Recent experimental studies in rodents suggest that treatment with inhibitors of phosphodiesterase type 5 (PDE5) (tadalafil, sildenafil, zaprinast) not only increases cerebral blood flow but also improves functional recovery after stroke. Here, we investigated in a mouse model of stroke the effects of vardenafil on survival, functional outcome and lesion size after experimental stroke. Mice wer...

BACKGROUND A low concentration of lidocaine (10 microM) has been shown to reduce anoxic damage in vitro. The current study examined the effect of low-dose lidocaine on infarct size in rats when administered before transient focal cerebral isehemia. METHODS Male Wistar rats (weight, 280-340 g) were anesthetized with isoflurane, intubated, and mechanically ventilated. After surgical preparation...

AIMS Obesity is a primary contributor to acquired insulin resistance leading to the development of type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular alterations. The carnitine derivate, propionyl-L-carnitine (PLC), plays a key role in energy control. Our aim was to evaluate metabolic and cardiovascular effects of PLC in diet-induced obese mice. METHODS C57BL/6 mice were fed a high-fat diet for 9 weeks and t...

The Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) requires the determination of an optimal set of routes for a set of vehicles to serve a set of customers. We deal here with the Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP) where there is a maximum weight or volume that each vehicle can load. We developed an Ant Colony algorithm (ACO) for the CVRP based on the metaheuristic technique introduced by Colorni, Dorigo...

Lane changing manoeuvres of heavy vehicles have significant influence on surrounding traffic characteristics due to the physical effects that the heavy vehicles impose on surrounding vehicles. These effects are the result of heavy vehicles’ length, size, weight and the limitations in their manoeuvrability. Due to the importance of heavy vehicle lane changing manoeuvres, this paper presents an e...

Extended-range electric vehicle is considered to be the ideal transition type for electric vehicle. The optimal operation curve control strategy was proposed for a 12 meter-long range extended electric bus. With exponential function inertia weight adjustment and local chaos substitution, an improved chaotic particle swarm optimization algorithm was applied to optimize the key parameters of ener...

This paper addresses a new vehicle routing problem that simultaneously involves time windows, split collection and linear weightrelated cost, which is a generalization of the split delivery vehicle routing problem with time windows (SDVRPTW). This problem consists of determining least-cost vehicle routes to serve a set of customers while respecting the restrictions of vehicle capacity and time ...

The vehicle/bridge interaction moving forces are important for the bridge structure design and the reliability evaluation. Therefore, the dynamic moving forces produced by the vehicles on the bridge structure must be determined by adopting the estimation method or measurement techniques. Direct measurement of the vehicle moving forces using sensors with higher precision is expensive and is subj...

This project is based on LabVIEW software using NI-myRIO and it is meant for low cost, small size and light weight unmanned ground vehicle .It is specialized in wheel structure and camera courage .the typical wheel design is used to cross the obstacles present in the path of vehicle and the camera is rotated with respect to the wheel direction .the camera provides image of the place. The gas se...

This paper presents a method for solving multi-depot vehicle routing problem (MDVRP). First, a virtual central depot is added to transfer MDVRP to the multi-depot vehicle routing problem with the virtual central depot (V-MDVRP), which is similar to a vehicle routing problem (VRP) with the virtual central depot as the origin. An improved ant colony optimization with coarse-grain parallel strateg...