CERVICAL CYTOLOGY TRENDS IN A SAMPLE OF INFLAMMATORY BOWEL DISEASE PATIENTS IN PUERTO RICO: A DESCRIPTIVE STUDY AND RESEARCH OF CURRENT LITERATURE.

OBJECTIVE OF THE STUDY: To describe cervical cytology trends in a sample of patients with Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) and to provide an overview of aspects such as contraception and menstrual patterns. STUDY DESIGN: We identified women with diagnosis of IBD of ages between 21-49 years followed at the IBD clinics of the Medical Sciences Campus from June 2012 to April 2014. A 15-minute questionnaire was administered. Data was entered and analyzed calculating frequencies and percentages. RESULTS: Sixty-three subjects were recruited. After reviewing the questionnaires, 52 subjects remained for analysis. All women were between 21 and 49 years of age. Thirty (58%) patients had a diagnosis of ulcerative colitis (UC), while 22 (42%) patients had Crohn's Disease (CD). Twenty-seven IBD patients (52%) were in remission. Use of immunomodulators was reported in ten (33%) and seventeen (61%) of patients for UC and CD respectively. Sixty six percent (67%) of participants specified having their cervical cytology for cervical cancer screening done a nually. Twenty patients (38%) reported abnormal cytology including 13 patients (43%) with UC and 7 patients (23%) with CD. No significant relation was found between the two conditions and the self-reported history of abnormal cervical cytology. Almost one-half of IBD patients reported a menstrual cycle of 25-30 days (45%). Duration of menses was described as normal (lasting between 4-6 days) in 45% of IBD patients (95% CI 31.13-59.66). Patients with UC were more likely to report regular menses than patients with CD. Eighty-six percent of participants reported no use of contraception. CONCLUSION: This is the first descriptive report of gynecologic conditions in which Puerto Rican patients with IBD have been studied. It is imperative to continue with similar larger studies to gain a broader idea of what are the gynecological needs of this population.

Implementation of a motion estimation algorithm for Intel FPGAs using OpenCL.

Motion Estimation is one of the main tasks behind any video encoder. It is a computationally costly task; therefore, it is usually delegated to specific or reconfigurable hardware, such as FPGAs. Over the years, multiple FPGA implementations have been developed, mainly using hardware description languages such as Verilog or VHDL. Since programming using hardware description languages is a complex task, it is desirable to use higher-level languages to develop FPGA applications.The aim of this work is to evaluate OpenCL, in terms of expressiveness, as a tool for developing this kind of FPGA applications. To do so, we present and evaluate a parallel implementation of the Block Matching Motion Estimation process using OpenCL for Intel FPGAs, usable and tested on an Intel Stratix 10 FPGA. The implementation efficiently processes Full HD frames completely inside the FPGA. In this work, we show the resource utilization when synthesizing the code on an Intel Stratix 10 FPGA, as well as a performance comparison with multiple CPU implementations with varying levels of optimization and vectorization capabilities. We also compare the proposed OpenCL implementation, in terms of resource utilization and performance, with estimations obtained from an equivalent VHDL implementation.