Agent Routing Research Articles

Procedural sedation and analgesia for paediatric patients in the emergency department

Children presenting to the emergency department (ED) often require sedation for brief procedures such as fracture and dislocation reductions, laceration repairs, and imaging procedures that are painful, anxiety provoking or both. This article presents three cases of paediatric patients who require sedation and/or analgesia, and summarizes important aspects of procedural sedation for the primary care practitioner in the emergency setting. Presedation assessment and monitoring equipment are detailed. Discussion of routes of administration and different agents including barbiturates, opiates, benzodiaxepines, the 'cardiac coctail', ketamine, propofol, nitrous oxide, and etomidate follow. Emphasis is placed on indications, contraindications, dosing, timing and advantages and disadvantages of each. Reversal agents are mentioned, and discharge criteria are outlined.

An ACL for a Dynamic System of Agents

In this article we present the design of an ACL for a dynamic system of agents. The ACL includes a set of conversation performatives extended with operations to register, create, and terminate agents. The main design goal at the agent–level is to provide only knowledge–level primitives that are well integrated with the dynamic nature of the system. This goal has been achieved by defining an anonymous interaction protocol which enables agents to request and supply knowledge without considering symbol–level issues concerning management of agent names, routing, and agent reachability. This anonymous interaction protocol exploits a distributed facilitator schema which is hidden at the agent–level and provides mechanisms for registering capabilities of agents and delivering requests according to the competence of agents. We present a formal specification of the ACL and of the underlying architecture, exploiting an algebra of actors, and illustrate it with the help of a graphical notation. This approach provides the basis for discussing dynamic primitives in ACL and for studying properties of dynamic multi agent systems, for example concerning the behavior of agents and the correctness of their conversation policies.

Review: Data are insufficient to evaluate the effectiveness of doses and administration routes of thrombolytic agents for acute ischemic stroke

Source Citation Liu M, Wardlaw J. Thrombolysis in acute ischaemic stroke: direct randomised comparisons of different doses, routes of administration and agents. Cochrane Review, latest version 13 A...

Thrombolysis (different doses, routes of administration and agents) for acute ischaemic stroke.

Thrombolytic therapy is effective for acute myocardial infarction, a vascular disease with some similarities to acute ischaemic stroke. The objective of this review was to assess the effect of different thrombolytic agents, and different regimens in acute ischaemic stroke. We searched the Cochrane Stroke Group trials register and Embase (1980 to 1997). We handsearched Japanese and Chinese journals. We contacted researchers in the field and pharmaceutical companies. Randomised and quasi-randomised trials of different doses of a thrombolytic agent, or one thrombolytic agent compared with another, or the same agent given by different routes, in people with confirmed acute ischaemic stroke. Trials were included if treatment was started within 14 days of stroke onset. Two reviewers independently assessed eligibility, trial quality and extracted the data. Eight trials involving 1334 people were included. Concealment of allocation was generally adequate. All the trials were conducted in Japan. Different doses (of tissue plasminogen activator or urokinase) were compared in seven trials. Different agents (tissue plasminogen activator versus urokinase, or tissue-cultured urokinase versus conventional urokinase) were compared in three trials. Few data were available for functional outcomes. A higher dose of thrombolytic therapy was associated with a five-fold increase in fatal intracranial haemorrhages (odds ratio 5.02, 95% confidence interval 1.56 to 16. 18). This was based on 11 events among 369 higher-dose patients and one event among 356 lower-dose patients in six trials. There was a non-significant trend towards more early deaths or clinically significant intracranial haemorrhages. No difference in late deaths or extra-cranial haemorrhages was shown between low and higher doses. However, very few of these events occurred. No difference was shown between the different thrombolytic agents tested. There is not enough evidence to conclude whether lower doses of thrombolytic agents might be safer or more effective than higher doses in acute ischaemic stroke. It is not possible to conclude whether one agent might be better than another, or which route of administration might be best. No comparative data for streptokinase have been found.

