bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Proteomic analysis of platelets treated with gamma irradiation versus a commercial photochemical pathogen reduction technology
Authors: Marrocco Cristina , D'Alessandro Angelo , Girelli Gabriella , Zolla Lello 
Published: January 2013

BackgroundSeveral strategies are currently being tested to reduce the risk of pathogen transmission associated with platelet (PLT) transfusion. Within the framework of the Italian Platelet Technology Assessment Study, we investigated the variations of the protein profiles (proteomics) of apheresis PLT concentrates (PCs) upon treatment with riboflavin and ultraviolet (UV) light (Mirasol; 6.24 J/mL; 280‐400 nm).Study Design and MethodsControl, gamma‐irradiated, and Mirasol‐treated apheresis PCs were assayed on Days 1 and 5 of storage by means of gel‐based analytical approaches (two‐dimensional gel electrophoresis) and mass spectrometry–based identification of significant (p < 0.05 analysis of variance) differential proteins. Supernatants were then assayed for metabolism and oxidative stress‐related metabolites through multiple reaction monitoring mass spectrometry.ResultsOnly a handful of modifications could be observed in the PLT proteome profiles in response to the Mirasol treatment, which included proteins involved in oxidative stress responses, PLT metabolism, and activation. Results confirmed increased metabolic rate and oxidative stress in the supernatants of treated PLTs (both gamma irradiated and Mirasol treated).ConclusionFrom this investigation, it emerges that, from a proteomics standpoint, gamma irradiation results in the acceleration of PLT storage lesions and the Mirasol treatment only moderately exacerbates these phenomena.
Mononuclear cell collection for extracorporeal photochemotherapy: a study comparing an automatic and a semiautomatic apheresis device
Authors: Del Fante Claudia , Scudeller Luigia , Viarengo Gianluca , Cervio Marila , Perotti Cesare 
Published: January 2013

BackgroundExtracorporeal photochemotherapy (ECP) is an effective cell therapy employed in several diseases, including graft‐versus‐host disease (GVHD) and organ rejection after transplantation. When ECP is performed using the off‐line technique, mononuclear cell (MNC) collection by leukapheresis is necessary for further manipulation. Semiautomated apheresis systems require experienced personnel to obtain a good MNC collection; an automated device, able to efficiently collect MNCs with high purity, is desirable. We compared the semiautomated COBE Spectra MNC and the new automated Spectra Optia v.5.0 MNC (Terumo BCT) devices in terms of efficacy and safety.Study Design and MethodsAdult patients with GVHD or bronchiolitis obliterans syndrome (BOS) after lung transplant undergoing ECP at our center were alternatively assigned, within the same ECP cycle (composed by two procedures each), to MNC collection with either device. Patients' characteristics, procedure, and product‐related variables were compared.ResultsThirty‐nine patients (24 with GVHD and 15 with BOS) underwent a total of 126 ECP procedures, with good compliance to both devices. Product volume and platelet (PLT) and red blood cell contamination were significantly lower with the Spectra Optia. MNC collection efficiency (CE), purity, and PLT loss were similar between the two devices, while white blood cells CE was in favor of the COBE Spectra.ConclusionThe Spectra Optia device proved to be a good option for MNC collection in the difficult ECP setting, since it ensures high‐quality MNC collection, while at the same time saving personnel's time, guaranteeing optimal monitoring and care to this frail patient population.
Donor anxiety, needle pain, and syncopal reactions combine to determine retention: a path analysis of two‐year donor return data
Authors: France Christopher R. , France Janis L. , Wissel Mary Ellen , Ditto Blaine , Dickert Tara , Himawan Lina K. 
Published: January 2013

