Block Latency Research Articles

A Blockchain-Based Framework to Make the Rice Crop Supply Chain Transparent and Reliable in Agriculture

Rice is one of the major food crops across the globe, and its quality and safety highly influence human health. It is the basis of many different products, including rice flour, rice bread, noodles, rice vinegar, and others. Therefore, the rice supply chain has garnered increasing attention due to the high demand for food safety. Furthermore, malpractices in the rice supply chain can impact farmers by generating low revenues despite their great efforts in rice cultivation. In addition, they would cause governments to suffer significant economic losses due to the high cost of importing rice crops from other countries during the off-season. These issues derive from the lack of reliability, trust, transparency, traceability, and security in the rice supply chain. In this research, we propose a secure, trusted, reliable, and transparent framework based on a Blockchain for rice crop supply chain’s traceability from farm to fork. A new crypto token, the Rice Coin (RC), is introduced to keep a record of all transactions between the stakeholders of the rice supply chain. Moreover, the proposed framework includes an economic model and a crypto wallet and introduces an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) for the RC. Based on smart contracts, a transaction processing system was developed for the transparency and traceability of rice crops, including the conversion of the RC to fiat currency. Furthermore, the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) is proposed in this research to store encrypted data of companies, retailers, and farmers, so to increase data security, transparency, and availability. In the end, the experimental results showed a better performance of the proposed framework compared to already available supply chain solutions in terms of transaction verification time, transaction average gas cost, and new block latency.

Descriptive Study: Characterization of subarachnoid anesthesia with levobupivacaine in patients undergoing lower abdominal and lower limb surgery. Hospital José Carrasco Arteaga and Hospital Vicente Corral Moscoso. Cuenca-Ecuador, 2020- 2021.

BACKGROUND: Levobupivacaine is currently the anesthetic of choice in subarachnoid anesthesia; reducing the risk of cardiotoxicity, it provides a shorter time of motor and sensory block compared to bupivacaine, allowing faster recovery of motility. The aim of this study was to characterize subarachnoid anesthesia with levobupivacaine, in a study of patients aged 18 to 65 years, undergoing lower abdominal and lower limb surgery, at the Hospital Vicente Corral Moscoso and Hospital de Especialidades José Carrasco Arteaga in Cuenca, Ecuador. METHODS: Observational, descriptive study. 276 patients who met the inclusion criteria were included. The anesthesiologist monitored the latency time, duration, level of block, and side effects of levobupivacaine. For qualitative variables, we presented frequencies and percentages, for quantitative variables we applied mean and standard deviation. Statistical associations between the variables were sought with Chi-square test, accepting statistical significance with a p value < 0.05. RESULTS: Most of patients were male, between 30 and 39 years old. The majority of patients were overweight, most classified as ASA II, and underwent emergency surgery. Sensory block latency time was 1 to 5 minutes in 57.2% of the sample. Regarding motor block, 8 out of 10 patients had the anesthetic effect in the range of 11 to 15 minutes. In more than half of the patients the duration of the sensitive block was > 200 minutes; most of participants reached a sensory block at T6. The duration of motor block varied between 81 and 160 minutes for 80.4% of the sample. One out of 10 patients had side effects. CONCLUSION: The average sensory latency time is 5.89 minutes and the average motor latency time is 12.69 minutes. The duration of sensory block is greater than 200 minutes in most patients. The higher the dose of levobupivacaine, the longer the sensory block lasted. Motor block duration was 131 ± 31.31 minutes on average. The differences in the sensitive latency time in relation to the use of fentanyl are not significant; on the contrary, there is a significant association between the duration of sensory block and fentanyl administration.

Fast Transient Analysis of Nonuniform Multiconductor Transmission Lines Using HIE-Block-LIM

This letter describes a hybrid implicit-explicit block latency insertion method (HIE-block-LIM) for the fast simulation of nonuniform multiconductor transmission lines (MTLs). In the HIE-block-LIM, an implicit difference method is used with respect to the current variables in the y-direction, and an explicit method is adopted to update the other variables. The HIE-block-LIM can alleviate a time step size limitation of the existing block-LIM by taking both advantages of the explicit and implicit difference methods. Numerical results show that the HIE-block-LIM is suitable for the fast simulation of the nonuniform MTLs.

