Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

Mycobacterium tuberculosis (M. tuberculosis) is a microorganism whose importance as an infectious agent has remained over the years but which has become a recent emergency and a serious public health problem in response to the evolution in its behavior against first-line antimicrobials, for its treatment and the emergence of multi-resistant strains, which require the use of therapeutic alternatives that allow its control. The objective of the work was to evaluate the in vitro behavior of M. tuberculosis before the antifungal agent fluconazole, for its possible use as a therapeutic alternative. To this, six strains were evaluated M. tuberculosis: 2 resistants to rifampicin, 2 resistants to isoniazid and 2 sensitive to both antimicrobials. We used the method of Minimum Inhibitory Concentration, using the microplate technique with Alamar Blue and the tube technique. Both methodologies showed sensitivity to low concentrations of fluconazole (0.0625 μg/ml). All strains were sensitive to the fluconazole / isoniazid combination; whereas, when exposed to the fluconazole / rifampicin combination, the strains showed resistance, indicating the antagonistic effect of rifampicin on fluconazole. The results allow us to conclude and suggest the possible therapeutic use of fluconazole against infections associated with M. tuberculosis.

A study of enteroparasites in an indigenous population was carried out, through which a new diagnostic procedure for strongyloidiasis, diphasic technique in tube (DTT), was proposed, in order to compare it with plaque agar (Arakaki). The methodology consisted in the analysis of fecal samples of 50 individuals by means of a fresh test, Ritchie concentration technique, plate agar technique and the DTT proposed here. A high parasitic prevalence and poliparasitism was obtained, with 94% and 70% respectively. Blastocystis spp. (chromist) prevailed, followed by Giardia intestinalis, among the protozoa, while among the helminths the geohelmities predominated, headed by Trichuris trichiura and Strongyloides stercoralis. The sensitivity and specificity of DTT was 75% and 66.7%, respectively, at 24 hours of reading, the species being isolated 1.5 times more on the traditional technique, and 85.71% and 16.67% at 48 hours, recovering the nematode 1.6 times more, showing greater sensitivity. No cases of strongyloidiasis were reported through the fresh examination, nor by the Ritchie technique. It is concluded that DTT, is more effective for diagnosis of the species S. stercoralis, both at 24 and at 48 hours of reading.

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En el presente artículo se diagnostica la situación que presentan los sistemas de gestión documental para desarrollar la gestión del conocimiento en las Entidades de Sistema CITMA en la Provincia de Pinar del Río, partiendo de los principales supuestos teóricos que se manejan actualmente entorno a la gestión documental y la gestión del conocimiento, así como la identificación de los modelos internacionales más trabajados, se precisa que existe una interrelación directa, considerando la gestión del conocimiento como el proceso sistemático e integrador de creación, captura, organización, acceso y socialización de la información, incluyendo los procesos para incorporar y mantener en forma de documentos la información y prueba de las actividades y actuaciones de la organización. Se determinan las limitaciones y potencialidades mediante la combinación del análisis del campo de fuerzas y la técnica del grupo focal.

A specific class of permutations – permutations with partially fixed order of elements – has been described. A procedure of enumeration and generation of this class has been developed. Steps of the algorithm have been established to be well-defined, and its complexity has been evaluated. Some important particular classes of permutations, such as alternating and unimodal ones are special cases of the permutations described. This algorithm can be used for generating other combinatorial sets, e.g. arrangements and combinations.

This paper proposes an algorithm for designing a cryptosystem, in which the derivative disproportion functions are used. The symbols to be transmitted are encoded with the sum of at least two of these functions combined with random coefficients. A new algorithm is proposed for decoding the received messages by making use of important properties of the derivative disproportion functions. Numerical experiments are reported as demonstrating the algorithm’s reliability and robustness.

In this paper, we present a hybrid method between the Ant System (AS) and the Harmonic Search (HS), which was used to solve vehicle routing problem with time-windows (VRP-TW). This method has been called AS-HS. In this sense, both metaheuristics are intertwined. The AS technique guides the behavior through changes in the pheromone matrix, and takes advantage of information from a number of HS executions stored in the harmonic memory (HM). In the proposed procedure, the best solutions are taken to update the pheromone level. This allows the ants to intensify in a promising region and the elements of diversity in the techniques avoid the premature convergence of the algorithm.   On the other hand, for a more efficient construction of the solutions, we took advantage of the structure of the problem that used the time window, the distance between the customers to visit and the load assigned to each vehicle as factors within the update of the pheromone level.

Nowadays, clusters containing multiple GPU nodes are widely used to execute high-performance computing applications. Diverse disciplines use these clusters to improve the performance of several services that consume high computational resources. The challenge of executing high-performance computing applications becomes harder when the applications are executed concurrently and each one of them may demand multiple GPU nodes for different periods of time. To tackle this challenge, we propose a multi-agent architecture for scheduling multiple services   in a heterogeneous GPU cluster. We provide simulation results of our agent-based system utilizing three commonly used scheduling heuristics for several configuration settings.

In this work a parallel scheme to solve the dynamic Maxwell’s equations is presented, in order to simulate an electromagnetic wave in a two-dimensional domain composed of distinct dielectric materials and subject to boundary conditions. In this approach a Discontinuous Galerkin Finite Element Method (DG-FEM) is used to compute the solution over a discretized domain of non-overlapping straight-sided elements. In contrast to continuous Galerkin methods, the core of the simulation relies on a set of elementwise calculations instead of a global processing. These local calculations are computed simultaneously in a shared memory environment with the parallel framework proposed, taking advantage of the discontinuous nature of the solver implemented.

In this paper, we present a parallelization technique developed to solve an unstructured-grid based Poisson equation on arbitrary three-dimensional geometries using CUDA over a GPU. The Poisson problem discretization is based on a second-order finite-volume technique on prisms elements, consisting of triangular grids in the horizontal direction and bounded by an irregular free surface and bottom in the vertical direction. The resulting linear system is solved using the Jacobi method, and the parallelization is designed by using different GPU memory management as shared, texture and managed memory. Numerical experiments are conducted to test and compare the performance of the proposed parallel technique.