Bücher veröffentlicht von IntechOpen

The production of healthcare services had been out of the business, organizational, and technological dynamic that continually revolutionized the production of all other goods and services for a long time. Nowadays, this marginality has ceased as the need for healthcare is rising. Healthcare is now at the center of attention influenced by the never-ending demand of medical technology and substantial resource scarcity that imposes substantial organizational and entrepreneurial innovations. One decisive challenge that has emerged from such a situation is the management of healthcare processes, in the broad sense: healthcare professionals are called upon to demonstrate their ability to cope with complex problems because they are characterized in an institutional, ethical, organizational, and economic sense. With its eight chapters in a single segment, this book makes it possible to realize the specific nature of the problem. Its multidimensionality and the original approach are contributed and harmonized by scholars belonging to different disciplines.

Clostridium difficile bacteria could be found everywhere around us: in the air, water, and soil and in the feces of humans and animals. You can easily become infected with C. difficile if you touch contaminated clothing, sheets, or other objects and then touch your mouth. Many people have the bacteria in their intestines and never have any symptoms. Still, it can cause symptoms ranging from diarrhea to life-threatening inflammation of the colon. The chance of developing a C. difficile infection increases with the usage of high doses of antibiotics over a prolonged period; thus, it is most often spread in the healthcare facilities between workers, patients, and residents. Each year in the United States, almost a half million people get sick from C. difficile, and approximately 29,000 patients died within 30 days of its initial diagnosis. Nowadays, C. difficile infections have become more frequent, severe, and difficult to treat. Therefore, the early diagnosis and the suitable treatment have become a real demand. In this book, we present the experience of worldwide specialists on the diagnosis and the treatment of C. difficile infections along with its lights and shadows.

Natural gas has become the world's primary supply of energy in the last decades. It is naturally occurring from the decomposition of organic materials, over the past 150 million years ago, into hydrocarbons. It is considered one of the most useful energy sources and the fastest growing energy source in the world. This book presents state-of-the-art advances in natural gas emerging technologies. It contains ten chapters divided into three sections that cover natural gas technology, utilization, and alternative.

The optical world is continuously and rapidly evolving, and new challenges arise every day. As a result of these rapid changes, the need for up-to-date texts that address this growing field from an interdisciplinary perspective persists. This book presents an overview of new optical communication technologies and a bird's-eye view of some of the more promising technologies among them. The book covers the theoretical but also the practical aspects of technology implementation in a way that is suitable for undergraduate- and graduate-level students, as well as researchers and professional engineers.

Dizziness and vertigo are symptoms related to peripheral vestibular disorders. These are among the most common complaints in medical offices, and knowledge of the major diseases affecting this system is of fundamental importance to the specialist in otolaryngology. In recent years, great advances have been made in otoneurology, which, coupled with increasing knowledge in the field of neurosciences, have substantially modified the approach of the patient with balance complaints. This book studies the most polemic of these vestibular diseases, the Meniere's disease.

Rare earth elements have significant physical and chemical properties, which have been made indispensable in many magnetic, electronic, and optical applications. For instance, rare earth magnets have high magnetic intensity that can be retained at high temperatures, making them ideal for aerospace applications. Moreover, rare earth elements allow to fabricate faster, smaller, and lighter devices such as cell phones and hard drives. They are also important for in-ear headphones, microphones, loudspeakers, optical fibers, smartphones, and tablet computers. All these technological possibilities have made sure that the rare earth elements are part of the daily life. Therefore, this book has a main objective to let the readers know useful information about the rare earth elements that possibly allow development of the researches in different fields of science where the rare earth elements are used.

The book, which is related to QSAR in sciences, is divided into five main chapters. The first chapter is the Introductory chapter. The second chapter aims to provide an update of the recent advances in the field of rational design of PDE inhibitors. The third chapter includes designing a series of peptidic inhibitors that possessed a substrate transition-state analog and evaluating the structure-activity relationship of the designed inhibitors, based on docking and scoring, using the docking simulation software Molecular Operating Environment. The aim of the forth chapter is to develop structure-property relationships for the qualitative and quantitative prediction of the reverse-phase liquid chromatographic retention times of chlorogenic acids. The final chapter aims to determine the model of interactions between the natural compounds with anti-inflammatory molecular target by molecular docking analysis.

