Artificial intelligence,fetal echocardiography,and congenital heart disease

There has been a recent explosion in the use of artificial intelligence (AI), which is now part of our everyday lives. Uptake in medicine has been more limited, although in several fields there have been encouraging results showing excellent performance when AI is used to assist in a well-defined medical task. Most of this work has been performed using retrospective data, and there have been few clinical trials published using prospective data. This review focuses on the potential uses of AI in the field of fetal cardiology. Ultrasound of the fetal heart is highly specific and sensitive in experienced hands, but despite this there is significant room for improvement in the rates of prenatal diagnosis of congenital heart disease in most countries. AI may be one way of improving this. Other potential applications in fetal cardiology include the provision of more accurate prognoses for individuals, and automatic quantification of various metrics including cardiac function. However, there are also ethical and governance concerns. These will need to be overcome before AI can be widely accepted in mainstream use. It is likely that a familiarity of the uses, and pitfalls, of AI will soon be mandatory for many healthcare professionals working in fetal cardiology.     

International perspectives on the implementation of reproductive carrier screening

Reproductive carrier screening started in some countries in the 1970s for hemoglobinopathies and Tay-Sachs disease. Cystic fibrosis carrier screening became possible in the late 1980s and with technical advances, screening of an ever increasing number of genes has become possible. The goal of carrier screening is to inform people about their risk of having children with autosomal recessive and X-linked recessive disorders, to allow for informed decision making about reproductive options. The consequence may be a decrease in the birth prevalence of these conditions, which has occurred in several countries for some conditions. Different programs target different groups (high school, premarital, couples before conception, couples attending fertility clinics, and pregnant women) as does the governance structure (public health initiative and user pays). Ancestry-based offers of screening are being replaced by expanded carrier screening panels with multiple genes that is independent of ancestry. This review describes screening in Australia, Cyprus, Israel, Italy, Malaysia, the Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. It provides an insight into the enormous variability in how reproductive carrier screening is offered across the globe. This largely relates to geographical variation in carrier frequencies of genetic conditions and local health care, financial, cultural, and religious factors.     

A multiobjective modeling approach to locate multi-compartment containers for urban-sorted waste

The location of multi-compartment sorted waste containers for recycling purposes in cities is an important problem in the context of urban waste management. The costs associated with those facilities and the impacts placed on populations are important concerns. This paper introduces a mixed-integer, multiobjective programming approach to identify the locations and capacities of such facilities. The approach incorporates an optimization model in a Geographical Information System (GIS)-based interactive decision support system that includes four objectives. The first objective minimizes the total investment cost; the second one minimizes the average distance from dwellings to the respective multi-compartment container; the last two objectives address the “pull” and “push” characteristics of the decision problem, one by minimizing the number of individuals too close to any container, and the other by minimizing the number of dwellings too far from the respective multi-compartment container. The model determines the number of facilities to be opened, the respective container capacities, their locations, their respective shares of the total waste of each type to be collected, and the dwellings assigned to each facility. The approach proposed was tested with a case study for the historical center of Coimbra city, Portugal, where a large urban renovation project, addressing about 800 buildings, is being undertaken. This paper demonstrates that the models and techniques incorporated in the interactive decision support system (IDSS) can be used to assist a decision maker (DM) in analyzing this complex problem in a realistically sized urban application. Ten solutions consisting of different combinations of underground containers for the disposal of four types of sorted waste in 12 candidate sites, were generated. These solutions and tradeoffs among the objectives are presented to the DM via tables, graphs, color-coded maps and other graphics. The DM can then use this information to “guide” the IDSS in identifying additional solutions of potential interest. Nevertheless, this research showed that a particular solution with a better objective balance can be identified. The actual sequence of additional solutions generated will depend upon the objectives and preferences of the DM in a specific application.     

History effect of light and temperature on monoterpenoid emissions from Fagus sylvatica L.

Monoterpenoid emissions from Fagus sylvatica L. trees have been measured at light- and temperature-controlled conditions in a growth chamber, using Proton Transfer Reaction Mass Spectrometry (PTR-MS) and the dynamic branch enclosure technique.De novo synthesized monoterpenoid Standard Emission Factors, obtained by applying the G97 algorithm (Guenther, 1997), varied between 2 and 32 μg g_DW^?1 h^?1 and showed a strong decline in late August and September, probably due to senescence.The response of monoterpenoid emissions to temperature variations at a constant daily light pattern could be well reproduced with a modified version of the MEGAN algorithm (Guenther et al., 2006), with a typical dependence on the average temperature over the past five days.The diurnal emissions at constant temperature showed a typical hysteretic behaviour, which could also be adequately described with the modified MEGAN algorithm by taking into account a dependence on the average light levels experienced by the trees during the past 10–13 h.The impact of the past light and temperature conditions on the monoterpenoid emissions from F. sylvatica L. was found to be much stronger than assumed in previous algorithms.Since our experiments were conducted under low light intensity, future studies should aim at confirming and completing the proposed algorithm updates in sunny conditions and natural environments.     

Eumelanin-based coloration and fitness parameters in birds: a meta-analysis

Although melanin is the most common pigment in animal integuments, the adaptive function of variation in melanin-based coloration remains poorly understood. The individual fitness returns associated with melanin pigments can be variable across species as these pigments can have physical and biological protective properties and genes involved in melanogenesis may vary in the intensity of pleiotropic effects. Moreover, dark and pale coloration can also enhance camouflage in alternative habitats and melanin-based coloration can be involved in social interactions. We investigated whether darker or paler individuals achieve a higher fitness in birds, a taxon wherein associations between melanin-based coloration and fitness parameters have been studied in a large number of species. A meta-analysis showed that the degree of melanin-based coloration was not significantly associated with laying date, clutch size, brood size, and survival across 26 species. Similar results were found when restricting the analyses to non-sexually dimorphic birds, colour polymorphic and monomorphic species, in passerines and non-passerines and in species for which inter-individual variation in melanism is due to colour intensity. However, eumelanic coloration was positively associated with clutch and brood size in sexually dimorphic species and those that vary in the size of black patches, respectively. Given that greater extent of melanin-based coloration was positively associated with reproductive parameters and survival in some species but negatively in other species, we conclude that in birds the sign and magnitude of selection exerted on melanin-based coloration is species- or trait-specific.     

Responding to climate variability: the opening of an artificial mouth on the Senegal River

The city of Saint-Louis is marked by recurrent floods, despite the decrease in rainfall. The town that grew downstream the vast plain where Senegalese-Mauritanian basin topography flattens considerably has experienced periodic flooding since its foundation. In 2003, the premature flooding of the Senegal River urged the Senegalese authorities to take the initiative to open a breach in the coastal sand strip of the “Langue de Barbarie,” in order to evacuate the water surplus from the river to the ocean and therefore resolve forever the problem of river flooding. But the disruption of estuarine dynamics has led to a rapid expansion of this gap: a few meters wide at its excavation, it reaches over 2,700 m in August 2009. Moreover, 10 months after the widening of the gap, the old river mouth was completely closed. If the natural movement of a mouth can be observed on some major deltas in the world (even on the Senegal River in the past), this is here a true man-made relocation. Based on the statistical analysis of series of hydrological data, this article demonstrates on the one hand that climatic conditions in 2003 which generated a major flood is an anomaly detected in the sequence of dry climate variability observed in the Sahel. On the other hand, it studies the rapid evolution of this new mouth of the Senegal River and discusses some of impacts on the regional social–ecological system, in this sensitive Sahelian environment.