Background: The safety and efficacy of cefpirome (CPM), a fourth-generation cephalosporin, has not yet been studied in an Asian population. Methods: Sixty-nine adult Chinese patients with sepsis due to bacterial infections were enrolled in the study and randomly assigned to receive CPM (2 g i.v. every 12 h) or ceftazidime (2 g i.v. every 8 h). Results: Both groups were comparable in terms of demographic, clinical and microbiological features. The causative pathogen was Escherichia coli or Klebsiella pneumoniae in the majority of microbiologically documented cases. The rates of clinical response (94 vs. 94%) and bacteriological response (65 vs. 68%) were similar in both groups. Similar adverse events, including rashes, gastrointestinal upset and asymptomatic elevation of hepatic enzymes, occurred in a minority of patients in both groups. All events were self-limited after discontinuation of the drugs. Conclusion: CPM is as safe and effective as ceftazidime in the treatment of sepsis due to bacterial infections in Chinese patients.
An improved complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) voltage-tocurrent converter is presented. PMOS transistors are employed in the resistor-replacement and voltage-level shifting of the proposed converter to avoid the body effect. To accurately annihilate the nonlinear voltage terms, a better modeling of the drain-to-source current of the MOS transistor operating in the linear region is essential and is adopted. Specifically, the substrate-bias effect of the MOS transistor is treated more accurately in our design. Consequently, the nonlinearity of the large-signal transconductance of the converter is reduced. The voltage-to-current converter is designed and fabricated in a 0.35 µm CMOS technology. The fabricated circuit occupies an area of 267 µm×197 µm (≈0.053 mm 2 ) and dissipates 3.92 mW from a 3.3 V supply. The measured and simulated data are in good agreement. For a 1 V P−P input voltage, the measured total harmonic distortion (THD) of the output current is less than 1.2%.
Face recognition, one of the biometric methods identifying individuals by the features of face, has attracted increasing interest and research activities over the last decade. In this paper, we proposed a twostage face recognition scheme inspired from multiresolution perspective. The lower resolution information is derived from the chin shape, whereas the higher resolution characteristics are extracted from the facial features. The chin shape information is characterized by the product of curvature and face length and the ratio of face width to face length, which are scale-independent. The facial features are extracted from Gabor faces followed by 2D-PCA for condensing features. A serial experiments were conducted to assess the system performance. The experimental results reveal that our system can effectively recognize faces and the chin shape information indeed can enhance the face recognition performance.
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