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Introduction: The prognostic importance of aortic calcification is often attributed to its close association with atherosclerotic plaque but it may relate to its effects on aortic stiffness and be driven by processes distinct from those of atherosclerosis. The aim of the present study was to determine...

Background: The Opening Angle (OA) is widely used as an index of the residual stresses and strains present in the arterial wall not subjected to internal pressure. The aim of this work was to quantify regional variation of the layer-specific OA in the bovine descending thoracic aorta. Methods: Descending...

Objectives: In resource-poor settings, aPWV’s prognostic power, independent of blood pressure (BP), has potential as an intervention target against ‘hypertension’ and diabetes (T2DM). We compared simple determinants of aPWV in 3 African-origin settings and British Europeans. Methods: Using methods standardised...

Objectives: Carotid-femoral pulse wave velocity (cfPWV) is a validated non-invasive measure of aortic stiffness. Risk factors for cfPWV are well described in adulthood, and furthermore cfPWV is associated with incident cardiovascular disease in adults (1). However, risk factors for arterial stiffness...

Morning blood pressure surge is associated with increased cardiovascular risk, possibly due to its ability to reflect short-term BP variability and/or its link with arterial stiffness. The link between morning BP surge and vascular stiffness is not defined. 689 untreated hypertensives (48±10 years,...

Objectives: To analyze the association of arterial stiffness with the fibrinogen in general population without previous cardiovascular diseases. Differences by gender. Methods: A cross-sectional study. Study population: From the population assigned to the participating healthcare centres, a cluster...

Objective: Atherosclerotic disease is caused by a combination of systemic, and local factors. The influence of local geometry (affecting local flow conditions) is often neglected. In contrast to the carotid artery, at the iliac-femoral artery region, a large degree of bilateral asymmetry exists. Therefore,...

In 2005, Chinese government defined its direction to electronic health records and electronic medical records. Up to 2012, hundreds of electronic health record systems and electronic medical systems have been developed, but the systems are still in their infancy, and China is facing a variety of challenges...

The Viet Nam economy, especially the stock exchange, has been influenced by the global crisis during and after the period 2007-2009. How much risk for a typical industry in an emerging market such as Viet Nam? For specific industries, such as banking, insurance, investment and security industries, the...

Much of information sits in an unprecedented amount of text data. Managing allocation of these large scale text data is an important problem for many areas. Topic modeling performs well in this problem. The traditional generative models (PLSA,LDA) are the state-of-the-art approaches in topic modeling...

valleys of mountainous regions in central Shandong Province in northern China, have been systematically tested and been compared with the YHC loess in the Loess Plateau to reveal the geochemical characteristics and material sources of LS loess. It is found that the average chemical composition of Shandong...

This paper presents an accurate wearable fall detection system which can identify the occurrence of falls among elderly population. A waist worn tri-axial accelerometer was used to capture the movement signals of human body. A set of laboratory-based falls and activities of daily living (ADL) were performed...

Hirota's bilinear technique is applied to some integrable lattice systems related to the Bäcklund transformations of the 2DToda, Lotka-Volterra and relativistic LotkVolterra lattice systems, which include the modified Lotka-Volterra lattice system, the modified relativistic Lotka-Volterra lattice system,...

A concept of semiclassically concentrated solutions is formulated for the multidimensional nonlinear Schrödinger equation (NLSE) with an external field. These solutions are considered as multidimensional solitary waves. The center of mass of such a solution is shown to move along with the bicharacteristics...

Feature subset selection, applied as a pre- processing step to machine learning, is valuable in dimensionality reduction, eliminating irrelevant data and improving classifier performance. In the classic formulation of the feature selection problem, it is assumed that all the features are available at...

A striking disparity exists across the globe, with essentially no large-scale longitudinal studies ongoing in regions that will be significantly affected by the oncoming non-communicable disease epidemic. The successful implementation of cohort studies in most low-resource research environments presents...

In order to eliminate Lymphatic Filariasis (LF) as a public health problem, the World Health Assembly recommends an approach which includes interruption of transmission of infection and the alleviation of morbidity. In 2000, the Togolese National Program to Eliminate Lymphatic Filariasis (PNELF) started...

Objective: To assess adherence of Palestinian hypertensive patients to therapy and to investigate the effect of a range of demographic and psychosocial variables on medication adherence. Methods: A questionnaire-based, cross-sectional descriptive study was undertaken at a group of outpatient clinics...

Zoonoses constitute more than 60% of infectious diseases and 75% of emerging infectious diseases. Inappropriate overemphasis of specialization of disciplines has ignored public health. Identifying the causes of disease and determining how exposures are related to outcomes in “emerging zoonoses” affecting...

Lassa fever is a deadly viral haemorrhagic fever caused by Lassa Virus (LASV). Rodents, especially, Mystomys natalensis, are the known reservoirs of LASV and humans are the defined hosts. Monkeys share many illnesses with humans and experimental LASV infections in monkeys are fatal but natural LASV infection...

