present in the sewage of cities, which many have problems both in the collection and treatment of sewage, being largely discharged directly into water resources. The municipality of Rio Grande/RS is an example, as in addition to presenting these problems, it has a flat topography with low drainage capacity and many occurrences of flooding and flooding on the water margins. Thus, this study aimed to analyze the current conditions of basic sanitation in this municipality and identify the main areas of concentration of discharge of contaminated water and possibly infected by Covid-19, relating to the number of cases infected with this disease in these areas. The methodology was based on a bibliographic review and data survey from the City Hall, Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) and Companhia Riograndense de Saneamento (CORSAN). The results point to the need for more installation of drainage and sewage networks due to their insufficiency, in addition to the implementation of public policies regarding the installation of infrastructure and management on the banks of water resources, and even more studies and collection of water from the points disposal of sewage and other effluents to verify the presence of SARS-CoV-2 and if there really are possibilities of contamination through the water. more...

BACKGROUND The criteria for the diagnosis of kidney disease outlined in the Kidney Disease: Improving Global Outcomes guidelines are based on a patient’s current, historical, and baseline data. The diagnosis of acute kidney injury, chronic kidney disease, and acute-on-chronic kidney disease requires previous measurements of creatinine, back-calculation, and the interpretation of several laboratory values over a certain period. Diagnoses may be hindered by unclear definitions of the individual creatinine baseline and rough ranges of normal values that are set without adjusting for age, ethnicity, comorbidities, and treatment. The classification of correct diagnoses and sufficient staging improves coding, data quality, reimbursement, the choice of therapeutic approach, and a patient’s outcome. OBJECTIVE In this study, we aim to apply a data-driven approach to assign diagnoses of acute, chronic, and acute-on-chronic kidney diseases with the help of a complex rule engine. METHODS Real-time and retrospective data from the hospital’s clinical data warehouse of inpatient and outpatient cases treated between 2014 and 2019 were used. Delta serum creatinine, baseline values, and admission and discharge data were analyzed. A Kidney Disease: Improving Global Outcomes–based SQL algorithm applied specific diagnosis-based International Classification of Diseases (ICD) codes to inpatient stays. Text mining on discharge documentation was also conducted to measure the effects on diagnosis. RESULTS We show that this approach yielded an increased number of diagnoses (4491 cases in 2014 vs 11,124 cases of ICD-coded kidney disease and injury in 2019) and higher precision in documentation and coding. The percentage of unspecific ICD N19-coded diagnoses of N19 codes generated dropped from 19.71% (1544/7833) in 2016 to 4.38% (416/9501) in 2019. The percentage of specific ICD N18-coded diagnoses of N19 codes generated increased from 50.1% (3924/7833) in 2016 to 62.04% (5894/9501) in 2019. CONCLUSIONS Our data-driven method supports the process and reliability of diagnosis and staging and improves the quality of documentation and data. Measuring patient outcomes will be the next step in this project. CLINICALTRIAL more...

The present study aims to analyze what are the current conditions of air pollutant emissions during three quarantine weeks of Covid-19 in different countries and what are the future perspectives. For this, we performed a bibliographic review, survey of data from national and international institutions and use of an interactive map of the Windy.com Application. It was possible to see in this study that despite the global reduction in emissions, and the effort on the part of some countries to reduce it, there are still challenges to verify the impacts of Covid-19 in this sector. The economic crisis installed at that moment calls into question the future conditions of implementing cleaner technologies in a short period of time. more...

This research aims to identify the impacts of Covid-19 in the State of Rio Grande do Sul from the first contagion, also demonstrating the current conditions of the State, so that one can have an initial vision for the application of future public policies. The methodology was based on an exploratory research based on a bibliographic review and a survey of recent data on Covid -19 in RS and Brazil. Our time frame, although it brings comparison data from March 2020 to March 2019, will have a greater emphasis in the period from early March to April 9th of 2020. &nbsp more...

As opposed to the recent tendency in Responsible Research and Innovation and in some approaches of Technology Assessment (like Vision Assessment) to reduce the role of socio-technical visions and s... more...

