The Actions of Lyophilized Apple Peel on the Electrical Activity and Organization of the Ventricular Syncytium of the Hearts of Diabetic Rats.

This study was designed to examine the effects of lyophilized red delicious apple peel (RDP) on the action potentials (APs) and the input resistance-threshold current relationship. The experiments were performed on isolated papillary heart muscles from healthy male rats, healthy male rats treated with RDP, diabetic male rats, and diabetic male rats treated with RDP. The preparation was superfused with oxygenated Tyrode's solution at 37°C. The stimulation and the recording of the APs, the input resistance, and the threshold current were made using conventional electrophysiological methods. The RDP presented no significant effect in normal rats. Equivalent doses in diabetic rats reduced the APD and ARP. The relationship between input resistance and threshold current established an inverse correlation. The results indicate the following: (1) The functional structure of the cardiac ventricular syncytium in healthy rats is heterogeneous, in terms of input resistance and threshold current. Diabetes further accentuates the heterogeneity. (2) As a consequence, conduction block occurs and increases the possibility of reentrant arrhythmias. (3) These modifications in the ventricular syncytium, coupled with the increase in the ARP, are the adequate substrate so that, with diabetes, the heart becomes more arrhythmogenic. (4) RDP decreases the APD, the ARP, and most syncytium irregularity caused by diabetes.

Using GPUs for the exact alignment of short-read genetic sequences by means of the Burrows-Wheeler transform.

General Purpose Graphic Processing Units (GPGPUs) constitute an inexpensive resource for computing-intensive applications that could exploit an intrinsic fine-grain parallelism. This paper presents the design and implementation in GPGPUs of an exact alignment tool for nucleotide sequences based on the Burrows-Wheeler Transform. We compare this algorithm with state-of-the-art implementations of the same algorithm over standard CPUs, and considering the same conditions in terms of I/O. Excluding disk transfers, the implementation of the algorithm in GPUs shows a speedup larger than 12, when compared to CPU execution. This implementation exploits the parallelism by concurrently searching different sequences on the same reference search tree, maximizing memory locality and ensuring a symmetric access to the data. The paper describes the behavior of the algorithm in GPU, showing a good scalability in the performance, only limited by the size of the GPU inner memory.

Investigación Radiológica: necesidad de una aproximación colaborativa / Radiology research: the need for a collaborative approach

La creciente importancia de la imagen en todos los procesos médicos hace que el desarrollo de trabajos cooperativos en red sea una obligación social. Mediante la creación de una plataforma conjunta, multidisciplinar y colaborativa se pueden aunar datos, esfuerzos, capacidades y recursos. Los profesionales de la imagen médica deben profundizar en la calidad de la información que se extrae de las exploraciones que se realizan y de las nuevas terapias mínimamente invasivas guiadas por la imagen, en un entorno distribuido y seguro de compartición de conocimietno y recursos. Este entorno se debe construir sobre una capa de servicios desplegados en una “ciberinfraestructura” con un sistema de acceso distribuido a las bases de datos estructuradas y seguras sobre las que aplicar técnicas avanzadas de “posproceso” y de “minería de datos” para extraer conocimiento en un entorno seguro. Las ciberinfraestructuras son los nuevos entornos de investigación avanzada que dan soporte a los procesos de adquisición, almacenamiento, gestión, integración, minería y visualización de datos, así como otros servicios de computación y procesamiento de la información a través de Internet. Para que la investigación radiológica sea eficaz, deben crearse grupo de trabajo donde se interrelacionen no sólo médicos de diversas especialidades, sino también otros profesionales no sanitarios relacionados con la imagen médica (ingenieros, informáticos, telecomunicaciones, química-física, farmacología). El grado de complejidad de estos grupos, su multidisciplinaridad, será un medida de las necesidades de la investigación (AU)

The growing importance of the image in all medical processes means that the development of cooperative work in network is a social obligation. Multi-disciplinarity is a key factor to increasing the quality of information which is extracted from radiology explorations and the new minimally invasive therapies guided by imaging. The cyber-infrastructures are the new advanced research settings which give support to the processes of acquisition, storing, management, integration, mining and visualization of data (AU)