VascAgeNet is a new European network which will join forces in order to refine, harmonize and promote the vascular ageing concept. It aims to bring innovations in cardiovascular research from bench to bedside and to establish assessment of vascular ageing in clinical practice. The interdisciplinary,...

Mobile teleoperation robot is one of the effective methods to help operators to work in complex environments. However, the time delay by distance is a key factor that restricts its application. To solve this problem, the motion trajectory of the robot is simulated using virtual reality technology and...

Although several guidelines for Stress Ulcer Prophylaxis (SUP) have been published, Acid-Suppressive Therapy (AST) remains largely prescribed in hospitalized patients. Thus, our study aimed to evaluate the current practice surrounding SUP in Soba University Hospital (Khartoum, Sudan). This descriptive...

Due to the misuse of pathogen-infected food, human beings continue to face serious diseases and even deaths. Thus, researchers from all walks of life concern on prevention, detection, and resistance for pathogenic bacteria. It is necessary to develop and explore a fast, cost-effective, portable, and...

Introduction: Ankylosing spondylitis (AS) is an inflammatory rheumatic disease associated with accelerated atherosclerosis and increased cardiovascular morbidity and mortality. Objectives: To assess the local arterial stiffness in carotid artery in subjects with AS compared with controls evaluated by...

ARTIC is a new segmentation-based tracking algorithm used to automatically measure diameter, distension and intima media thickness (IMT) in arteries using B-mode ultrasound. ARTIC is initiated with a mark in the center of lumen and can then perform automatic measurements in about 1000 frames/second....

Pulse wave velocity (PWV) is gold standard for assessing arterial stiffness. Studies have shown that people with metabolic syndrome have insulin resistance and that after the onset of diabetes, cardiovascular risk is intensely increased, high-sensitive C-reactive protein (hsCRP) (1). Relate influence...

Background: Vasera is a machine developed to evaluate arterial stiffness by measuring pulse wave velocity (PWV) and cardio-ankle vascular index (CAVI), apparently independent of blood pressure (BP). The 4-cuff device measures right (R) and left (L) brachial and ankle BP, deriving the CAVI value and cardiac-ankle...

Objective: To study the determinants of Arterial Stiffness (AS) in the elderly. Design and method: Cross-sectional, observational study of elderly participants. Blood Pressure (BP) and arterial function parameters were measured with a validated device. Clinical and demographic information was gathered,...

Surgical or critically ill patients often require continuous assessment of cardiac output (CO) for diagnostic purposes or guiding therapeutic interventions. A new method of non-invasive estimation of CO, based on pressure wave analysis, has been recently developed, but its validity has been examined...

A commercial territory design problem with compactness maximization criterion subject to territory balancing and connectivity is addressed. Four new heuristics based on Greedy Randomized Adaptive Search Procedures within a location-allocation scheme for this NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem...

A new type of perturbative expansion is built in order to give a rigorous derivation and to clarify the range of validity of some commonly used model equations. This model describes the evolution of the modulation of two short and localized pulses, fundamental and second harmonic, propagating together...

Some types of first integrals for Hamiltonian Nambu-Poisson vector fields are obtained by using the notions of pseudosymmetries. In this theory, the homogeneous Hamiltnian vector fields play a special role and we point out this fact. The differential system which describe the SU(2)-monopoles is given...

Considering the coupled envelope equations in nonlinear couplers, the question of integrability is attempted. It is explicitly shown that Hirota's bilinear method is one of the simple and alternative techniques to Painlevé analysis to obtain the integrability conditions of the coupled nonlinear Schrödinger...

To explore and understand the intrinsic dynamic mechanisms of urban fire system is an important prerequisite for the fire risk analysis and management. By analyzing the time series of urban fire system, it is helpful to achieve this goal. In this paper, the detrended fluctuation analysis (DFA) is applied...

The current study aimed to determine the prognostic values of personality traits for common psychological problems in a large sample of Iranian adult. In a large sample of healthy people (n = 4763) who lived in Isfahan province; the NEO-FFI was used to assess the personality traits; depression and anxiety...

Background: Age-related decrease in cerebral blood flow is a risk factor for cognitive decline. Aerobic exercise training improves vascular and cognitive functions. However, the effect of exercise training on age-related reduction in cerebral blood flow is unclear. The present study investigated whether...

The objectives of the study were to identify the prevalence of insomnia among a representative sample of the Lebanese population and to assess potential factors associated with insomnia among this group. A cross-sectional study was done in the Lebanese population from August 2017 to April 2018 enrolling...

A high-level associative memory modelling method was developed to explore the realization of associative memory. In the proposed method, two stage procedures are progressively performed to construct a unified associative knowledge network. In the first stage, some direct weighted associative links are...

We aimed to assess the reliability of a screening questionnaire for Active Pulmonary Tuberculosis (APTB) in a population of sheltered homeless persons (HP). Participants from two homeless shelters completed a questionnaire specially designed to identify patients at high-risk of APTB (available at www.tb-screen.ch),...