This paper describes the development and preliminary testing of a robotic device to facilitate minimally invasive beating-heart intrapericardial interventions. We propose the concept of a subxiphoid-inserted mobile robot (HeartLander) with the ability to adhere to the epicardium, navigate to any location, and administer therapy under physician control. As compared to current laparoscopic cardia...

We investigate the complexity of obtaining sparse descriptions for sets in var ious reduction classes to sparse sets Let A be a set in a certain reduction class Rr SPARSE Then we are interested in nding upper bounds for the complexity relative to A of sparse sets S such that A Rr S By establishing such upper bounds we are able to derive the lowness of A In particular we show that if a set A is ...

In this study, we successfully report an intimate ternary blend system of polycarbonate (PC)/poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA)/poly(vinyl acetate) (PVAc) obtained by the simultaneous coalescence of the three guest polymers from their common -cyclodextrin ( -CD) inclusion compound (IC). The thermal transitions and the homogeneity of the coalesced ternary blend were studied by differential scannin...

BACKGROUND Dengue virus (DENV) is found in the tropical and subtropical regions and affects millions of people annually. Currently, no specific vaccine or antiviral treatment against dengue virus is available. Innate immunity has been shown to be important for host resistance to DENV infection. Although protein kinase regulated by double-stranded RNA (PKR) has been found to promote the innate s...

Intellectual capital (IC) is organizational intangible asset which is frequently associated with performance. IC is commonly categorized into three core components: human capital, structural capital and relational capital. This study takes a step further in the evolution of the IC model for the hotel industry and divides relationship capital into two categories: End customer- relationship capit...

nanofibrous scaffolds produced by electrospinning have attracted much attention, recently. aligned and random nanofibrous scaffolds of poly (vinyl alcohol) (pva), poly (ε-caprolactone) (pcl) and nanohydroxyapatite  (nha) were fabricated by electrospinning method in this study. the composite nanofibrous scaffolds were subjected to detailed analysis. morphological investigations revealed that the...