Control systems play an important role in engineering. Fuzzy logic is the natural choice for designing control applications and is the most popular and appropriate for the control of home and industrial appliances. Academic and industrial experts are constantly researching and proposing innovative and effective fuzzy control systems. This book is an edited volume and has 21 innovative chapters arranged into five sections covering applications of fuzzy control systems in energy and power systems, navigation systems, imaging, and industrial engineering. Overall, this book provides a rich set of modern fuzzy control systems and their applications and will be a useful resource for the graduate students, researchers, and practicing engineers in the field of electrical engineering.

The book entitled Sepsis will provide a great and up-to-date information in this field to students and researchers involved in sepsis research with its chapters targeting host-pathogen interaction at a metabolic level during sepsis pathogenesis, how age affects sepsis pathogenesis and its outcome in old-age population as compared to young population, sepsis-associated acute organ injury mainly targeting acute kidney injury in sepsis, and kallistatin as host-derived immunomodulatory mechanism during sepsis, along with developments in techniques required for early diagnosis of sepsis and sepsis-associated encephalitis, a devastating medical condition observed during severe sepsis. The book is written by experts in their fields associated with sepsis, a critical condition needing great medical attention.

Block encryption algorithms are now the most widely used cipher systems in the world to protect our communications and our data. Despite the fact that their design is open and public, there is absolutely no guarantee that there do not exist hidden features, at the mathematical design level, that could enable an attacker to break those systems in an operational way. Such features are called backdoors or trapdoors. The present book intends to address the feasibility of a particular class of such backdoors based on partitionning the plaintext and ciphertext message spaces. Going from the theory to the practical aspects, it is shown that mathematical backdoors in encryption systems are possible. This book, thus, intends to initiate a new field of research.

This book consists of seven chapters containing multiple questions of the global socially epistemological situation in science and higher education. Despite the progress of techno-sciences, we are facing blind flaws in leading systems of knowledge and perception. The global era, in a paradox way, connects the new knowledge of economics, postpolitics, postdemocracy, and biopolitical regulation of live and unpresentable forms of the global geo-located violence. Techno-optimism and techno-dictatorship in the twenty-first century coincide with the ideology of market, biopolitics of mandatory satisfaction, religious revivalism, and collapse of higher education. In order for sciences to recover, it is necessary to make a globally epistemological and moral turn toward the truth. The book shows that, when joint desires of the new economics of knowledge and technology erase epistemology (in a way to assign definitions of knowledge and rules and practices of the public usage of the mind), then the time for epistemology is on its way.

Nowadays, the technological advances allow developing many applications on different fields. In this book Motion Tracking and Gesture Recognition, two important fields are shown. Motion tracking is observed by a hand-tracking system for surgical training, an approach based on detection of dangerous situation by the prediction of moving objects, an approach based on human motion detection results and preliminary environmental information to build a long-term context model to describe and predict human activities, and a review about multispeaker tracking on different modalities. On the other hand, gesture recognition is shown by a gait recognition approach using Kinect sensor, a study of different methodologies for studying gesture recognition on depth images, and a review about human action recognition and the details about a particular technique based on a sensor of visible range and with depth information.

For many years, hydropower played an essential role in the development of humanity and has a long and successful track record. It is a conventional renewable energy source for generating electricity in small- and large-scale production. Due to its important utilization and future prospects, various interesting topics of research related to hydroelectric power generation are covered in this book. This book is the result of significant contributions from several researchers and experts worldwide. It is hoped that the book will become a useful source of information and basis for extended research for researchers, academics, policy makers, and practitioners in the area of renewable hydropower technologies.

