Abstract
Background/Aim: This study aimed to evaluate the in vitro efficacy of carboplatin and piroxicam, both in isolation and combined, against T24 and 5637 human urinary bladder cancer cell lines. Materials and Methods: Cell viability, drug interaction, cell morphology, cell proliferation, apoptosis and autophagy were analyzed after 72 h of drug exposure. Statistical analysis was performed and values of p<0.05 were considered statistically significant. Results: Drug exposure in combination led to a significant reduction of cell viability comparatively to single-drug exposure. These combinations resulted in a synergistic interaction in the T24 (combination index for 50% effect (CI50)=0.65) and 5637 (CI50=0.17) cell lines. Notable increase of morphological alterations, a marked decrease of Ki-67 expression, a considerable enhancement of autophagic vacuoles and a minimal effect on apoptosis was observed in both cell lines treated with combined drugs. Conclusion: Data showed that in vitro combination of carboplatin and piroxicam produced a more potent antiproliferative effect when compared to single drugs.

Abstract

Abstract
Computational models of complex systems are usually elaborate and sensitive to implementation details, characteristics which often affect their verification and validation. Model replication is a possible solution to this issue. It avoids biases associated with the language or toolkit used to develop the original model, not only promoting its verification and validation, but also fostering the credibility of the underlying conceptual model. However, different model implementations must be compared to assess their equivalence. The problem is, given two or more implementations of a stochastic model, how to prove that they display similar behavior? In this paper, we present a model comparison technique, which uses principal component analysis to convert simulation output into a set of linearly uncorrelated statistical measures, analyzable in a consistent, model-independent fashion. It is appropriate for ascertaining distributional equivalence of a model replication with its original implementation. Besides model-independence, this technique has three other desirable properties: a) it automatically selects output features that best explain implementation differences; b) it does not depend on the distributional properties of simulation output; and, c) it simplifies the modelers' work, as it can be used directly on simulation outputs. The proposed technique is shown to produce similar results to the manual or empirical selection of output features when applied to a well-studied reference model.

Abstract

Abstract
The authors present a series of sea trails with autonomous systems using a long-range communication network. The continuous monitoring of the oceans and realtime data gathering/monitoring is a key issue in future marine challenges. To have long range communication, between land and ships at tens of kilometers', the authors used the BlueCom+ project research trials and tested their robotic systems. Bluecom+ project intends to fill the gap of long range communication with high bandwidth. It was demonstrated the usefulness of the system using autonomous systems, such as a small unmanned vehicle (ROAZ USV) for bathymetric mapping and tested an underwater acoustic positioning and communications system. © 2017 Marine Technology Society.

Abstract
Automatic and simultaneous electrocardiogram (ECG) and phonocardiogram (PCG) segmentation is a good example of current challenges when designing multi-channel decision support systems for healthcare. In this paper, we implemented and tested a Montazeri coupled hidden Markov model (CHMM), where two HMM's cooperate to recreate the "true" state sequence. To evaluate its performance, we tested different settings (two fully connected and two partially connected channels) on a real dataset annotated by an expert. The fully connected model achieved 71% of positive predictability (P+) on the ECG channel and 67% of P+ on the PCG channel. The partially connected model achieved 90% of P+ on the ECG channel and 80% of P+ in the PCG channel. These results validate the potential of our approach for real world multichannel application systems.