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Background: The reason for the particularly increased cardiovascular morbidity and mortality in diabetic women remains unclear. The purpose of our study was to prospectively investigate sex difference in carotid stiffness in elder Chinese patients with type-2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM). Methods: 109 T2DM...

Tuberculosis (TB) remains a main hurdle for national programs due to increase in drug resistance to antitubercular drugs. World Health Organization (WHO)-endorsed Line Probe Assay, Genotype MTBDRsl Ver 2.0, gives opportunity for rapid diagnosis and molecular characterization of different mutations in...

Background: Steady state hemodynamics [Stroke Volume - SV, cardiac output, peripheral resistance (Rp)] have attracted researchers in hypertension for decades. However, due to technical difficulties, they never entered clinical medicine. Objective: To investigate the performance of a model-based algorithm,...

Background: China’s vigorous anti-COVID-19 campaign has been going on for three months since January 20, which has contained the spread of the virus across China. Objectives: Epidemiological investigations found that COVID-19 fatality rates in Wuhan, rest parts of Hubei province except Wuhan (Rest of...

Backward traveling waves, an important determinant of central haemodynamics, are usually regarded as being due to reflections from discontinuities in the arterial tree. However, consideration of a single tube model of the arterial with a single site of reflection shows that a backward pressure wave may...

Aim: Type 2 diabetes (DM2) causes microvascular dysfunction (MVD). In addition, MVD can contribute to insulin resistance, predisposing to DM2. This hypothesis predicts that MVD should be present in impaired glucose metabolism (IGM; prediabetes). However, population-based studies of MVD and glucose metabolism...

Background: Arterial stiffening is an age-related change and is a well-known cardiovascular risk factor but its association with physical decline is rarely evaluated. The aim of this analysis was to assess the association of arterial stiffness as carotid-femoral pulse wave velocity (PWV) with gait performance...

Decreases in the mean gestational age of babies born at term have been reported over the past decade in several developed countries, linked to increases in the rates of planned births by labour induction and/or pre-labour caesarean sections. In contrast to the effects of pre-term birth, the extent to...

Nowadays, the quality and diversification of the services in Iranian marketing and advertising industry are growing. But, providing the customers with marketing and advertising services is still conducted using out-dated, complicated and time-consuming processes. So it seems that revising these processes...

We propose a distributed storage system which relocates data blocks autonomously among the storage nodes. In order to optimize I/O performance with slight administrative workload, our system is aimed at the realization of the following two functions; (i) Run-time construction of the storage tiers from...

We prove a generalization of the fact that periodic functions converge weakly to the mean value as the oscillation increases. Some convergence questions connected to locally periodic nonlinear boandary value problems are also considered.

The gauge-field theoretical formulation of solitonic theories is quantized by using an extended version of the BRST Sp(2) symmetric formalism. The proposed method is based on a modified triplectic geometry which allows us to incorporate the linear and/or nonlinear global symmetries of the model and to...

This study was aimed at determining the levels of natural uranium (U) in air samples collected in the surroundings of various industrial facilities: three cement plants, two municipal solid waste incinerators, and a hazardous waste landfill in Catalonia (NE Spain). Although U concentrations were found...

The use of social media for contemporary knowledge management is growing. Success stories range from the fields of marketing to emergency disaster management. However its application to improve public safety remains elusive. This article outlines a case study of the presence of outlaw motorcycle clubs...

This study investigates how trade openness affects economic growth in developing countries, with a focus on sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). We use a dynamic growth model with data from 42 SSA countries covering 1980 to 2012. We employ the Pooled Mean Group estimation technique, which is appropriate for drawing...

The goal of syndromic surveillance is the earlier detection of epidemics, allowing a timelier public health response than is possible using traditional surveillance methods. Syndromic surveillance application for public health purposes has changed over time and reflects a dynamic evolution from the collection,...

Development assistance for health (DAH) and foreign aid have been criticized for being poorly associated with health and economic outcomes on a national level. This study is an attempt to examine whether DAH targeted specifically to malaria, HIV and tuberculosis (TB) is associated with changes in malaria,...

The aim of this study is to improve classification performance of neural networks as an EEG-based BCI for mobile robot control by means of hyperparameter optimization in training the neural networks. The hyperparameters were intuitively decided in our preceding study. It is expected that the classification...

Background: Affective temperaments (depressive, anxious, cyclothymic, irritable and hyperthymic) have important role in psychopathology, but cumulating data support their involvement in vascular pathology, especially in hypertension as well. The aim of our study was to evaluate their associations with...

The aim of this research was to study the association between the gut microbiota composition and arterial wall properties. The study included 92 participants, men and women aged 25–76 years old without clinical manifestation of chronic diseases but with the possible presence of cardiovascular risk factors....

Competent elastic fibers endow central arteries with the compliance and resilience that are fundamental to their primary mechanical function in vertebrates. That is, by enabling elastic energy to be stored in the arterial wall during systole and then to be used to work on the blood during diastole, elastic...

Background: Few studies assessed arterial stiffness in Black hypertensive patients born and living in sub-Saharan Africa, where cardiovascular disease reaches epidemic proportions. Methods: The Newer versus Older Antihypertensive Agents in African Hypertensive Patients (NOAAH) trial is currently recruiting...

Background: Atherosclerosis is the disease with one of the largest mortalities of the Western world. An important cause of this high mortality rate is rupture of atherosclerotic plaques and subsequent total blockage of the vessel by thrombus. Because, plaque rupture has been associated with a distinct...

Testing automation is one of the challenges facing the software development industry, especially for large complex products. This paper proposes a mechanism called Multi Stage Failure Detector (MSFD) for automating black box testing using different machine learning algorithms. The input to MSFD is the...

