M. Van Dyck

Childhood haemolytic uraemic syndrome : long-term outcome and prognostic features

From January 1970 to December 1982, 95 infants and children with the haemolytic uraemic syndrome were admitted to our unit. Six patients died (6.3%) in the acute phase, 4 went into end-stage renal failure (4.2%) within months after the acute episode. The remaining 85 patients (89.5%) survived and recovered. They were followed as outpatients at yearly intervals for 5 years. Arterial hypertension was a major problem in 7. Eighty patients were studied 10 years later: 52 of them (65%) had no sequelae, 21 (26%) had mild defects and 7 (9%) severe sequelae. Clinical and laboratory data at the onset were analysed for prognostic significance. The immediate outcome was significantly worse in patients with either arterial hypertension or central nervous system manifestations on admission. Yet, no single variable studied during the acute phase was predictive of the presence of sequelae after 10 years. Even when all complications i.e. anuria, hypertension and central nervous system involvement, were taken together, there was no difference between patients with and patients without sequelae.

Idiopathic infantile arterial calcification with cardiac, renal and central nervous system involvement.

Idiopathic infantile arterial calcification was diagnosed in a 2 week old infant with failure to thrive associated with neurological, renal and cardiac signs. Therapy with diphosphonate resulted in a complete resolution of vascular calcifications. At the age of 2 years the child is doing well but requires medical treatment for arterial hypertension.

Fast an Robust Face Tracking for CNN chips: application to wheelchair driving

An algorithm for fast and robust face tracking with the CNN universal machine is proposed in this paper. It is applied to a driving mechanism for a wheelchair with an on-chip implementation. A novel object tracking CNN visual algorithm is introduced and employed in the tracking of multiple face features. The speed and robustness of this method are achieved due to the parallelism in the visual algorithm, and the tracking of multiple face features. The tracking algorithm is designed to achieve a high frame rate and exploit the specific properties of face features. The face tracking method proposed here was implemented on a Bi-I stand-alone cellular vision system and applied to a wheelchair driving mechanism. The template operations were trained and/or fine-tuned in order to generate chip-specific robust templates. In order to improve performance in environments with varying illumination, an adaptive image capture procedure was also introduced. Our simulations with a 3D model wheelchair showed that the final algorithm is capable of performing tracking with a frame rate of 92 frames/sec, which is supposedly enough for real-time driving in most of the real life situations

Subcutaneous recombinant erythropoietin in preterminal renal insufficiency

Recombinant human erythropoietin was given to eight children and adolescents with stable chronic renal failure in the predialysis state. The hormone was administered subcutaneously, twice weekly for 12 weeks, at a starting dose of 50 U/kg per week. The dosage was adapted every 4th week. Target haemoglobin was 10.5-11.5 g/dl, and the target haematocrit 32%-35%. Baseline haemoglobin levels of 8.20 +/- 0.93 g/dl increased to 9.17 +/- 1.10, 10.38 +/- 1.18 and 11.19 +/- 0.84 g/dl (mean +/- SD) after 4, 8 and 12 weeks respectively. Serum ferritin levels decreased progressively despite iron supplementation. No side-effects were observed: creatinine clearances remained stable, blood pressure did not increase and none of the patients displayed either convulsions or thrombotic features. The study shows that subcutaneous recombinant human erythropoietin is both effective and safe in anaemic children and adolescents with chronic renal insufficiency.