INTRODUCTION The purpose of the present study was to evaluate the influence of different variables on radiation dose and image quality based on a national database. MATERIALS AND METHODS Taiwan's Ministry of Health and Welfare requested all radiology departments to complete a questionnaire for each of their CT scanners. Information gathered included all scanning parameters for CT head scans. ...

INTRODUCTION Anthracosis of the lung is the blackening of bronchial tissues which can lead to chronic bronchial obstruction. Many studies have shown association of bronchial anthracosis and tuberculosis. The aim of this study was accumulation of scattered studies and getting the definite conclusion about the association between anthracosis and tuberculosis. MATHERIALS AND METHODS We conducted...

Developing heat treatment methods to control insect pests in harvested commodities has traditionally relied on empirical trial-and-error approaches. There is a need for an effective means to systematically develop and assess heat treatments to save time and expense. In this study, we developed a cumulated lethal time model based on the efficacy of different hot water treatments for killing codl...

OBJECTIVE To describe the treatment and long term outcome after immunosuppressive treatment of children with myocarditis. METHODS AND RESULTS 114 patients with newly diagnosed dilated cardiomyopathy were divided into three groups, according to the histological pattern: group A, acute myocarditis; group B, borderline myocarditis; and group C, non-inflammatory cardiomyopathy. Groups A and B wer...

Objective: To describe the treatment and long term outcome after immunosuppressive treatment of children with myocarditis. Methods and results: 114 patients with newly diagnosed dilated cardiomyopathy were divided into three groups, according to the histological pattern: group A, acute myocarditis; group B, borderline myocarditis; and group C, non-inflammatory cardiomyopathy. Groups A and B wer...

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether obese rats with a strong anorectic response to growth hormone also showed signs of increased hepatic ketogenesis as reflected in circulating β-hydroxybutyrate levels. Rats with diet-induced obesity were allocated to one of two groups, receiving either vehicle (n = 7) or 4 mg/kg/d of growth hormone (n = 13) for 4 days. This latter group was la...

The present study aimed at exploring how two main primarily semantic factors of discourse comprehension, namely global coherence and amount of information cumulated across a passage, may impact on the sentential syntactic processing. This was measured in two event-related brain potentials (ERP) to grammatical (morphosyntactic) violations: anterior negativities (LAN) and posterior positivities (...

Various studies have suggested the existence of different pathways of tumor progression in colorectal cancer that associate with specific molecular, chromosomal, and clinicopathological features. We hypothesize that a comprehensive analysis of cumulated genomic damage in colorectal cancers would aid the characterization of different tumor progression pathways and identify the factors determinin...

The development of fisheries in the oceans, and other human drivers such as climate warming, have led to changes in species abundance, assemblages, trophic interactions, and ultimately in the functioning of marine food webs. Here, using a trophodynamic approach and global databases of catches and life history traits of marine species, we tested the hypothesis that anthropogenic ecological impac...

OBJECTIVE To investigate in a prospective randomised study both long term clinical effects and cost effectiveness of percutaneous coronary interventions (PCI) with or without intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) guidance. METHODS 108 male patients with stable angina referred for PCI of a significant coronary lesion were randomly assigned to IVUS guided PCI or conventional PCI. Individual accumulat...