Airway hyperresponsiveness (AHR) is a characteristic feature of asthma, and generally correlates with severity of asthma. Understanding the protection mechanism against excessive airway narrowing and how it breaks down is fundamental to solving the problem of asthma. In this paper we have proposed a stochastic modeling the airway smooth muscle bundle for reproducing AHR such as an increased sen...

In fetuses with Ebstein anomaly or tricuspid valve dysplasia (EA/TVD), poor hemodynamic status is associated with worse neonatal outcome. It is not known whether EA/TVD fetuses with more favorable physiology earlier in gestation progress to more severe disease in the third trimester. We evaluated if echocardiographic indexes in EA/TVD fetuses presenting <24 weeks of gestation are reliable indic...

In a high-resolution small-scale seismic experiment we investigated the shallow structure of the Wadi Araba fault (WAF), the principal fault strand of the Dead Sea Transform System between the Gulf of Aqaba/Eilat and the Dead Sea. The experiment consisted of 8 sub-parallel 1 km long seismic lines crossing the WAF. The recording station spacing was 5 m and the source point distance was 20 m. The...

Postreplicative mismatch repair plays a major role in mediating the cytotoxicity of agents generating O6-methylguanine in DNA. We previously showed that a methylating antitumor triazene compound, temozolomide, induces apoptosis and that the persistence of O6-methylguanine in DNA is required to trigger the process. We wanted to test whether the latter apoptotic signal is dependent on a functiona...

A second-order total variation diminishing (TVD) method with variable flux limiters is proposed to overcome the non-realizability issue, which has been one of major obstacles in applying conventional TVD schemes moment transport equations. In present method, a realizable set at cell face reconstructed by allowing flexible selection limiter values within region. Necessary conditions for scheme s...

Lithium, besides mood stabilization, might be involved in neuroprotection. Previously we have found that the treatment with lithium increased the levels of p21(WAF/Cip1 and survivin in human glioblastoma A1235 cells. The aim of the present study was to examine the cytotoxic effect of glutamate on these cells, and to determine whether lithium can protect A1235 cells against toxic effects of glut...

Received 9/8/2002; accepted 10/1/2002. For correspondence or reprints contact: Nan-Jing Peng, M.D., Department of Nuclear Medicine, Kaohsiung Veterans General Hospital. 386 Ta-Chung 1st Road, Kaohsiung 813, Taiwan, ROC. Tel: (886)7-3422121 ext. 6418, Fax: (886)7-3461179, E-mail: [email protected] Background: The scintigraphic findings of triple-vessel coronary artery disease (TVD) may va...

The paper describes an algorithm for constructing convective weather avoidance polygons. The algorithm combines weather avoidance fields (WAF) from the en route convective weather avoidance model (CWAM) with edges automatically detected in the echo tops field, clustering, convex hull fitting and wind data to build weather avoidance polygons. Results for 2 case days with significantly different ...