Concentrations of mercury (Hg) are not well studied in free-ranging wildlife. Atmospheric deposition patterns of Hg have been studied in detail and have been modeled for both global and specific locations and often correlate to environmental impact. However, monitoring the impact of Hg deposition in wildlife is complicated due to local environmental conditions that can affect the transformation...

We have previously shown that nuclear DNA of bloodstream from Trypanosoma brucei contains a novel base beta-glucosyl-hydroxymethyluracil, called J. Base J is enriched in minichromosome fractions but not in the minichromosome internal repeats, suggesting the association of J with telomeric DNA. To test whether J is present in the long telomeric (GGGTTA)n repeat arrays, which are 2-26 kb in T.bru...

Autofocusing is a fundamental procedure towards automated microscopic evaluation of blood smear and pap smear samples for clinical diagnosis. This paper presents comparison results of 16 selected focus algorithms based on 8000 static bright-field images and 1600 dynamic autofocusing trials using 10 blood smear and pap smear samples. Besides static behaviour, dynamic autofocusing performance is ...

Two theoretical frameworks have been widely used to understand the response of monsoons to local and remote forcings: the vertically integrated atmospheric energy budget and convective quasi-equilibrium (CQE). Existing forms of these frameworks neglect some of the complexities of monsoons, such as the shallow meridional circulations that advect dry air from adjacent deserts into the middle and ...

OBJECTIVE To date, the contribution of basal atrial natriuretic peptide (ANP) levels to resting vascular function in humans is unknown. In the present study we sought to investigate the role of ANP in regulating regional vascular volume and venous tone in healthy subjects. METHODS AND RESULTS We used radionuclide plethysmography to examine the effects of ANP and the ANP-receptor antagonist A7...

BACKGROUND The American Society of Nuclear Cardiology and the Society of Nuclear Medicine conclude that incorporation of attenuation corrected (AC) images in myocardial perfusion scintigraphy (MPS) will improve diagnostic accuracy. The aim was to investigate the value of adding AC stress-only images for the decision whether a rest study is necessary or not. METHODS 1,261 patients admitted to ...

OBJECTIVE Originally, this blind study was designed to check whether blood smears constitute reliable tools to determine sex. However, when we analyzed our data some interesting findings immerged and in this paper we try to highlight them. MATERIAL AND METHODS 74 blood smears (35 women and 39 men) have been performed and then stained. 200 polynuclearneutrophils were examined for nuclear appen...

Abstract Funding Acknowledgements Type of funding sources: None. Introduction Interatrial septal aneurysm (IASA) appears as a localised saccular deformity usually detected during routine echocardiography or stroke evaluation. Imaging hallmarks are >15mm prolapsing motion across the interatrial septum (IAS) and identical content to blood-pool, which in contrast this patient. Clinical case...

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) has evolved as a clinical standard-of-care imaging modality for cardiac morphology, function assessment, and guidance of cardiac interventions. All these applications rely on accurate extraction of the myocardial tissue and blood pool from the imaging data. Here we propose a framework for left ventricle (LV) segmentation from cardiac cine-MRI. First, we segment ...

Background The calculation of the extracellular volume fraction (ECV) requires accurate quantification of myocardial and blood pool T1. Some Modified look locker inversion recovery (MOLLI) sequences provide a T1 and T1* output. T1* does not use a look locker correction, and so it is theoretically a more accurate estimation of true T1 blood T1 because fresh spins are flowing into the imaging pla...