DIAL 2004 explores new technologies that promise to assist the integration of imaged documents within digital libraries. This workshop describes the state of the art and identifies urgent open problems. Its papers cover general DIA challenges arising within DLs, DL systems architectures, document-image retrieval, content extraction from document images for DLs, and specialized challenges to DIA methods posed by handwritten and/or historical documents.

Vols. for 1963- include as pt. 2 of the Jan. issue: Medical subject headings.

This book is an evidence-based review of the practical challenges of dealing with patients receiving dialysis. The first section covers technical and procedural considerations such as choosing the hemodialysis membrane and choosing the best dialysis option. The second section covers clinical considerations such as infection and the treatment of specific renal disease complications. The book includes numerous illustrations and tables and drug charts for dialysis patients. This edition's current outcomes chapter has been expanded to include patient depression and improving quality of care. New chapters cover dialysis in the ICU, valvular heart disease, and pre-emptive renal transplantation.

This book contains notable contributions from the well-known Vicenza course on hemodialysis and miniaturized wearable devices for renal replacement therapy.The main themes covered in this publication include cardio-renal syndromes as well as new technologies in hemodialysis, new dialysis membranes and techniques, the importance of vitamin D receptors in renal and extra-renal physiology, and the control of risk factors such as blood pressure and lipid disorders. Special interest is placed on new models of organization including large dialysis networks and health care economics. Moreover, acute kidney injury and its impact on the subsequent development of chronic kidney disease are discussed together with the use of modern biomarkers. Microfluidics, nanotechnology and miniaturized dialysis devices suitable for wearable ambulatory treatments are also covered in depth.The publication at hand is a useful tool for consultation by the clinician as well as for those involved in the care of patients with end-stage kidney disease.

Thisvolumecontainspapersselectedforpresentationatthe6thIAPRWorkshop on Document Analysis Systems (DAS 2004) held during September 8–10, 2004 at the University of Florence, Italy. Several papers represent the state of the art in a broad range of “traditional” topics such as layout analysis, applications to graphics recognition, and handwritten documents. Other contributions address the description of complete working systems, which is one of the strengths of this workshop. Some papers extend the application domains to other media, like the processing of Internet documents. The peculiarity of this 6th workshop was the large number of papers related to digital libraries and to the processing of historical documents, a taste which frequently requires the analysis of color documents. A total of 17 papers are associated with these topics, whereas two yearsago (in DAS 2002) only a couple of papers dealt with these problems. In our view there are three main reasons for this new wave in the DAS community. From the scienti?c point of view, several research ?elds reached a thorough knowledge of techniques and problems that can be e?ectively solved, and this expertise can now be applied to new domains. Another incentive has been provided by several research projects funded by the EC and the NSF on topics related to digital libraries.

Even though peritoneal dialysis (PD) is by now well established and its advantages in terms of clinical efficacy, social impact and individual tolerance are acknowledged, it is still underutilized on a global scale. In view of this fact, the publication at hand has two objectives, namely to provide help to identify possible obstacles to a wider application of PD and to advance a project called USS PD: Understanding, Starting and Sustaining Peritoneal Dialysis (initiated by the Department of Nephrology, Dialysis and Transplantation of the St. Bortolo Hospital in Vicenza, Italy).The initial part of this book is thus dedicated to basic principles of PD, as understanding how this technique works is one of the prerequisites to improve the quality of its application and, ultimately, its outcomes. In the second part, in-depth reviews help the physician to identify the benefits and problems involved in a PD program, facilitating the initiation of a new program or the start of new patients on PD. The third part, finally, is dedicated to potential complications and technical solutions designed to solve the problems of the different techniques. This helps physicians to sustain the use of PD after having acquired the know how and the capacity of starting the program. Everyone interested in understanding and implementing PD will highly profit from the papers presented in this publication.

The rapidly growing volume of available digital documents of various formats and the possibility to access these through Internet-based technologies, have led to the necessity to develop solid methods to properly organize and structure documents in large digital libraries and repositories. Due to the extremely large volumes of documents and to their unstructured form, most of the research efforts in this direction are dedicated to automatically infer structure and schemas that can help to better organize huge collections of documents and data. This book covers the latest advances in structure inference in heterogeneous collections of documents and data. The book brings a comprehensive view of the state-of-the-art in the area, presents some lessons learned and identifies new research issues, challenges and opportunities for further research agenda and developments. The selected chapters cover a broad range of research issues, from theoretical approaches to case studies and best practices in the field. Researcher, software developers, practitioners and students interested in the field of learning structure and schemas from documents will find the comprehensive coverage of this book useful for their research, academic, development and practice activity.