Als Ergebnis heterogener Kooperation kann ein Typus von Innovation bezeichnet werden fur dessen Zustandekommen die Beitrage vieler unterschiedlicher Akteursgruppen notwendig sind, ein Prozess der Vereinheitlichung aber nicht stattfindet. Dieser Beitrag stellt zwei prominente Ansatze aus der Wissenschafts- und Technikforschung dar, die geeignet scheinen, unterschiedliche Aspekte heterogener Kooperation konzeptionell zu fassen. Die in beiden Konzepten vorgestellten Koordinationsmodi legen auch fest, auf welche Sorte empirischer Phanomene sich die beiden Konzepte sinnvoll anwenden lassen. more...

Socio-technical futures like visions or scenarios, that is the more or less systematic imagination of the interplay of future technologies with future society, have played an important role in Science and Technology Studies (STS) und Technology Assessment (TA) for decades. For a long time, the debates on and the analysis of these socio-technical futures have focused on the plausibility and legitimacy of these futures as anticipations, both on the technical and on the societal side. Only recently, the focus has shifted to investigating how socio-technical images of the future influence the present, that is, how they contribute to present processes of policymaking, societal debate and technology development, equally. This volume presents papers that focus on the question how socio-technical images of the future shape present processes of innovation and transformation. more...

In der Robotik lasst sich ein partieller Ubergang von der Servicerobotik, die menschliche Alltagsumgebungen als eine fur Roboter besonders komplexe und daher rein technisch besonders reizvolle Aufgabe betrachtet hat, hin zu Social Robotics beobachten. Jene ist angetreten, die im engeren Sinne ingenieurialen Entwicklungsanstrengungen eng mit der sozialwissenschaftlichen und psychologischen Begleitforschung zu verzahnen. Der Beitrag schlagt vor, diesen grundsatzlichen Wandel des Innovationskontextes konzeptionell als Institutionalisierung zu fassen, und zwar im Sinne des neoinstitutionalistischen Konzeptes der Issue-based Fields. Zu diesem Zweck wird zunachst das Konzept der Issue-based Fields so rekonstruiert, dass sich vier generalisierbare Hauptbestandteile identifizieren lassen, die sich dann auf den empirischen Fall der Robotik anwenden lassen. Anschliesend werden anhand von prominenten Beispielen aus den Feld Social Robotics empirische Evidenzen fur das Vorliegen von verschiedenen Arten von Institutionalisierungstendenzen in Social Robotics prasentiert. Abschliesend wird der Ertrag der Anwendung des Konzeptes auf den Fall systematisch diskutiert, um daran anschliesend zwei vorsichtige Generalisierungen zu wagen, die auf eine Erweiterung des Konzeptes der Issue-based Fields hinauslaufen. more...

Most of the clinical outcome studies dealing with ACL repair are from the developer’s perspective. It is a fact that these developer-initiated studies tend to interpret the results rather in favour than against their developed technique or product. Hence, it was the purpose of the present independent investigator-initiated study to investigate the clinical and radiological outcomes as well as failure rate of patients who underwent an ACL suture using dynamic intraligamentary stabilisation device in a specialised independent knee clinic. A retrospective study was performed on prospectively collected data of 26 patients (28 ± 9 years, range 18–50 years; male/female = 17:9) who underwent biologically augmented ACL suture using dynamic intraligamentary stabilisation. Mean time from ACL injury was 15 ± 5 days (range 4–25 days). In addition, in seven (27%) patients a medial meniscus refixation and in four (15%) patients a lateral meniscus refixation was done for associated meniscal lesions. All patients were clinically and radiologically followed up at 6 weeks, 3 and 12 months after ACL surgery using the Tegner and Lysholm score as well as IKDC score. Adverse events such as ACL failure, arthrofibrosis, pain > 3 on a visual analogue scale as well as the need and type of revision surgery were noted. Four patients (15%) suffered from an ACL retear due to another adequate trauma during follow-up time. In six patients (23%), an arthrofibrosis (extension deficit of > 10° or flexion deficit > 20°) was noted. In five of those six patients, an arthroscopic arthrolysis was performed. Three patients also complained about pain VAS > 3. In nine (35%) patients, superfluous ACL scar tissue and the DIS device including the polyethylene suture and the DIS screw were removed, and in another two (8%) patients, the DIS screw only was removed. In two patients, a partial meniscectomy was performed due to a non-healed meniscal suture. The median Tegner score was 8 (range 6–10) before injury and 7 (range 3–10) at last follow-up (p more...

