Meditation is becoming increasingly popular as a topic for scientific research and theories on meditation are becoming ever more specific. We distinguish between what is called focused Attention meditation, open Monitoring meditation, and loving kindness (or compassion) meditation. Research suggests that these meditations have differential, dissociable effects on a wide range of cognitive (cont...

Background/introduction Anti-tumor immune response caused by High Intensity Focused Ultrasound (HIFU) therapy has been a subject of controversy. Most agree that the response is more likely to be induced by mechanical, rather than thermal effects of HIFU. The goal of the current work was to study the effect of HIFU-induced liquefaction of a tumor on tumor-specific and non-specific T-cell mediate...

In the present study, an exploratory approach (Oxford, Cho, Leung & Kim, 2004) to language learning is adopted which holds that the number and type of strategies used by Iranian learners might vary with respect to the difficulty of task and their L2 proficiency. In this regard, the term task is defined, its leading dimentions and charecteristics are put forward, and the nature of learning start...

Blind source separation technique separates mixed signals blindly without any information on the mixing system. In this paper, we have used two evolutionary algorithms, namely, genetic algorithm and particle swarm optimization for blind source separation. In these techniques a novel fitness function that is based on the mutual information and high order statistics is proposed. In order to evalu...

BACKGROUND High-intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) is a promising, non-invasive technique in treating benign thyroid nodules (TNs). The aim of this study was to evaluate the efficacy of HIFU to induce clinically meaningful shrinkage in benign predominantly solid TNs and to identify variables that influence or predict the magnitude of TN volume reduction. METHODS For each of ten subjects, HIF...

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Ultrasound (US) is used in the clinical setting not only for diagnosis but also for therapy. As a therapeutic US technique, high-intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) can be applied to treat cancer in a clinical setting. Microbubbles increased temperature and improved the low therapeutic efficiency under HIFU; however, microbubbles have room for improvement in size, stability, and targeting abili...