In the event of large crises (earthquakes, typhoons, floods, ...), a primordial task of the fire and rescue services is the search for human survivors on the incident site. This is a complex and dangerous task, which - too often - leads to loss of lives among the human crisis managers themselves. This book explains how unmanned search can be added to the toolkit of the search and rescue workers, offering a valuable tool to save human lives and to speed up the search and rescue process. The introduction of robotic tools in the world of search and rescue is not straightforward, due to the fact that the search and rescue context is extremely technology-unfriendly, meaning that very robust solutions, which can be deployed extremely quickly, are required. Multiple research projects across the world are tackling this problem and in this book, a special focus is placed on showcasing the results of the European Union ICARUS project on this subject.The ICARUS project proposes to equip first responders with a comprehensive and integrated set of unmanned search and rescue tools, to increase the situational awareness of human crisis managers, so that more work can be done in a shorter amount of time. The ICARUS tools consist of assistive unmanned air, ground, and sea vehicles, equipped with victim-detection sensors. The unmanned vehicles collaborate as a coordinated team, communicating via ad hoc cognitive radio networking. To ensure optimal human-robot collaboration, these tools are seamlessly integrated into the command and control equipment of the human crisis managers and a set of training and support tools is provided to them in order to learn to use the ICARUS system.The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Community's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement number 285417. The publishing of this book was funded by the EC FP7 Post-Grant Open Access Pilot programme.

This book represents a synergic effort of an international team of specialists in immunology to expand the scientific achievements in the field of lymphocytes. It offers important and specific updated information to researchers, students, teachers, and medical professionals. Moreover, considering the remarkable dynamics of immunology and immunotherapy, this book "Lymphocyte Updates - Cancer, Autoimmunity, and Infection" aims to represent a significant source of concise scientific data and advancement of knowledge in this field. The chapters offer new insights into the latest scientific progress on lymphocyte roles in protective immunity, as well as their involvement in pathogenesis of various disorders.

There have been brilliant studies in the field of morphometry in recent years. This book increases the literature on this domain by presenting some recent advances and emerging applications upon biological structures, ranging in a variety of purposes and objectives: from animal visual system to growth models, from amphibians to humans, all in a comprehensive and accessible way of information. All chapters are written by leading internationally recognized experts from academia, who explain their own topics in plain English and in a totally rigorous manner. Suitable for a wide range of expert readers, this book represents a high valuable work for scientists and advanced students working in biological and medical morphometric topics.

This book is aimed to cover the phylogenetic and functional ecology with special reference to ecological shifts. I hope this book may benefit the students, fellow professors, and resource managers studying plant sciences. Since the topics stated in this book are not new but the issues and technologies mentioned were new to me, I expect that they will be new and equally advanced for the readers too. I encourage the readers to get out into the field to identify plants and to dig out the anthropogenic and social activities effecting plants to come along with the development of plant ecology; to rise and serve the topic of the enormous number of plants facing extinction; and to relish themselves and make some effort to contribute something to the world.

Many alcoholic beverages produced using various methods are consumed throughout the world. Alcoholic beverages made by brewing cereals, such as beer and Japanese sake, are extremely popular. Brewing them requires a complicated process by which the cereal must be saccharified using enzymes such as amylase. For example, with beer brewing, malt enzymes are used for saccharification. By germination, malt is made from barley to produce enzymes. Finally, wort is made by processing at higher temperatures using malt. The actual techniques require high-level skills. In this book, the discussion encompasses leading-edge brewing technology with fermentation using a non-Saccharomyces starter, healthy uses of spent grain from brewing processes, and an electronic nose for quality control, but it also includes descriptions of local traditional alcoholic beverages of Korea and Cameroon.

Escherichia coli is a versatile organism and very diverse. Members of this species vary from very pathogenic agents causing different types of diseases including meningitis, gastroenteritis, and septicemia, just to cite a few, to harmless organisms living in the intestines of both humans and animals. E. coli has also been used as a model organism for most bacteria except a few. For this reason, its study provides a huge advantage and can help understand the mechanisms involved in different processes such as pathogenesis, environmental disinfection, nutrient utilization, antibiotic resistance, and diagnostic/detection methods, and these are indeed the topics discussed in this book. The book has been divided into four main sections representing the different facets of E. coli applications, which include disease, biotechnology, environmental engineering and innovative approaches to detection, and lastly its physiology and cell biology. Such processes can be applied to the study of other organisms as well considering the development of diversity; for example, many organisms are capable of horizontal gene transfer, which is capable of increasing the fitness of the bacterial organisms involved and has a great impact on the control of such bacterial organism.