BackgroundEfforts to expand the donor pool by recruiting younger donors have resulted in higher numbers of initial donations, but retention of young donors continues to be challenging.Study Design and MethodsPath analysis was used to examine the simultaneous relationships among syncopal reactions, donation anxiety, needle pain, donor satisfaction, and donation intention in predicting repeat donation. Participants included 421 first‐ and second‐time donors recruited for a study comparing the effects of predonation water loading with and without the use of applied muscle tension during donation (52% female, 60.8% first‐time donor, mean age 20.3 years). For this longitudinal follow‐up study, donor database records were accessed 2 years after the index donation to assess repeat donation.ResultsResults of a series of path analyses demonstrated the influential role of donor anxiety in shaping donor retention (final model χ2 = 35.75, root mean square error of approximation 0.03, comparative fit index 0.98, weighted root mean square residual 0.74). First, anxiety exerted a direct negative influence on donation intention, the proximal and sole direct predictor of repeat donation. Second, anxiety increased the likelihood of donor‐reported needle pain, adversely affecting donation satisfaction and, subsequently, donation intention. Finally, anxiety was associated with donor ratings of syncopal reactions through its impact on needle pain, which also contributed to decreased donation intention.ConclusionThese results provide novel evidence that donation anxiety plays a central role in shaping future donation behavior. Individual differences in anxiety must be considered when developing and testing strategies to enhance blood donor retention.
Antibody of undetermined specificity: frequency, laboratory features, and natural history
Authors: Liu Chang , Grossman Brenda J. 
Published: January 2013

BackgroundIn pretransfusion testing at our institution, unexplained reactions are reported as antibody of undetermined specificity (AUS) after antibodies against Food and Drug Administration–specified red blood cell antigens have been ruled out. The frequency, laboratory features, and natural history of these reactions are not well defined.Study Design and MethodsWe retrospectively examined AUS reported at a single institution between July 1, 2009, and December 31, 2011. For AUS reported in the first quarter of 2012, the reference workup and antibodies identified during subsequent testing were reviewed to characterize the laboratory features and natural history of AUS.ResultsA total of 8121 antibodies were detected in 6058 patients during the study period. AUS was reported 1442 times (18%) and was the single most reported event, followed by anti‐E (18%) and anti‐K (14%). In the first quarter of 2012, AUS was reported in 174 unique patients. Most AUS (78%) reacted with two cells or less tested in gel and most reactions (98%) were 1+ or weaker. Forty‐five patients presenting with AUS for the first time had repeated antibody workup later. AUS persisted in 31 cases for 2 to 60 days. AUS disappeared in 14 cases, seven of which developed a total of 10 new antibodies (three anti‐E; one anti‐D; one anti‐C; two anti‐Jkb; and one each of anti‐Lea, anti‐s, and warm autoantibody) in 3 to 21 days (median, 8 days).ConclusionAUS is a common finding with our pretransfusion testing method. These reactions are heterogeneous and may represent antibodies against low‐prevalence antigens, non‐RBC antigens, or developing antibodies that are clinically significant.
Synchronous papillary cystadenocarcinoma of ovary and squamous cell carcinoma of lower vagina: first report of an unusual chance occurrence
Authors: Shekhar Shashank , Thakur Sita , Singh Kamal , Chander Bal 
Published: January 2013

Synchronously occurring primary gynecological malignancies are rare, and most commonly reported synchronous female genital malignancies are ovarian and endometrial. It is postulated that the extended Mullerian system, comprising the ovarian epithelium, fallopian tube, uterine corpus and cervix, may respond as a single morphological unit to a carcinogenic process, thus producing primary tumours at above-mentioned sites in varying combinations. We are reporting for the first time, an unusual occurrence of synchronous papillary serous cystadenocarcinoma of the ovary and sqaumous cell carcinoma of lower vagina. Clinical implications of this case along with the multicentric concept of tumourigenesis and diagnosis of synchronous female genital malignancies are briefly discussed. Index case is probably a chance occurrence, as it cannot be explained by the current concepts of muticentric tumourogenesis in the female genital tract. Nonetheless, further research is warranted to explain simultaneous tumourogenesis in embryologically different tissues.
Cross-sectional study of prescribing errors in patients admitted to nine hospitals across North West England
Authors: Seden Kay , Kirkham Jamie J , Kennedy Tom , Lloyd Michael , James Sally , Mcmanus Aine , Ritchings Andrew , Simpson Jennifer , Thornton Dave , Gill Andrea , Coleman Carolyn , Thorpe Bethan , Khoo Saye H 
Published: January 2013

