INTRODUCTION Proper maintenance policy can play a vital role for effective investigation of product reliability. Every engineered object such as product, plant or infrastructure needs preventive and corrective maintenance. CASE DESCRIPTION In this paper we look at a real case study. It deals with the maintenance of hydraulic pumps used in excavators by a mining company. We obtain the data tha...

A prospective study on the management of suspected malaria using a protocol on a general medical ward during the months of February and March, 1992 was done and the results compared with those of a retrospective study covering the months of November and December, 1991. The retrospective analysis showed that 78 (65%) from a total of 120 patients received antimalarial drugs despite negative or ab...

A prospective study of the use of the injectable contraceptive Norethisterone Oenanthate (NET-OEN) is presented using 96 subjects attending the Family Welfare Centre at the Kenyatta National Hospital, Nairobi, Kenya. 54 subjects had completed 2 years of use and 42 had completed 3 years. 2 pregnancies occured during the study period, giving an incidence of 0.07 per 100 woman months or 0.86 per...

BACKGROUND Simon's two-stage design is the most widely implemented among multi-stage designs in phase II clinical trials to assess the activity of a new treatment in a single-arm study. In this two-stage design, the sample size from the second stage is fixed regardless of the number of responses observed in the first stage. METHODS We develop a new minimax adaptive design for phase II clinica...

Using a glass-box theory of nite domain constraints, FD, we show how the entailment of user-deened constraints can be expressed by anti-monotone FD constraints. We also provide an algorithm for checking the entailment and consistency of FD constraints. FD is shown to be expressive enough to allow the deenition of arithmetical constraints, as well as non-trivial symbolic constraints, that are no...

Several recent reviews surveying the promising field of nutrigenomics1,2 have not discussed the important role that epigenetic mechanisms play at the nexus between nutrition and the genome. This is a glaring omission. Certainly, “nutrient–gene interactions” in humans enable various nutrients to transiently influence the expression of specific subsets of genes. In addition to these phenomena, ho...

Oncofertility is an exciting new interdisciplinary field that encompasses the obstetrician gynecologist, gynecologic oncologist, reproductive endocrinologist, and primary care physician in a common goal to provide fertility preservation options for cancer patients. Maintaining their fertility is of the upmost importance for many oncology patients diagnosed during their childbearing years. This ...

Adeno-associated virus (AAV) vectors are one of the most efficient in vivo gene delivery platforms. Over the past decade, clinical trials of AAV vector-mediated gene transfer led to some of the most exciting results in the field of gene therapy and, recently, to the market approval of an AAV-based drug in Europe. With clinical development, however, it became obvious that the host immune system ...

BACKGROUND Several risk factors for cardiovascular disease (CVD) have been identified in recent decades. However, the association between the health system and the burden of CVD has not yet been sufficiently researched. The objective of this study was to analyse the association between health system development and the burden of CVD, in particular CVD-related disability-adjusted life-years (DAL...

A case-control study was carried out between May 1988 and May 1989 to assess the effectiveness of three doses of trivalent oral poliomyelitis vaccine (TOPV3) in children aged 6-35 months in Madras city. All the cases were patients with acute paralytic poliomyelitis who were residing in Madras city and were hospitalized in the Institute of Child Health; they represented 95% of such cases in the ...