Given the lack of a serological test specific for Behçet's disease, its diagnosis rests upon clinical criteria. The clinical diagnosis is nevertheless difficult because the disease manifestations vary widely, especially at the onset of disease. The aim of this study was to identify molecules specifically recognized by serum autoantibodies in patients with Behçet's disease and to evaluate their ...

This paper describes TER-Plus (TERp) the University of Maryland / BBN Technologies submission for the NIST Metric MATR 2008 workshop on automatic machine translation evaluation metrics. TERp is an extension of Translation Edit Rate (TER) that builds off of the success of TER as an evaluation metric and alignment tool while addressing several of its weaknesses through the use of paraphrases, mor...

The Bomhuetter/Fergnason loss reserving method consists of selecting a development pattern and, for each accident year, an initial ultimate loss ratio. From these, the reserve estimate is derived. In this paper, the usual way to obtain the development pattern from the cl~in ladder link ratios is criticized because it assumes a multiplicat~ve connection between past and future loss amounts where...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Total elbow replacement (TER) is used in the treatment of inflammatory arthropathy, osteoarthritis, and posttraumatic arthrosis, or as the primary management for distal humeral fractures. We determined the annual incidence of TER over an 18-year period. We also examined the effect of surgeon volume on implant survivorship and the rate of systemic and joint-specific compli...

Depending on their CTFE content (from 0 to 10 mol %), poly(VDF-ter-TrFE-ter-CTFE), poly(vinylidene fluoride-ter-trifluoroethylene-ter-chlorotrifluoroethylene) copolymers, exhibit ferroelectric (FE) or relaxor (RFE) properties at room temperature. Solvent cast films of these terpolymers can crystallize in three orthorhombic phases: FE, DFE (Defective Ferroelectric) RFE according amount CTFE. The...

It was previously shown that cyclosporine A (CsA) increases transepithelial resistance in MDCK cells. Activation of the extracellular signal-regulated kinase 1/2 (ERK1/2) mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) cascade seems to be pivotal to the CsA-induced increase in transepithelial electrical resistance (TER). This study examined the role played by TGF-beta in mediating the CsA-induced activ...