Summary: To safeguard runaway reactions in industrial scale, qualified methods have to be used. While mechanical safety devices are usually installed, their design may be problematic as the runaway kinetics must be known. This may not be the case for many processes due to the required flexibility and possible unanticipated deviations from recipes. It is shown that runaway kinetics can be very fast and can lead to high conversions. Therefore, a method is proposed that does not depend on kinetics but limits the amounts of unreacted monomer in the reactor by monitoring the conversion and by quantitatively determining the hazardous potential. If a potential violation is observed, feeds to the reactor are interrupted. more...

Recent years have seen an increasing interest in materiality in social research. Some might say that materiality is now back on the agenda of social research. The challenges of bringing materiality back have spurred lively debates about material agency, most of which, however, are leveled at the largely dematerialized theories of the social in the social sciences, for example, in material culture studies (Appadurai 1986; Miller 1998) as well as science and technology studies (Latour 1988; Law/Mol 1995). Since the turn of the century, a marked shift towards the material has emerged (cf. Hicks 2010), ranging from questions concerning nature (Grundmann/Stehr 2000) and everyday objects (Molotch 2003; Costall/Dreier 2006; Miller 2010) to issues of cultural theory (Reckwitz 2002), post-phenomenology (Verbeek 2005), ethnography (Henare et al. 2007), distributed cognition (Hutchins 1995), and materiality in general (Dant 2005; Miller 2005; Knappett/Malafouris 2008). A perspective on materiality is now being developed in diverse fields such as archaeology (Meskell 2005), economic sociology (Pinch/Swedberg 2008), political science (Bennett 2010; Coole/Frost 2010), and organization studies (Carlile et al. 2013). Yet the status of the material remains debated in the evolving fields of various “new” materialisms (cf. Lemke 2015). more...

The implementation of direct search schemes for the design of multi-level diffractive optical elements is investigated. In particular, simulated annealing with an estimated temperature is shown to yield improvements in iteration time over simple simulated annealing. A cost function for the formation of greylevel diffraction patterns is suggested. An efficient method of finding an appropriate initial temperature for simulated annealing is presented. more...

Excimer lasers are well known for their ability to machine features on the micron scale. Recently, they have been used to fabricate diffractive optical elements (DOEs). These elements are patterns of pixels machined to the depth required, in order that a reconstructed pattern is formed in the image plane when the DOE is illuminated by a coherent source. The patterns are designed using computer phase retrieval code. These designs are used to create XY co-ordinate data files for conversion to machining routines where the pixels are machined individually. The laser used is an ArF excimer operating at 193 nm. We describe research undertaken on the fabrication and testing of some typical DOEs. The measurements include efficiency of reconstruction as well as the measurements of profile and surface roughness. The work compares the reconstruction results with the topographical measurements made on the DOE for 2, 4 and 8 phase-level designs. Newly developed simulation code was used to generate reconstructions without machining imperfections. more...

We report the fabrication and characterization of wavelength-scale diffractive optical elements etched directly on the surface of red (660 nm) vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers. The structures were fabricated by focused ion beam etching. Linear and two-dimensional (2-D) grating configurations were investigated. Each showed excellent suppression of the zeroth-order diffracted beam. Compared to the power from an unetched laser, /spl sim/22% of the emission was coupled into the first order for linear gratings and 12% for the 2-D structures. Polarization was independent of grating orientation for grating pitches as small as 1/spl lambda/. Threshold current increases of 35%-40% were measured. more...

Background: Diffusion tensor imaging provides information about the location of white matter tracts within the human brain. For neurosurgery, this imaging technique is of major interest in order to minimize the risk of postoperative neurological deficits. In preoperative planning, fiber tracking algorithms based on streamline propagation are used in order to reconstruct major fiber tracts. The resulting streamline bundles approximate the course of the underlying white matter structures and indicate their shape and location in 3 dimensions as well as the spatial relation with respect to surrounding anatomy. However, for intraoperative application in combination with the neuronavigation system, these streamline representations are not adequate. Hulls encompassing the streamline bundles are necessary, since the boundary curves of hulls can be superimposed on the operating room (OR) microscope view for guidance in neurosurgery. Methods: In this work, we present a novel hull approach which is based on rasterization and isosurface extraction, combined with surface filtering techniques. The advantages of this approach are its robustness and the possibility to control the tightness of wrapping. Results: The approach makes it possible to generate precise hulls for different tract systems, which can be used as a basis for intraoperative visualization in the OR microscope. Distance measurements further confirm the accuracy of the hulls. more...

