OBJECTIVE There is increasing interest for strategies that could curtail antibiotic resistance in the critical care setting. We sought to determine the effectiveness and safety of procalcitonin-guided algorithms in the management of septic patients in the intensive care unit. DATA SOURCES MEDLINE, Scopus, Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (through April 2010), reference lists of ...

The cooperation strategy followed by the buyer and vendor results is an overall effect on the saving percentage along with the impact of inventory costs such as holding cost, fixed and linear backorder cost. This paper deals with buyer vendor incentive inventory model with fixed lifetime product with fixed and linear back order cost. A distinguishing feature of this model is that both fixed and...

background: various studies on prevalence of celiac disease in patients with irritable bowel syndrome in iran is available that chiefly, the prevalence of this disease and its association with several factors have been investigated. in order to gain a better perspective of iran and spread across the heterogeneity, all studies included in the systematic review, the findings were analyzed and use...

AIMS The uncertainty surrounding safety of angiotensin receptor blockers (ARBs) increased after publication of experimental and clinical studies which suggested an excess risk of myocardial infarction (MI) in people treated with ARBs. METHODS AND RESULTS We performed a meta-analysis of randomised clinical trials, which compared ARBs with either a placebo or active drugs different from ARBs. O...

the aim of this study was to investigate the effects of nigella sativa  (ns) fixed oil in comparison to dexamethasone (dex) on inducible nitric oxide synthase (inos), peripheral blood eosinophils (pbe), allergen specific serum igg1 and interleukins and airway inflammation in a murine model of allergic asthma. thirty-one mice were divided into four groups. group  i (n =  6) served as the control...

By incorporating a prey refuge, this paper proposes new discrete Leslie–Gower predator–prey systems with and without Allee effect. The existence of fixed points are established and the stability of fixed points are discussed by analyzing the modulus of characteristic roots. Keywords—Leslie–Gower; predator–prey model; prey refuge; Allee effect.

Chemical mechanical polishing (CMP) has emerged as the planarization technique of choice in both front-end (STI) and back-end (ILD) integrated circuit manufacturing. Conventional CMP processes utilize a polyurethane polishing pad and liquid chemical slurry containing abrasive particles. More recent work has examined the use of a fixed abrasive CMP pad [1], in which abrasive material is embedded...

We analyze the distribution of PageRank on a directed configuration model and show that as the size of the graph grows to infinity it can be closely approximated by the PageRank of the root node of an appropriately constructed tree. This tree approximation is in turn related to the solution of a linear stochastic fixed point equation that has been thoroughly studied in the recent literature.

We numerically study the directed version of the fixed energy sandpile. On a closed square lattice, the dynamical evolution of a fixed density of sand grains is studied. The activity of the system shows a continuous phase transition around a critical density. While the deterministic version has the set of nontrivial exponents, the stochastic model is characterized by mean field like exponents.