In recent decades, a resurgence of allometry in ecology and its associated scaling laws has been observed, going under the name macroecology. It is reasonable to think that the plethora of current works on experimental physiology using allometry is a continuation of the tradition of searching for the...

This paper studies verification of a combination of hand gestures recognized by using the Myo armband as an input device. To this end, relationship between data distribution and learning curves is investigated for binary classification and multi-class classification problems. A verification method is...

Isolated neutropenia without anemia or thrombocytopenia is a common clinical problem. The etiology of neutropenia may vary from transient bone marrow suppression, caused by self-limited viral illnesses, to previously undiagnosed congenital syndromes or serious systemic diseases. Consequently, determining...

A series of Polyaniline (PANI) nanoparticles doped with citric acid were synthesized by situ polymerization. It is interesting that uniform nanofibers with the diameter of 50 nm formed under a proper mass ratio (aniline:citric acid) of 5:4, which forms 3D conductive networks. XRD patterns show the nanofibers...

A general differential-algebraic approach is devised for constructing multi-component Hamiltonian operators as differentiations on suitably constructed loop Lie algebras. The related Novikov-Leibniz algebraic structures are presented and a new non-associative “Riemann” algebra is constructed, which is...

Analysis of large data sets is increasingly important in business and scientific research. One of the challenges in such analysis stems from uncertainty in data, which can produce anomalous results. This paper proposes a method for detecting an anomaly in time series data using a Support Vector Machine...

Background: Arterial stiffness measured under static conditions reclassifies significantly cardiovascular (CV) risk and associates with organ damage, including narrower retinal arterioles. However, arterial stiffness exhibits diurnal variation, thus single static stiffness recordings do not correspond...

Background: The Riva-Rocci brachial blood pressure (BP) method purported to measure aortic BP, and this remains the cornerstone thesis of clinical BP measurement. However, few studies have confirmed this thesis with direct BP measurements. This study aimed to determine the true differences in aortic...

Introduction: In wave separation analysis, the pressure wave is decomposed into a single forward and backward component, which actually compounds all forward and backward propagating waves. We hypothesize that, in particular in presence of early reflections as in aortic coarctation, re-reflection of...

This study develops the system called UNARM which assists the unit placement decision of the automatic assembling equipment to assemble efficiently. The unit is a part supply or a robot hand constituting assembling equipment. It is the system which decides these unit placements where of the assembling...

The concept of “Building Type Control” was employed to establish hierarchical design guidelines for the urban regeneration process. GIS was used to manage and map environmental database as visual reference tool. Existing building regulations and urban design policies were reviewed to set out limitation...

In this paper, a good portfolio is found through an ant colony algorithm (including a local search) that approximates the Pareto front regarding some kind of project categorization, cardinalities, discrepancies with priorities given by the ranking, and the average rank of supported projects; this approach...

An integration technique for difference schemes possessing Lie point symmetries is proposed. The method consists of determining an invariant Lagrangian and using a discrete version of Noether's theorem to obtain first integrals. This lowers the order of the invariant difference scheme.

In this paper we discuss a theoretical model for the interfacial profiles of progressive non-linear waves which result from introducing a triangular obstacle, of finite height, attached to the bottom below the flow of a stratified, ideal, two layer fluid, bounded from above by a rigid boundary. The derived...

Aims: This study aimed to investigate the relationship between blood pressure variability and the incidence of silent cerebral infarction (SCI) in patients with primary hypertension. Methods: The 346 hospitalized patients with primary hypertension were divided into primary hypertension group (160 cases)...

It has been recognised for nearly 200 years that the human pressure waveform changes in shape with ageing and disease. The shape of the pressure waveform has been explained in terms of two fundamental models: the Windkessel (reservoir) and wave theory. In its simplest form the Windkessel model satisfactorily...

Brain Computed Tomography (CT) is routinely requested before Lumbar Puncture (LP) to rule out increased intracranial pressure. However, normal brain radiography does not abate the risk of herniation and unnecessarily delays the course of treatment. Thus, the primary aims of this study were to evaluate...

Background: Carotid-femoral pulse wave velocity (cfPWV), a marker of cardiovascular disease, is modified by both blood pressure and changes in arterial wall properties. Current cfPWV measurement does not differentiate between effects of blood pressure and arterial wall properties. Animal studies show...

Introduction: COPD is associated with increased cardiovascular risk, independent of established risk factors. Arterial stiffness is a surrogate of cardiovascular risk and we sought to determine its relationship with COPD severity and prognosis in the ERICA (Evaluation of role of inflammation in airways...

Left ventricular diastolic function declines with aging and hypertension. It is well known that elevated blood pressure results in increased arterial stiffness. The study aims to determine the relationship between arterial stiffness and left ventricular diastolic function in general population. Methods:...

Childhood determinants of aortic pulse wave velocity [PWV] are poorly understood. We tested how factors measured twice previously in childhood in the MRC ‘DASH’ study, particularly body mass (BMI) components and BP, affected PWV in young adults. Methods: Of 6643 London children, aged 11–13 y, from 51...

This study purported to explore the dynamic capabilities of facilitating educational improvement in Taiwanese universities of technology, and to further investigate the structural relationships among the five domains of dynamic capabilities. Research data were collected from a sample of 278 administrative...

Multiagent systems, where many agents work together to achieve their objectives, and cooperative behaviors between agents need to be realized, have been widely studied In this paper, a new reinforcement learning framework considering the concept of “Symbiosis” in order to represent complicated relationships...

In 1807 Fourier suggested a original method of solving partial differential equations. The method is known to lead to ordinary differential equations containing some arbitrary parameter...