ObjectiveTo evaluate the prevalence, type and severity of prescribing errors observed between grades of prescriber, ward area, admission or discharge and type of medication prescribed.DesignWard-based clinical pharmacists prospectively documented prescribing errors at the point of clinically checking admission or discharge prescriptions. Error categories and severities were assigned at the point of data collection, and verified independently by the study team.SettingProspective study of nine diverse National Health Service hospitals in North West England, including teaching hospitals, district hospitals and specialist services for paediatrics, women and mental health.ResultsOf 4238 prescriptions evaluated, one or more error was observed in 1857 (43.8%) prescriptions, with a total of 3011 errors observed. Of these, 1264 (41.9%) were minor, 1629 (54.1%) were significant, 109 (3.6%) were serious and 9 (0.30%) were potentially life threatening. The majority of errors considered to be potentially lethal (n=9) were dosing errors (n=8), mostly relating to overdose (n=7). The rate of error was not significantly different between newly qualified doctors compared with junior, middle grade or senior doctors. Multivariable analyses revealed the strongest predictor of error was the number of items on a prescription (risk of error increased 14% for each additional item). We observed a high rate of error from medication omission, particularly among patients admitted acutely into hospital. Electronic prescribing systems could potentially have prevented up to a quarter of (but not all) errors.ConclusionsIn contrast to other studies, prescriber experience did not impact on overall error rate (although there were qualitative differences in error category). Given that multiple drug therapies are now the norm for many medical conditions, health systems should introduce and retain safeguards which detect and prevent error, in addition to continuing training and education, and migration to electronic prescribing systems.
Consequences of the increasing prevalence of the poisonousLagocephalus sceleratusin southern Turkey
Authors: Beköz Alev Banu , Beköz Sera , Yilmaz Elanur , Tüzün Suna , Beköz Üner 
Published: January 2013

BackgroundThe increasing Indo-Pacific migration has affected the biodiversity of the Mediterranean Sea, and the prevalence of the puffer fish (Lagocephalus sceleratus), a well-known poisonous migrant, is increasing. The fish, which contains tetrodotoxin, is lethally poisonous when consumed. As its population increases it becomes more available in the markets of southern Turkey, but local people seem to be unaware of the danger. Probably because of the depressed stocks of the surrounding waters and demand on affordable seafood, local anglers are catching the fish. The situation constitutes an alert for the local emergency medicine organisation and is a public health issue.MethodsLocal fishermen, fish sellers/dealers/brokers, buyers and emergency department physicians were interviewed about the fishery and consumption facts of the puffer fish in the region, the number of cases reported in the regional state run hospitals and the 112 Emergency Medical Response Service, and the knowledge and practice of the doctors in the emergency departments.Results and conclusionsGeneral health organisations are unprepared for the serious health hazards caused by this fish, including fatalities. Health workers should have sufficient knowledge regarding the clinical manifestations, complications and management of puffer fish poisoning. Official authorities should make the public aware of the potential risk of consuming puffer fish.
A corneal cat‐astrophe?
Authors: Williams David 
Published: January 2013