Diffusion tensor imaging provides information about structure and location of white matter tracts within the human brain which is of particular interest for neurosurgery. The reconstruction of neuronal structures from diffusion tensor data is commonly solved by tracking algorithms based on streamline propagation. These approaches generate streamline bundles that approximate the course of neuronal fibers. For medical application, a 3D representation of streamline bundles provides valuable information for pre-operative planning. However, for intra-operative visualization, surfaces wrapping eloquent structures are required for integration into the OR microscope. In order to provide hulls tightly encompassing the neuronal structures obtained from fiber tracking, we propose an approach based on tetrahedralization. This technique reuses the sampling points derived from fiber tracking and therefore provides precise hulls which serve as basis for intra-operative visualization. more...

Multidisziplinare oder transdisziplinare Kooperationen sind viel versprechend und riskant zugleich. Sie werden eingegangen, da sie eine produktive Nutzung der Differenzen zwischen disziplin- und bereichsspezifischen Zugangsweisen versprechen. Zugleich sind sie riskant, denn sie setzen die wechselseitige Erwartung voraus, dass alle Beteiligten mehr als nur ihre kurzfristigen Gewinnchancen verfolgen. In der alltagsweltlichen wie der sozialwissenschaftlichen Einstellung wird daher mit groser Selbstverstandlichkeit davon ausgegangen, dass ein zusatzliches Element erforderlich ist: ein gemeinsamer Bezugpunkt, der die Verschrankung der wechselseitigen Erwartungen stabilisiert und so die bestehenden Differenzen langfristig uberbruckt, ohne auf deren vollstandige Auflosung abzuzielen.2 more...

Heterogene Kooperationen beinhalten eine spezifische Spannung. ‚Heterogen‘ steht fur das Zusammenfugen von Beitragen aus unterschiedlichen Quellen, derentwegen die gemeinsame Aktivitat ‚Kooperation‘ meist unternommen wird. Wir beobachten heterogene Kooperationen dort, wo Akteure auf Leistungen angewiesen sind, die in ihrem eigenen sozialen Kontext nicht erbracht werden konnen. Der heterogene Handlungszusammenhang, auf den sich die Akteure damit einlassen, ist aber auch eine Belastung. Die Verankerung der Akteure in unterschiedlichen Kontexten impliziert Differenzen auf allen fur Kooperation wichtigen Handlungsebenen. Die Akteure wissen Unterschiedliches, sprechen verschiedene Sprachen, haben unterschiedliche Praferenzen und Interessen, sind in je spezifische Institutionensysteme und Praxisgemeinschaften eingebunden usw. Diese vielfaltigen Heterogenitaten erschweren Kooperation und konnen sie im Extremfall scheitern lassen. more...

We report on the design of phase only diffractive optical elements (DOEs) with a locally improved signal to noise ratio. The formation of low noise regions is particularly useful for designs where it is difficult to achieve low background noise throughout the entire reconstruction. Such a case may arise in highly quantized elements or elements with a small spatial bandwidth. The DOE design is achieved by a direct search algorithm which allows for the definition of arbitrary low-noise areas in the reconstruction plane. However, the method is not restricted to direct search and should work with all direct schemes. While the local suppression of noise works rather well other performance criteria like diffraction efficiency and reconstruction error do, in practice, not suffer much from the additional constraints. This is due to the advantage that amplitude freedom and phase freedom can be maintained in large areas of the reconstruction. It is shown how this approach may be used in the design of beam splitters to prevent the formation of unwanted repeated spot patterns. more...

We present the fabrication of phase only diffractive optical elements (DOEs) by contact prints using a novel technique. Phase only DOEs consist of a transparent slide with a surface profile that modulates the phase of an incident laser beam in the desired manner. This surface profile can be exploited to split or to shape the laser beam. In our process a Perspex sheet (PMMA) is exposed through a chrome-on-quartz mask that carries the DOE pattern. The UV light used in the exposure is generated by an ArF excimer laser (l=193nm). The high energy radiation causes photomodification and the phase pattern of the DOE is transferred to the PMMA. While the primary investigations concentrate on binary DOEs, which require one exposure only, we have also attempted to produce multilevel designs which need mask alignment and tighter control of the exposure. At the moment, we study the capability of the method to produce relatively large structures but it might also be possible to use it to manufacture finer structures. more...