Economical design with sufficient fracture resistance is of high importance in any offshore pipeline projects. Using an Engineering Critical Assessment (ECA), alternate acceptance criteria for pipeline girth weld inspection can significantly reduce the cost of constructing of offshore oil and gas pipeline by minimizing unnecessary repairs. Offshore pipelines consist of short pipeline segments c...

While the interest of Embodied Conversational Agents (ECA) in health care context increased, the extent to which patients find ECAs acceptable should be more evaluated. Thus, in this study, we evaluated the acceptability of an ECA who conducts a clinical structured interview to make a medical diagnosis, in comparison with the same clinical structured interview presented in written form on a tab...

Amajor problem with dialectal Arabic acoustic modeling is due to the very sparse available speech resources. In this paper, we have chosen Egyptian Colloquial Arabic (ECA) as a typical dialect. In order to benefit from existing Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) resources, a cross-lingual acoustic modeling approach is proposed that is based on supervised model adaptation. MSA acoustic models were ada...

A new sensitive and precise method for quantitative determination of direct thrombin inhibitors is described, the ecarin chromogenic assay (ECA). Ecarin is used as the specific prothrombin-activating principle. The cleavage of a chromogenic substrate by meizothrombin is inhibited in a concentration-dependent fashion by direct thrombin inhibitors. For the ECA, the linear measuring range is about...

OBJECTIVE To ascertain whether clinically diagnosed rheumatoid arthritis (RA) patients having antibodies to enterobacterial common antigens (ECA) in synovial fluid (SF) have a histological appearance characteristic of RA synovitis. METHODS Twenty-five RA patients for which synovial biopsy specimens were preserved, were selected from 58 patients with RA tested for antibodies to ECA in SF The s...

We investigated a role of neuroregulation in the release of eosinophil chemotactic activity (ECA) from bovine bronchial epithelial cells (BBEC). BBEC were stimulated with acetylcholine (ACh) and substance P (SP), and the supernatant fluids were tested for ECA by a blind-well chemotactic chamber technique. BBEC released ECA in response to ACh and SP in a dose- and time-dependent manner. Checkerb...

Phosphoglyceride-linked enterobacterial common antigen (ECA(PG)) is a cell surface glycolipid that is synthesized by all gram-negative enteric bacteria. The carbohydrate portion of ECA(PG) consists of linear heteropolysaccharide chains comprised of the trisaccharide repeat unit Fuc4NAc-ManNAcA-GlcNAc, where Fuc4NAc is 4-acetamido-4,6-dideoxy-D-galactose, ManNAcA is N-acetyl-D-mannosaminuronic a...

Cell cultures derived from trabecular meshworks of human and bovine eyes and from bovine vascular endothelia were incubated at 37 degrees C for 1 hr with ethacrynic acid (ECA, 0.1-0.5 mmol/l) dissolved in culture medium. At 2 hr after the initial exposure, ECA at concentrations up to 0.4 mmol/l induced a reversible alteration in cell shape in all three cell types that was coincident with a chan...

Acute toxicity study of Centella asiatica standardized extract ECa 233 was conducted by an oral administration of 10.0 g/kg extract into 10 male and 10 female mice. The extract at the given dose did not cause any toxic signs and death within the observation period of 14 days. Sub-chronic toxicity study of ECa 233 has been investigated in four groups of Wistar rats, each of 24 rats (12 of each s...

The research presented in this paper looks at ECA’s and the influence of the color of their clothing on user perception. To perform this research an experiment was done. In the experiment two different colored versions of the same ECA told a story after which test subjects answered questions on their perception of the ECA and the contents of the story. The initial literary research gave good re...