Articles in this series give readers the opportunity to consider and contribute to discussion of some of the ethical dilemmas that can arise in veterinary practice. Each month, a case scenario is presented, followed by discussion of some of the issues involved. In addition, a possible way forward is suggested; however, there is rarely a cut‐and‐dried answer in such cases, and readers may wish to suggest an alternative approach. This month's dilemma, ‘A corneal cat‐astrophe?’, is presented and discussed by David Williams. Readers with comments to contribute are invited to send them as soon as possible, so that they can be considered for publication in the next issue. Discussion of the dilemma ‘Are you positive? The fate of a shelter cat’, which was published in the November/December 2012 issue of In Practice, appears on page 47.The series is being coordinated by Siobhan Mullan, of the University of Bristol. It is hoped it will provide a framework that will help practices find solutions when facing similar dilemmas.
Implementing constrained cyber-physical systems with IEC 61499
Authors: Yoong Li Hsien , Roop Partha S. , Salcic Zoran 
Published: January 2013

Cyber-physical systems (CPS) are integrations of computation and control with sensing and actuation of the physical environment. Typically, such systems consist of embedded computers that monitor and control physical processes in a feedback loop. While modern electronic systems are increasingly characterized as CPS, their design and synthesis still rely on traditional methods, which lack systematic and automated techniques for accomplishment.
Recently, IEC 61499 has been proposed as a standard for designing industrial process-control and measurement systems. It prescribes a component-based approach for developing industrial automation software using function blocks. Executable code can then be automatically generated and simulated from these function blocks. This bodes well for designers of CPS, who are more likely to be experts in specific industrial domains, rather than in computer science. The intuitive graphical nature and automatic code synthesis of IEC 61499 programs will alleviate the programming burden of industrial engineers, while ensuring more reliable software. While software synthesis from IEC 61499 programs is not new, the generation of efficient code from them has been wanting. This has made it difficult for function blocks to be used in software development for resource-constrained embedded controllers commonly employed in CPS. To address this, we present an approach that can generate very efficient code from function block descriptions. Experimental results from a benchmark suite shows that our approach produces substantially faster and smaller code compared to existing techniques.
Bisimulation for Quantum Processes
Authors: Feng Yuan , Duan Runyao , Ying Mingsheng 
Published: January 2013

Quantum cryptographic systems have been commercially available, with a striking advantage over classical systems that their security and ability to detect the presence of eavesdropping are provable based on the principles of quantum mechanics. On the other hand, quantum protocol designers may commit more faults than classical protocol designers since human intuition is poorly adapted to the quantum world. To offer formal techniques for modeling and verification of quantum protocols, several quantum extensions of process algebra have been proposed. An important issue in quantum process algebra is to discover a quantum generalization of bisimulation preserved by various process constructs, in particular, parallel composition, where one of the major differences between classical and quantum systems, namely quantum entanglement, is present. Quite a few versions of bisimulation have been defined for quantum processes in the literature, but in the best case they are only proved to be preserved by parallel composition of purely quantum processes where no classical communication is involved.
Many quantum cryptographic protocols, however, employ the LOCC (Local Operations and Classical Communication) scheme, where classical communication must be explicitly specified. So, a notion of bisimulation preserved by parallel composition in the circumstance of both classical and quantum communication is crucial for process algebra approach to verification of quantum cryptographic protocols. In this article we introduce novel notions of strong bisimulation and weak bisimulation for quantum processes, and prove that they are congruent with respect to various process algebra combinators including parallel composition even when both classical and quantum communication are present. We also establish some basic algebraic laws for these bisimulations. In particular, we show the uniqueness of the solutions to recursive equations of quantum processes, which proves useful in verifying complex quantum protocols. To capture the idea that a quantum process approximately implements its specification, and provide techniques and tools for approximate reasoning, a quantified version of strong bisimulation, which defines for each pair of quantum processes a bisimulation-based distance characterizing the extent to which they are strongly bisimilar, is also introduced.
Eliminating read barriers through procrastination and cleanliness
Authors: Sivaramakrishnan KC , Ziarek Lukasz , Jagannathan Suresh 
Published: January 2013

