José María Gómez

Dye adsorption onto mesoporous materials: pH influence, kinetics and equilibrium in buffered and saline media

Mesoporous materials were used as adsorbents for dye removal in different media: non-ionic, buffered and saline. The mesoporous materials used were commercial (silica gel) as well as as-synthesised materials (SBA-15 and a novel mesoporous carbon). Dye adsorption onto all the materials was very fast and the equilibrium was reached before 1 h. The pH has a significant influence on the adsorption capacity for the siliceous materials since the electrostatic interactions are the driving forces. However, the influence of the pH on the adsorption capacity of the carbonaceous material was lower, since the van der Waals interactions are the driving forces. The ionic strength has a great impact on the siliceous materials adsorption capacity, being their adsorption capacity in a buffered medium six times higher than the corresponding to a non-ionic medium. Nevertheless, ionic strength does not influence on the dye adsorption on the mesoporous carbon. Overall, the as-synthesised carbon material presents a clear potential to treat dye effluents, showing high adsorption capacity (q(e) ≈ 200 mg/g) in all the pH range studied (from 3 to 11); even at low concentrations (C(e) ≈ 10 mg/L) and at short contact times (t(e) < 30 min).

Introduction to the Special Issue: Mining Social Media

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Testing concept indexing in crosslingual medical text classification

MetaMap is an online application that allows mapping text to UMLS Metathesaurus concepts, which is very useful for interoperability among different languages and systems within the biomedical domain. MetaMap Transfer (MMTx) is a Java program that makes MetaMap available to biomedical researchers in controlled, configurable environment. Currently there is no Spanish version of MetaMap, which difficult the use of UMLS Metathesaurus to extract concepts from Spanish biomedical texts. Developing a Spanish version of MetaMap would be a huge task, since there has been a lot of work supporting the English version for the last sixteen years. Our ongoing research is mainly focused on using biomedical concepts for crosslingual text classification. In this context the use of concepts instead of bag of words representation allows us to face text classification tasks abstracting from the language. In this paper we show our experiments on combining automatic translation techniques with the use of biomedical ontologies to produce an English text that can be processed by MMTx in order to extract concepts for text classification.

In the development of a spanish metamap

MetaMap is an online application that allows mapping text to UMLS Metathesaurus concepts, which is very useful interoperability among different languages and systems within the biomedical domain. MetaMap Transfer (MMTx) is a Java program that makes MetaMap available to biomedical researchers. Currently there is no Spanish version of MetaMap, which difficults the use of UMLS Metathesaurus to extract concepts from Spanish biomedical texts. Our ongoing research is mainly focused on using biomedical concepts for cross-lingual text classification and retrieval [3]. In this context the use of concepts instead of bag of words representation allows us to face text classification tasks abstracting from the language [4]. In this paper we evaluate the possibility of combining automatic translation techniques with the use of biomedical ontologies to produce an English text that can be processed by MMTx.

Removal of caffeine from pharmaceutical wastewater by adsorption: influence of NOM, textural and chemical properties of the adsorbent

ABSTRACT This work involves the study of the influence of textural and chemical adsorbent properties on natural organic matter (NOM) removal and the simultaneous adsorption of caffeine and NOM in pharmaceutical wastewater. The performance of a microporous activated carbon, Calgon F400, a synthesized mesoporous carbon from peach stones and a commercial sepiolite in the removal of NOM of a WWTP effluent, and the competitive adsorption of caffeine/NOM were evaluated. It was evidenced that the microporous structure of the adsorbents significantly conditioned the removal of NOM, finding that F400 activated carbon (microporous volume of 0.46 cm3 g−1) led to a NOM removal of 45%. The presence of NOM in the aqueous medium led to worse adsorption parameters, including adsorption capacity at breakthrough time, mass transfer zone length and fractional bed utilization. Additionally, an overshooting in the Total Organic Carbon concentration (TOC/TOC0 = 1.05) was observed in the sepiolite adsorption fixed-bed experiment, due to the displacement of the background NOM. The tested adsorbents were efficient in the removal of caffeine from a pharmaceutical wastewater, finding a competitive effect between the target compound and the background NOM for the active sites.

Building a Spanish MMTx by Using Automatic Translation and Biomedical Ontologies

The use of domain ontologies is becoming increasingly popular in Medical Natural Language Processing Systems. A wide variety of knowledge bases in multiple languages has been integrated into the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) to create a huge knowledge source that can be accessed with diverse lexical tools. MetaMap (and its java version MMTx) is a tool that allows extracting medical concepts from free text, but currently there not exists a Spanish version. Our ongoing research is centered on the application of biomedical concepts to cross-lingual text classification, what makes it necessary to have a Spanish MMTx available. We have combined automatic translation techniques with biomedical ontologies and the existing English MMTx to produce a Spanish version of MMTx. We have evaluated different approaches and applied several types of evaluation according to different concept representations for text classification. Our results prove that the use of existing translation tools such as Google Translate produce translations with a high similarity to original texts in terms of extracted concepts.