In the heart, oxidative stress caused by exogenous H2O2 has been shown to induce early afterdepolarizations (EADs) and triggered activity by impairing Na current (INa) inactivation. Because H2O2 activates Ca 2 /calmodulin kinase (CaMK)II, which also impairs INa inactivation and promotes EADs, we hypothesized that CaMKII activation may be an important factor in EADs caused by oxidative stress. U...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE The internal carotid artery (ICA) in the rat has a single extracranial branch, which supplies the muscles of mastication. The rat ICA also has multiple intracranial branches including (from proximal to distal): multiple small perforating arteries which supply the hypothalamus and the anterior choroidal artery which supplies the choroid plexus and part of the basal ganglia...

BACKGROUND Little is known about parathyroid gland function in patients receiving total parenteral nutrition (TPN). OBJECTIVE Our objective was to determine whether parathyroid gland function is abnormal in TPN recipients. DESIGN Six patients with a mean (+/-1 SD) age of 45.5 +/- 8.0 y who had been receiving TPN for 18.7 +/- 2. 8 y underwent bone biopsy, bone mass measurements with dual-ene...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the effectiveness of a new method of using Independent Component Analysis (ICA) and k-means clustering to increase the signal-to-noise ratio of Event-Related Potential (ERP) measurements while permitting standard statistical comparisons to be made despite the inter-subject variations characteristic of ICA. METHODS Per-subject ICA results were used to create a channel poo...

Optimization of turning process is a non-linear optimization with constrains and it is difficult for the conventional optimization algorithms to solve this problem. The purpose of present study is to demonstrate the potential of Imperialist Competitive Algorithm (ICA) for optimization of multipass turning process. This algorithm is inspired by competition mechanism among imperialists and coloni...

imperialist competitive algorithm (ica) is a new socio-politically motivated global search strategy. the ica is applied to hybrid composite laminates to obtain minimum weight and cost. the approach which is chosen for conducting the multi-objective optimization was the weighted sum method (wsm). the hybrid composite laminates are made of glass/epoxy and carbon/epoxy to combine the lightness and...

This study investigated whether KMUP-1, a xanthine-derivative K(+) channel opener, could prevent serotonin-induced hypertrophy in H9c2 cardiomyocytes via L-type Ca(2+) channels (LTCCs). Rat heart-derived H9c2 cells were incubated with serotonin (10 μM) for 4 days. The cell size increased by 155.5%, and this was reversed by KMUP-1 (≥1 μM), and attenuated by the LTCC blocker verapamil (1 μM) and ...

The early rate of action potential (AP) repolarization varies in the mammalian heart regionally, during development, and in disease. We used confocal microscopy to assess the effects of changes in repolarization rate on spatially resolved sarcoplasmic reticulum (SR) Ca release. The kinetics and peak amplitude of Ca transients were reduced, and the amplitude, frequency, and temporal synchronizat...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE MR angiography (MRA) is increasingly used as an alternative to digital subtraction angiography (DSA) to evaluate internal carotid artery (ICA) stenosis. Because MRA is not standardized in data acquisition and postprocessing, we sought to evaluate the effects of different acquisition techniques (time-of-flight MRA [TOF-MRA]) and contrast-enhanced MRA [CE-MRA]) and postproc...