Transarterial Brachial Plexus Anaesthesia for Upper Limb Surgery: Safety and Efficacy Without Nerve Stimulator

Objective: We present our experience with the transarterial brachial plexus anaesthesia as a technique of choice for upper limb procedure in developing countries where nerve stimulator may not be readily available. Methods: For all consenting patients, the axillary block was instituted using a 23G hypodermic needle and injection of 1.5% lidocaine with adrenaline (40 – 50mL). Sociodemographic data, the quality of anaesthesia at commencement of surgery, time to request for first postoperative analgesia, surgeons and patients satisfaction with quality of anaesthesia were obtained. Results: 43 patients with a mean age of 33.4 ± 15.8yr were studied. The site of surgical procedures included forearm (48.8%), hand (20.9%), wrist (16.3%) and distal humerus/elbow (14.0%). The block performance time was 6.7 ± 2.5min, block latency (20.8 ± 7.9min), primary block effectiveness (81.4%) and with supplementation 90.7%. Conclusion: The transarterial approach without neurostimualtion is simple and safe. It appears as a good alternative to general anaesthesia for upper limb surgery in resource-poor setting. Key words: axillary block, transarterial approach, brachial plexus anaesthesia, outcome

High-Speed CORDIC Based on an Overlapped Architecture and a Novel σ-Prediction Method

This paper presents architectural and algorithmic approaches for achieving high-speed CORDIC processing in both of the two operating modes: vectoring and rotation. For vectoring mode CORDIC processing, a modified architecture is proposed, which aims at reduction of computation time by overlapping the stages for redundant addition and selection of rotation direction. In addition, a novel rotation direction prediction scheme for rotation mode CORDIC is presented. The method is based on approximation of the binary angle input to a number with the arctangent weights (tan^−1 2^−i). The implementation is designed to keep the fast timing characteristics of redundant arithmetic in the x/y path of the CORDIC processing. The characteristics are analyzed with respect to latency time and area, and compared with those obtained by conventional CORDIC implementations. The results show that the proposed techniques reduce not only the block latency but also the overall computation time. Thus, they achieve higher throughput in pipelining.

Readiness for surgery after axillary block: Single or multiple injection techniques

We have assessed prospectively the time to readiness for surgery following axillary block (sum of block performance and latency times) in 80 patients. The brachial plexus was identified using a nerve stimulator, and anaesthetized with 45 mL of mepivacaine 1% with adrenaline 5 micrograms mL-1. In group 1 (single injection) the whole volume of mepivacaine was injected after locating only one of the plexus nerves. In group 2 (multiple injections) at least three plexus nerves were located, and the volume of mepivacaine was divided between them. Sensory block was assessed by a blinded observer every 10 min. Patchy analgesia was supplemented after electrolocating the unblocked nerves after 20, 30 or 40 min. The patient was pronounced ready for surgery when analgesia was present in all areas to be operated upon, which always included the three nerves to the hand. The single injection technique required less time for block performance (mean 5.5 min) than multiple injections (mean 9.5 min), P < 0.0001. However, latency of the block was longer and the requirement for supplemental nerve blocks was greater, after single injections (33 min and 57%) than after multiple injections (15.5 min and 7%, respectively), P < 0.0001. As a result, readiness for surgery was achieved faster in group 2 (25 min), than in group 1 (38.5 min), P < 0.0001. After supplementation, block effectiveness was 100% in group 1 and 98% in group 2 (NS). The frequency of adverse effects (vessel puncture or paraesthesia) was similar in both groups. No neurological sequelae were observed. We conclude that the multiple injection technique takes longer to perform than single injection, but that readiness for surgery is faster because of shorter block latency and better spread of analgesia.

Plasma concentrations of bupivacaine after supraclavicular brachial plexus blockade in patients with chronic renal failure

The plasma concentrations of bupivacaine and the latency and duration of anaesthesia after supraclavicular block with 30 ml of 0.5% bupivacaine were measured in 10 patients with chronic renal failure and in 10 patients with normal renal function. No significant difference was found between the two groups in respect of pharmacokinetic parameters, or in block latency or duration.