Neuromyelitis optica (NMO) is an acute or subacute lesion of demyelinating disease involving the optic nerve and spinal cord, and imaging techniques and their effects have been the focus of investigations. The aim of the present study was to examine the value of three-dimensional double inversion recovery (3D-DIR) in the early differential diagnostic and prognostic evaluation of NMO. Forty-eigh...

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) implementations are known for high failure rates and crossing the defined budget and schedule. A new framework GenNext is introduced to arrest these issues. The objective of this paper is to validate the effectiveness of the framework and compare the benefits with respect to traditional methodology. Five projects were executed by the traditional methodology an...

Background. Intravesical pressure (IAP(ivp)) measurement is considered to be the gold standard for assessment of intra-abdominal pressure (IAP). This study evaluated a new minimally invasive IAP monitoring device (CiMON) against three other devices in a wide range of clinically relevant IAP and in different body positions in healthy pigs. Methods. The CiMON catheter (IAP(CiM)) and another ballo...

The reduction of Fe during bacterial anaerobic respiration in sediments and soils not only causes the degradation of organic matter but also results in changes in mineralogy and the redistribution of many nutrients and trace metals. Understanding trace metal patterns in sedimentary rocks and predicting the fate of contaminants in the environment requires a detailed understanding of the mechanis...

UNLABELLED Endemic Pemphigus Foliaceus (EPF) is a bullous autoimmune skin disease whose incidence used to be high in the State of São Paulo (SP), Brazil, during the forties, but has declined thereafter. OBJECTIVES to report a series of EPF patients from the northeastern region of SP. METHODS a retrospective study concerning demographic and epidemiological data of patients seen from 1973 to ...

BACKGROUND Understanding the irradiated area and dose correctly is important for the reirradiation of organs that deform after irradiation, such as the liver. We investigated the spatial registration error using the deformable image registration (DIR) software products MIM Maestro (MIM) and Velocity AI (Velocity). METHODS Image registration of pretreatment computed tomography (CT) and posttre...

The concept of Differentiated Reliability (DiR) was recently introduced by the authors to provide multiple reliability degrees (or classes) at the same network layer using a common protection mechanism, e.g., path switching. According to the DiR concept, each connection at the layer under consideration is guaranteed a minimum reliability degree, defined as the Maximum Failure Probability allowe...

BACKGROUND The extent and clinical relevance of grey matter (GM) pathology in multiple sclerosis (MS) are increasingly recognised. GM pathology may present as focal lesions, which can be visualised using double inversion recovery (DIR) MRI, or as diffuse pathology, which can manifest as atrophy. It is, however, unclear whether the diffuse atrophy centres on focal lesions. This study aimed to de...

Cortical lesions are prevalent in multiple sclerosis but are poorly detected using MRI. The double inversion recovery (DIR) sequence is increasingly used to explore the clinical relevance of cortical demyelination. Here we evaluate the agreement between imaging sequences at 3 Tesla (T) and 7T for the presence and appearance of individual multiple sclerosis cortical lesions. Eleven patients with...

This paper presents a greedy heuristic-based double iteration and rectification (DIR) approach to intraoperative planning for permanent prostate brachytherapy. The DIR approach adopts a greedy seed selection (GSS) procedure to obtain a preliminary plan. In this process, the potential seeds are evaluated according to their ability to irradiate target while spare organs at risk (OARs), and their ...