Managed languages typically use read barriers to interpret forwarding pointers introduced to keep track of copied objects. For example, in a multicore environment with thread-local heaps and a global, shared heap, an object initially allocated on a local heap may be copied to a shared heap if it becomes the source of a store operation whose target location resides on the shared heap. As part of the copy operation, a forwarding pointer may be established in the original object to point to the copied object. This level of indirection avoids the need to update all of the references to the object that has been copied.
In this paper, we consider the design of a managed runtime that eliminates read barriers. Our design is premised on the availability of a sufficient degree of concurrency to stall operations that would otherwise necessitate the copy. Stalled actions are deferred until the next local collection, avoiding exposing forwarding pointers to the mutator. In certain important cases, procrastination is unnecessary -- lightweight runtime techniques can sometimes be used to allow objects to be eagerly copied when their set of incoming references is known, or when it can be determined that having multiple copies would not violate program semantics.
We evaluate our techniques on 3 platforms: a 16-core AMD64 machine, a 48-core Intel SCC, and an 864-core Azul Vega 3. Experimental results over a range of parallel benchmarks indicate that our approach leads to notable performance gains (20 - 32% on average) without incurring any additional complexity.
Scalable concurrent and parallel mark
Authors: Iyengar Balaji , Gehringer Edward , Wolf Michael , Manivannan Karthikeyan 
Published: January 2013

Parallel marking algorithms use multiple threads to walk through the object heap graph and mark each reachable object as live. Parallel marker threads mark an object "live" by atomically setting a bit in a mark-bitmap or a bit in the object header. Most of these parallel algorithms strive to improve the marking throughput by using work-stealing algorithms for load-balancing and to ensure that all participating threads are kept busy. A purely "processor-centric" load-balancing approach in conjunction with a need to atomically set the mark bit, results in significant contention during parallel marking. This limits the scalability and throughput of parallel marking algorithms.
We describe a new non-blocking and lock-free, work-sharing algorithm, the primary goal being to reduce contention during atomic updates of the mark-bitmap by parallel task-threads. Our work-sharing mechanism uses the address of a word in the mark-bitmap as the key to stripe work among parallel task-threads, with only a subset of the task-threads working on each stripe. This filters out most of the contention during parallel marking with 20% improvements in performance.
In case of concurrent and on-the-fly collector algorithms, mutator threads also generate marking-work for the marking task-threads. In these schemes, mutator threads are also provided with thread-local marking stacks where they collect references to potentially "gray" objects, i.e., objects that haven't been "marked-through" by the collector. We note that since this work is generated by mutators when they reference these objects, there is a high likelihood that these objects continue to be present in the processor cache. We describe and evaluate a scheme to distribute mutator generated marking work among the collector's task-threads that is cognizant of the processor and cache topology. We prototype both our algorithms within the C4 [28] collector that ships as part of an industrial strength JVM for the Linux-X86 platform.
Down for the count? Getting reference counting back in the ring
Authors: Shahriyar Rifat , Blackburn Stephen M. , Frampton Daniel 
Published: January 2013

Reference counting and tracing are the two fundamental approaches that have underpinned garbage collection since 1960. However, despite some compelling advantages, reference counting is almost completely ignored in implementations of high performance systems today. In this paper we take a detailed look at reference counting to understand its behavior and to improve its performance. We identify key design choices for reference counting and analyze how the behavior of a wide range of benchmarks might affect design decisions. As far as we are aware, this is the first such quantitative study of reference counting. We use insights gleaned from this analysis to introduce a number of optimizations that significantly improve the performance of reference counting.
We find that an existing modern implementation of reference counting has an average 30% overhead compared to tracing, and that in combination, our optimizations are able to completely eliminate that overhead. This brings the performance of reference counting on par with that of a well tuned mark-sweep collector. We keep our in-depth analysis of reference counting as general as possible so that it may be useful to other garbage collector implementers. Our finding that reference counting can be made directly competitive with well tuned mark-sweep should shake the community's prejudices about reference counting and perhaps open new opportunities for exploiting reference counting's strengths, such as localization and immediacy of reclamation.