BACKGROUND Individual placement and support (IPS) has been repeatedly demonstrated to be the most effective form of mental health vocational rehabilitation. Its no-discharge policy plus fixed caseloads, however, makes it expensive to provide. AIMS To test whether introducing a time limit for IPS would significantly alter its clinical effectiveness and consequently its potential cost-effective...

Generation of induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells using defined factors has been considered a ground-breaking step towards establishing patient-specific pluripotent stem cells for various applications. The isolation of human embryonic stem (ES) cells set the standard that pluripotent stem cells are attainable as potentially immortal cells for regeneration of many types of tissues. Different ap...

Induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells from somatic cells have great potential for regenerative medicine. The efficiency in generation of iPS cells has been significantly improved in recent years. However, the generation of high-quality iPS cells remains of high interest. Consistently, we demonstrate that knockout serum replacement (KSR)-based medium accelerates iPS cell induction and improves th...

Left ventricular end-systolic pressure-wall thickness and pressure-segment length relations have been used to assess regional myocardial contractility. The purpose of these studies was to determine whether the method of afterload alteration, coronary perfusion pressure, and the definition of end systole affected regional end-systolic relations. In paced open-chest pig hearts (n = 10), left vent...

BACKGROUND Noninvasive indices based on Doppler echocardiography are increasingly used in clinical cardiovascular research to evaluate left ventricular global systolic chamber function. Our objectives were to clinically validate ultrasound-based methods of global systolic chamber function to account for differences between patients in conditions of abnormal load, and to assess their sensitivity...

Consider a system consisting of n d-dimensional quantum particles (qudits), and suppose that we want to optimize the entanglement between each pair. One can ask the following basic question regarding the sharing of entanglement: what is the largest possible value Emax(n, d) of the minimum entanglement between any two particles in the system? Here we take the entanglement of formation as our mea...

In this paper, we study battery sizing for grid-connected photovoltaic (PV) systems. In our setting, PV generated electricity is used to supply the demand from loads: on one hand, if there is surplus PV generation, it is stored in a battery (as long as the battery is not fully charged), which has a fixed maximum charging/discharging rate; on the other hand, if the PV generation and battery disc...

BACKGROUND Ficus deltoidea, is a perennial herb that is used to assist labor, firm the uterus post-delivery and to prevent postpartum bleeding. In view of its claimed uterotonic action, the mechanisms underlying plant's effect on uterine contraction were investigated. METHODS Adult female SD rats were injected with 2 mg/kg 17β-oestradiol (E2) to synchronize their oestrous cycle. A day after i...

Forced expression of certain transcription factors in somatic cells results in generation of induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, which differentiate into various cell types. We investigated T-cell and B-cell lineage differentiation from iPS cells in vitro. To evaluate the impact of iPS cell source, murine splenic B-cell-derived iPS (B-iPS) cells were generated after retroviral transduction of...