A common multi-agent testbed for diverse seamless personal information networking applications

This article describes the design and implementation of a unique cooperative agents testbed aimed at addressing diverse applications for the difficult problem of seamless personal information networking (SPIN). The real-world SPIN testbed is aimed at two difficult applications. Namely seamless messaging and intelligent network management. Both applications are agent-driven and share agent behavior, and the messaging agents rely on the network management device diagnostic agents for input. The article introduces both problem areas in a common testbed. The first-generation seamless messaging application is described in detail. User-centric seamless messaging assumes heterogeneous communication environments intended to support today's nomadic users. The prototype is introduced for the management of messages across distributed information networks. Its aim is to intercept, filter, interpret, and deliver multimodal messages, be they voice, fax, video, and/or e-mail messages. A user's personal communication agent is charged with delivering messages to the recipient regardless of their target messaging device-a telephone, pager, desktop, wireless laptop, or wireless phone. Personal communication agents classify and act on incoming messages based on their content. A secretary agent routes and tailors urgent messages appropriately to the device manager agent, which delivers the message to a device on which the user may be roaming or active. What makes the seamless messaging application unique is its approach to treating a message in a universal manner, and its ability to mediate between different messaging environments and devices, and to try to track and find the user.

Back to the future in film: Combining industry and self-knowledge to meet the career challenges of the 21st century

Career patterns are changing. As fewer people attach their long-term fortunes to the fates of a single organization, more and more people follow a free agent route. The free agent scrambles, bee-like, from opportunity to opportunity without regard to boundaries. While this career scramble is new to most industries, it has been common to the American film industry for a quarter century. In this article, we look back at successful careers in the film industry to gain insight into the challenges facing free agents in the 21st century.

The colonization of the Bahama archipelago: A reappraisal

Abstract A number of colonization models have been proposed to explain the prehistoric peopling of the Bahamas archipelago from the Greater Antilles. Each varies in respect to place of origin, timing of migration and settlement, routes of movement, intentionality, settlement permanency and causal agents. The paper summarizes the evidence for each of the models. A new model which suggests that late Ostionan Ostionoid people from northern Cuba colonized the central Bahama archipelago circa ad 600–900 is presented. This model incorporates the articulation of palaeoclimatic push factors, economic pull factors, ease of transport factors and shallow bank navigation.

Evaluation of the dipeptide and oligopeptide permeases of Candida albicans as uptake routes for synthetic anticandidal agents

In order to obtain information essential for the design of synthetic anticandidal drugs that can exploit peptide permeases to gain access to intracellular targets, the substrate specificities of the dipeptide permease (Dpp) and oligopeptide permease (Opp) of Candida albicans have been studied. The permeases show strict stereospecificity, a preference for large, hydrophobic and N-terminal Ala residues, and marked discrimination against basic and acidic side chain residues. Comparison of results from several transport assays indicated that measuring loss of peptide substrate from the medium using fluorescence labelling procedures gave reliable transport rates and kinetic parameters, whereas in contrast, measuring accumulation of radioactivity from labelled substrates gave erroneous results arising from substrate metabolism and exodus. Intact accumulation of peptidase-resistant substrate against a concentration gradient was demonstrated. From amongst a variety of protein reagents tested, selective inhibition of dipeptide transport and presumed labelling of essential carboxyl group(s) in Dpp proteins was demonstrated using Woodward's reagent K.

Evaluation of the dipeptide and oligopeptide permeases ofCandida albicansas uptake routes for synthetic anticandidal agents

In order to obtain information essential for the design of synthetic anticandidal drugs that can exploit peptide permeases to gain access to intracellular targets, the substrate specificities of the dipeptide permease (Dpp) and oligopeptide permease (Opp) of Candida albicans have been studied. The permeases show strict stereospecificity, a preference for large, hydrophobic and N-terminal Ala residues, and marked discrimination against basic and acidic side chain residues. Comparison of results from several transport assays indicated that measuring loss of peptide substrate from the medium using fluorescence labelling procedures gave reliable transport rates and kinetic parameters, whereas in contrast, measuring accumulation of radioactivity from labelled substrates gave erroneous results arising from substrate metabolism and exodus. Intact accumulation of peptidase-resistant substrate against a concentration gradient was demonstrated. From amongst a variety of protein reagents tested, selective inhibition of dipeptide transport and presumed labelling of essential carboxyl group(s) in Dpp proteins was demonstrated using Woodward's reagent K.