scholarly journals ENTROPY METHODS IN ANALYSIS OF BIOLOGICAL SYSTEMS

2014 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 15-20
Author(s):  
O. G. Berestneva ◽  
Ya. S. Pekker ◽  
S. S. Murzina

The adaptation of people to new production environment are often influenced by very unusual, excessive and harsh environmental factors, genetically inadequate to its nature. Human adaptation to the new production conditions can be summarized as a set of social and biological properties and characteristics needed to sustain the existence of the human body in a particular ecological environment.It is necessary under the new conditions to achieve harmony of human interaction with the physical environment of their lives, adequate human nature. In addressing this fundamental problem of the primary role belongs to biomedical science, which should not so much to predict the appearance of the disease, how much help to preserve and improve the health of population. At the same time beco­ming increasingly clear that solving this problem adaptation theory plays a crucial role.Adaptive features appear only in real life. It is in particular natural or artificial habitat capabilities of the body, when the survival and life require maximum mobilization and stress its potential adaptive capacity. Consequently, the property adaptation of living systems is, in fact, a measure of individual health.An approach based on entropy methods for modeling complex systems, seems to be the most promising for integrated assessment of biological systems.

2011 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 283
Author(s):  
Inga Narbute ◽  
Sanda Jegere ◽  
Indulis Kumsars ◽  
Dace Juhnevica ◽  
Agnese Knipse ◽  
...  

Together with calcified lesions, saphenous vein grafts, chronic total occlusions and unprotected left main lesions, bifurcation lesions are complex lesions that remain among the outstanding challenges of treatment with percutaneous coronary intervention. Bifurcation lesions are associated with increased rates of procedural complications, restenosis and adverse events than lesions in the body of the vessel. The introduction of drug-eluting stents for the treatment of bifurcation lesions has dramatically decreased restenosis rates, especially in patients suffering from diabetes. However, abrupt side branch closure, side branch ostial restenosis and stent thrombosis remain areas where further improvement is needed. Although a provisional T-stent strategy is most often used when side branch stenting is required, there are true bifurcation lesions where the selected use of more complex bifurcation approaches (such as the crush technique, T-stenting or the culotte technique) seem appropriate, particularly when the main branch and side branch are larger vessels with more diffuse side branch disease. The major challenge with any technique is to ensure that the side branch is protected and there is a satisfactory final result. Many technical questions rise in trying to ensure this outcome and lower the risk of intra- and post-procedural complications such as side branch closure and restenosis, stent thrombosis, dissection and fracture of a jailed wire: how can difficult side branch access be solved? How can unfavourable side branch anatomy be re-wired after main vessel stent placement? How can fracture of a jailed wire be avoided? Is side-strut dilation beneficial?


2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 422-430
Author(s):  
Federico Massini ◽  
Lars Ebert ◽  
Garyfalia Ampanozi ◽  
Sabine Franckenberg ◽  
Lena Benz ◽  
...  

AbstractEvidence acquisition, interpretation and preservation are essential parts of forensic case work that make a standardized documentation process fundamental. The most commonly used method for the documentation and interpretation of superficial wounds is a combination of two modalities: two-dimensional (2D) photography for evidence preservation and real-life examination for wound analysis. As technologies continue to develop, 2D photography is being enhanced with three-dimensional (3D) documentation technology. In our study, we compared the real-life examination of superficial wounds using four different technical documentation and visualization methods.To test the different methods, a mannequin was equipped with several injury stickers, and then the different methods were applied. A total of 42 artificial injury stickers were documented in regard to orientation, form, color, size, wound borders, wound corners and suspected mechanism of injury for the injury mechanism. As the gold standard, superficial wounds were visually examined by two board-certified forensic pathologists directly on the mannequin. These results were compared to an examination using standard 2D forensic photography; 2D photography using the multicamera system Botscan©, which included predefined viewing positions all around the body; and 3D photogrammetric reconstruction based on images visualized both on screen and in a virtual reality (VR) using a head-mounted display (HMD).The results of the gold standard examination showed that the two forensic pathologists had an inter-reader agreement ranging from 69% for the orientation and 11% for the size of the wounds. A substantial portion of the direct visual documentation showed only a partial overlap, especially for the items of size and color, thereby prohibiting the statistical comparison of these two items. A forest plot analysis of the remaining six items showed no significant difference between the methods. We found that among the forensic pathologists, there was high variability regarding the vocabulary used for the description of wound morphology, which complicated the exact comparison of the two documentations of the same wound.There were no significant differences for any of the four methods compared to the gold standard, thereby challenging the role of real-life examination and 2D photography as the most reliable documentation approaches. Further studies with real injuries are necessary to support our evaluation that technical examination methods involving multicamera systems and 3D visualization for whole-body examination might be a valid alternative in future forensic documentation.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (11) ◽  
pp. 6494
Author(s):  
Grzegorz Baran ◽  
Aleksandra Berkowicz

