Background The data on infective endocarditis after transcatheter aortic valve implantation (TAVI) is scarce and limited to case reports and case series in the literature. It is the need of the hour to analyze the available data on post-TAVI infective endocarditis from the available literature. The objectives of this systematic review were to evaluate the incidence of infective endocarditis after transcatheter aortic valve implantation, its microbiological profile and clinical outcomes. It will help us to improve the antibiotic prophylaxis strategies and treatment options for infective endocarditis in the context of TAVI. Methods EMBASE, Medline and the CENTRAL trials registry of the Cochrane Collaboration were searched for articles on infective endocarditis in post-TAVI patients till October 2018. Eleven articles were included in the systematic review. The outcomes assessed werethe incidence of infective endocarditis, its microbiological profile andclinical outcomes including major adverse cardiac event (MACE), net adverse clinical event (NACE), surgical intervention and valve-in-valve procedure. Results The incidence of infective endocarditis varied from 0%-14.3% in the included studies, the mean was3.25%. The average duration of follow-up was 474 days (1.3 years). Enterococci were the most common causative organism isolated from 25.9% of cases followed by Staphylococcus aureus (16.1%) and coagulase-negative Staphylococcus species (14.7%). The mean in-hospital mortality and mortality at follow-up was 29.5% and 29.9%, respectively. The cumulative incidence of heart failure, stroke and major bleeding were 37.1%, 5.3% and 11.3%,respectively. Only a single study by Martinez-Selles et al. reported arrhythmias in 20% cases. The septic shock occurred in 10% and 27.7% post-TAVI infective

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Vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANET) enable vehicles to exchange information on traffic conditions, dynamic status and localization, to enhance road safety and transportation efficiency. A typical VANET application is platooning, which can take advantage of exchanging information on speed, heading and position to allow shorter inter-vehicle distances without compromising safety. However, the platooning performance depends drastically on the quality of the communication channel, which in turn is highly influenced by the medium access control protocol (MAC). Currently, VANETs use the IEEE 802.11p MAC, which follows a carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) policy that is prone to collisions and degrades significantly with network load. This has led to recent proposals for a time-division multiple access (TDMA)-based MAC that synchronize vehicles’ beacons to prevent or reduce collisions. In this paper, we take CSMA/CA and two TDMA-based overlay protocols, i.e., deployed over CSMA/CA, namely PLEXE-slotted and RA-TDMAp, and carry out extensive simulations with varying platoon sizes, number of occupied lanes and transmit power to deduce empirical models that provide estimates of average number of collisions per second and average busy time ratio. In particular, we show that these estimates can be obtained from observing the number of radio-frequency (RF) neighbours, i.e., number of distinct sources of the packets received by each vehicle per time unit. These estimates can enhance the online adaptation of distributed applications, particularly platooning control, to varying conditions of the communication channel.