Cave investigation is one of the most interesting research field in natural and earth sciences, showing a rapid development with technological progress. It coincides with a number of scientific disciplines to address the early human histrory, habitats of living lives and specimens. This book will be useful to students and researchers as well as to earth scientists, archeologist, biologist, natural sciences, and other experts in a other related of disciplines. The volume consists of three sections sorted thematically, each focusing on a certain aspect. The book presents results on the determination and definition of caves discussed by means of geographic, geophysical, and geological applications. Geomorphometric analysis using GIS and laser scanning, the importance of electric tomography method in cave detection, the use of groundwater sources in agricultural areas, and the habitats of bats and species are studied on several cave studies.

Salient features of the book: - All chapters are related to the advances in cardiovascular risks.; - Chapters are written by renowned authors globally. - Chapters are lucid and easy to understand. - Chapters are useful for clinicians, medical practitioners, researchers, teachers, and students. - Chapters include flow charts, diagrams, and tables for easy comprehension of overall risks of cardiovascular disease. - Chapters generate awareness among common people about the risks so that the cost of intensive care units can be prevented, thus the economy of the country.

The book Recent Progress in Organometallic Chemistry mostly reviews the modem techniques and substantial organometallic and medical applications of inorganic materials. Chapters of this book are invited and contributed from the experts throughout the world from prominent researchers and scientists in the field of inorganic chemistry on organometallics and metallocenes. Each chapter provides technical and methodological details beyond the level found in typical journal articles or reviews and explores the application of organometallics, medicinal, inorganic, and catalysis to a significant problem in medical and catalysis, also providing a prospectus for the future. This book compiles with the expert knowledge of many specialists in the organic-inorganic synthesis and use of inorganic catalyst and metallocenes including chemical catalysis, biological catalysis, photo-electrocatalysis, bioassays, industrial catalysis, large-scale synthesis, micro-nanocatalyst, and so on in the field of fundamental and applied organometallic chemistry. Highlighting and importance are included on real and practical problems, ranging from industrial to medical applications and from single-multicells to animal to human objects. This offers the unique opportunity of exchanging and combining the scientist or researcher in organometallic chemistry in largely chemistry, biological, biomedical, physiological, metallocene, and inorganic chemistry fields.

The surfactants are among the materials that have a significant importance in everyday life of human. The rapid growth in science and technology has opened new horizons in a very wide range, in which the surfactants play a major and vital role. Hence, the increasing number of applications as well as arising environmental issues has made this relatively old topic still a hot research theme. In the first section of this book, some of the applications of surfactants in various fields such as biology and petroleum industry, as well as their environmental effects, are described. In Section 2 some experimental techniques used for characterization of the surfactants have been discussed.

The book with two sections represents the current trend of research in basic and applied malacology. In the section "Organismal Malacology", high-impact articles were contributed in the frontier areas of taxonomy, ecology and aquaculture of molluscs. Importance of mussel in water quality monitoring was highlighted. Biology and conservation of keystone molluscs were discussed from organismal point of view. "Cellular and Molecular Biology" section contains informative chapters on toxin-induced differential gene expression, spatiotemporal neural activity in olfactory processing in slug and immunity of hydrothermal vent molluscs. Biochemistry of cellulose degradation, lipid profile and C-reactive protein were elucidated in detail in separate chapters. This book represents a rich source of malacological information for the scientists, teachers and students.

This book, Natural Products and Cancer Drug Discovery, is written by leading experts in natural products in cancer therapy. The first two sections describe new applications of common herbs and foods for treatment of cancer. Section 3 deals with the development of new chemotherapeutics from Cannabis and endophytic fungi. Section 4 presented formulations of natural products for treatment of malignant melanoma. Made-to-order anticancer therapy from natural products using computational and tissue engineering approaches is addressed in the fifth section. It is our hope that this book may motivate readers to approach the evidence of anticancer natural products with an open mind and thereby spark an interest in making further contributions to the cancer treatment efforts.