The main idea of the paper is to combine modern research methods (as living labs that enable research in a real-life setting) with the new technological opportunities for entrepreneurship and innovation development (as digital platforms) to search for innovative solutions, while addressing the sustainable development problems. Thus, the paper aims to explain how real value for society is created within digital platform ecosystems and how they employ to this end novel solutions that better address existing social problems. Consequently, it proposes a conceptual framework to research and develop sustainable entrepreneurship and innovation with the use of digital platforms. This research study takes a synthesizing conceptual approach that seeks to integrate the existing knowledge drawn on two major streams of research: living labs as a methodology and digital platform ecosystems to enrich the theory of sustainable entrepreneurship and innovation development. The paper contributes to the body of knowledge by proposing a novel conceptual model of digital platform ecosystems as living labs for sustainable entrepreneurship and innovation. The model depicts digital platform ecosystems examined as living labs and the implicit processes that include platform users in problem-solving and value-creation in real-life settings. The novelty of the model stems from framing these processes that capture the relationship between individuals and opportunities as the foundations of entrepreneurship and the relationship between the problem space and the solution space, where the opportunities occur.


2005 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 413-417 ◽  
Author(s):  
A.D. Metcalfe ◽  
M.W.J. Ferguson

Biomedical science has made major advances in understanding how cells grow into functioning tissue and the signalling mechanisms used to achieve this are slowly being dissected. Tissue engineering is the application of that knowledge to the building or repairing of organs, including skin, the largest organ in the body. Generally, engineered tissue is a combination of living cells and a supporting matrix. Besides serving as burn coverings, engineered skin substitutes can help patients with diabetic foot ulcers. Today, most of these ulcers are treated with an approach that includes antibiotics, glucose control, special shoes and frequent cleaning and bandaging. The results of such treatments are often disappointing and ineffectual, and scarring remains a major problem, mechanically, cosmetically and psychologically. Within our group we are attempting to address this by investigating novel approaches to skin tissue engineering. We are identifying novel therapeutic manipulations to improve the degree of integration between a tissue engineered dermal construct and the host by both molecular manipulation of growth factors but also by understanding and harnessing mechanisms of regenerative biology. For the purpose of this summary, we will concentrate primarily on the latter of these two approaches in that we have identified a novel mouse mutant that completely and perfectly regenerates skin and cartilaginous components following ear injury. This experimental animal will allow us to characterize not only novel genes involved in the regeneration process but also to utilize cells from such animals in artificial skin equivalents to assess their behaviour compared with normal cells. This approach should allow us to create a tissue-engineered substitute, which more closely resembles the normal regional microanatomy and physiology of the skin, allowing better integration to the host with minimal or no scarring.


Author(s):  
Svetlana Artemyeva ◽  
E. Zhuravleva ◽  
E. Plehanova

The health of students and their physical fitness are among the most important and urgent problems. Health depends to a large extent on the way of life, covering the entire complex of life processes and the entire area of human interaction with the environment. When studying the functional state of the body, the most important are the indicators of the cardiovascular and respiratory systems, the assessment of the level of physical development, fitness, functional capabilities and deviations in health. Motor activity increases the adaptation of the human body to changing environmental conditions and improves all adaptive mechanisms. Decreased physical activity contributes to an increase in the number of disorders in the body, which entails the risk of mental and physical discomfort in students.


2006 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 87-115
Author(s):  
Jean-Claude Charpentier

In today's economy, chemical engineering must respond to the changing needs of the chemical process industry in order to meet market demands. The evolution of chemical engineering is necessary to remain competitive in global trade. The ability of chemical engineering to cope with managing complex systems met in scientific and technological problems is addressed in this paper. Chemical Engineering is vital for sustainability: to satisfy both the market requirements for specific end-use properties of products and the social and environmental constraints of industrial-scale processes. An integrated system approach of complex multidisciplinary, non-linear non-equilibrium processes and phenomena occurring on different length and time scales is required. This will be obtained due to breakthroughs in molecular modeling, scientific instrumentation and related signal processing and powerful computational tools. The future of chemical engineering can be summarized by four main objectives: (1) Increase productivity and selectivity through intensification of intelligent operations and a multiscale approach to processes control; (2) Design novel equipment based on scientific principles and new production methods: process intensification using multifunctional reactors and microengineering and microtechnology (3) Extend chemical engineering methodology to product design and engineering using the "triplet 3PE molecular Processes-Product-Process Engineering" approach; (4) Implement multiscale application of computational chemical engineering modeling and simulation to real-life situations from the molecular scale to the production scale.