Every day, civilians in dozens of countries around the world are injured and killed by landmines and other lethal leftovers of conflict, years after hostilities of war have ended. Once planted, a mine will never be able to tell the difference between a military and civilian footstep, and a bomblet will continue to attract children and metal dealers. In order to put an end to the suffering and casualties caused by antipersonnel mines, the Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines and on their Destruction (the Ottawa Convention or Mine Ban Treaty), was adopted in 1997. Further, in order to prevent suffering and casualties caused by cluster munitions at the time of their use, the Convention on the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Cluster Munitions (the Oslo Convention), was adopted in 2008. In 1996, the Royal Military Academy (RMA) opted for the implementation of mine action technological projects funded by the Belgian Ministry of Defense and the Belgian State Secretariat for Development Cooperation. It further decided to set up a close collaboration with other Belgian universities, which started organizing their own research activities on mine action. Later, other funding sources were granted to RMA by the Belgian Science Policy, the European Commission, and the European Committee for Standardization. At a more politico-administrative level, RMA participates in the States Parties Meetings of the Mine Ban Treaty, and in this context, Prof. Acheroy created an expert group on mine action technologies with representatives of different organizations and countries, aiming at informing the States Parties of the Mine Ban Treaty about the evolution of the mine action technologies. Further, Prof. Y. Baudoin created working groups dedicated to robotics in mine action within international organization. This book reports research activities achieved by the RMA.s

This book on hybrid electric vehicles brings out six chapters on some of the research activities through the wide range of current issues on hybrid electric vehicles. The first section deals with two interesting applications of HEVs, namely, urban buses and heavy duty working machines. The second one groups papers related to the optimization of the electricity flows in a hybrid electric vehicle, starting from the optimization of recharge in PHEVs through advance storage systems, new motor technologies, and integrated starter-alternator technologies. A comprehensive analysis of the technologies used in HEVs is beyond the aim of the book. However, the content of this volume can be useful to scientists and students to broaden their knowledge of technologies and application of hybrid electric vehicles.

The purpose of this book is to concentrate on recent developments on fatty acids. The articles collected in this book are contributions by invited researchers with a long-standing experience in different research areas. We hope that the material presented here is understandable to a broad audience, not only scientists but also people with general background in many different biological sciences. This volume offers you up-to-date, expert reviews of the fast-moving field of fatty acids. The book is divided into four major sections: (1) Fatty Acids in Physiopathology, (2) Fatty Acids and Cancer, (3) Fatty Acids in Aquatic Organisms, and (4) Fatty Acids in Veterinary and Dairy Products.

Congenital defects in humans are of greater concern, and in that line, cystic fibrosis (CF) has been one of the most complex diseases posing treatment challenge till date. Though it is a chronic condition, CF is closely associated with dysfunction of various organ systems of the human body, which in turn results in secondary infections by microbes. Decades of research by scientists worldwide has narrowed down the cause of CF to a single target gene. But the complexity of the disease is the prime impediment to finding a single-shot cure. Fortunately, the multidisciplinary approach toward understanding and management of the CF condition has certainly increased the level of life expectancy among CF patients. In particular, the "omics" and the "systems biology" approach have greatly widened the focal area for better understanding of the disease. This book includes a collection of interesting chapters contributed by eminent scientists around the world who have been striving to improve the life of those affected by CF.

The development of innovative interventional strategies and materials, primarily attributed to rapid strides in healthcare technology and education, has helped position interventional cardiology as one of the foremost disciplines in cardiovascular medicine. Patients diagnosed with inoperable conditions, including complex structural heart disease, have found renewed hope with the practice of these path-breaking therapeutic techniques. Nevertheless, the growing complexity of these procedures has also necessitated a close cooperation with different specialists, such as cardiothoracic surgeons, vascular surgeons, anesthesiologists, and interventional radiologists. There is an urgent need to further explore the use of such alternative strategies of clinical management of cardiac disease, while limiting or potentially eliminating any procedural risks for the patient. This book is oriented to readers interested in learning the basic principles of interventional cardiology and offers a brief insight into the potential use of such treatments in routine clinical practice.