1995 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-46 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wulf Schiefenhövel

The ArgumentPain has important biomedical socioanthropological, semiotic, and other facets. In this contribution pain and the experssion of pain are looked at from the perspective of evolutionary biology, utilizing, among others, cross-cultural data from field work in Melanesia.No other being cares for sick and suffering conspecifics in the way humans do. Notwithstanding aggression and neglect, common in all cultures, human societies can be characterized as empathic, comforting, and promoting the health and well-being of their members. One important stimulus triggering this caring response in others is the expression of pain. The nonverbal channel of communication, particularly certain universal — i.e., culture-independent facial expressions, gestures, and body postures, convey much of the message from the painstricken person to the group.These behaviors signal the person's physical and psychical pain, sadness, grief, and despair in ways very similar to the signs given by infants and small children: the body loses tonus and sinks or drops to the ground, the gestures are those of helplessness. Pain and grief may be so strong that control is lost not only over the body's posture but also over the mind's awareness. In such cases the afflicted person may carry out actions endangering himself or others. In general, these behavior patterns resemble those of infants in situations of distress and danger, and it is not surprising that the response of the members of the group is basically parental: taking care, assisting and consoling.Perceptive and behavioral patterns which developed in the course of avian and mammalian phylogeny to serve the well-being of the young have proven, as was shown by Eibl-Eibesfeldt (1989), to be powerful building blocks for actions in other spheres of human interaction. Love is one such field, the reactions to a conspecific suffering pain is another.


Author(s):  
Basarab Nicolescu

A viable education can only be an integral education of the human being. Transdisciplinary education is founded on the inexhaustible richness of the scientific spirit which is based on questioning and of the refusal of all a priori answers and all certitude contradictory to the facts. At the same time, it revalues the role of the deeply rooted intuition, of the imaginary, of sensitivity, and of the body in the transmission of knowledge. It is only in this way that the society of the twenty-first century can reconcile effectivity and respect for the potentiality of every human being. The transdisciplinary approach will be an indispensable complement to the disciplinary approach because it will mean the emergence of continually connected beings, who are able to adapt themselves to the changing exigencies of professional life, and who are endowed with permanent flexibility which is always oriented towards the actualization of their interior potentialities. If the University intends to be a valid actor in sustainable development it has first to recognize the emergence of a new type of knowledge: transdisciplinary knowledge. The new production of knowledge implies a necessary multidimensional opening of the process of learning: towards civil society; towards cyber-space-time; towards the aim of universality; towards a redefinition of the values governing its own existence.


Author(s):  
N.L. Vishnevskaya ◽  
◽  
L.V. Plakhova ◽  
M.Yu. Liskova ◽  
◽  
...  

Modern high-tech industry intensifies the production load on operators. The problem of maintaining a high level of working capacity and error-free work is growing. Earlier studies revealed that the work of operators in hermetically sealed rooms is characterized by the following: monotony, hypokinesia, lack of psychological and industrial contacts, static muscle tension, as well as a lot of frequently repeated small movements caused by the fact that the technical system is controlled indirectly — through the remote control. The operator is affected by the factors of a closed production environment (microclimate) and the labor process (work and rest mode, long working shifts), which together form a general status called fatigue. The main factor that causes fatigue is the integral extensive intensity of the activity. The dynamics of physiological processes characterizing fatigue and the possibility of erroneous actions were evaluated. It is established that low-intensity factors, which form the working conditions of operators of high-tech industrial complexes, provoke persistent fatigue, a decrease in the functional reserves of the body, the development and aggravation of professionally caused diseases. The degree of fatigue was assessed by the indicators of the latent time of sensorimotor reactions, the stability of attention and the error of actions. The obtained data confirm the need in developing effective ways and means of maintaining working capacity. In particular, the regulated breaks and pauses filled with the specially developed schemes of isometric exercises, should be introduced (according to a special schedule) into the work and rest mode with a 12-hour schedule. The study substantiates the need for further making recommendations on the development of preventive measures to optimize the working conditions of the operators in high-tech industries.


2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Dóra Horváth ◽  
Tamás Csordás ◽  
Katalin Ásványi ◽  
Julianna Faludi ◽  
Attila Cosovan ◽  
...  

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to argue for the sustained need for the physical workplace and real-life encounters in higher education even in the digital age despite being seemingly transformable into the virtual sphere as seen during the COVID-19 situation. Design/methodology/approach This study is based on a collaborative autoethnography by a group of seven higher educators with an overall 2,134 student encounters during the study’s time span. The authors then connect these practitioner observations with relevant COVID-19-related studies thereby adding to research on higher education as a workplace. Findings The data suggest that the physical workplace strongly bolsters the personal experience and effectiveness of higher education through contributing to its dynamics. Spaces predetermine the scope and levels of human interaction of teaching and learning. In a physical setting, all senses serve as mediators, whereas, online, only two senses are involved: vision and hearing. The two-dimensional screen becomes a mediator of communications. In the physical space, actors are free to adjust the working space, whereas the online working space is limited and defined by platforms. Practical implications Although higher education institutions may indeed fully substitute most practices formerly in a physical setting with online solutions, real-time encounters in the physical working space belong to its deeper raisons d'être. Originality/value This paper highlights the necessity of the physical workplace in higher education and describes the depriving potential of the exclusively online higher education teaching setting.


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