Millions of US patients are prescribed oral anticoagulants. Traditionally, oral anticoagulation was achieved with vitamin K antagonists (VKAs). In recent years, non-VKA oral anticoagulants (NOACs) have emerged that provide an effective and convenient alternative to VKAs. These agents possess very different pharmacologic properties from what the medical community has grown accustom to with the V...

Chromophore quantification in optoacoustic tomography is challenging due to signal contributions from strongly absorbing background tissue chromophores and the depth-dependent light attenuation. Herein we present a procedure capable of correcting for wavelength-dependent light fluence variations using a logarithmic representation of the images taken at different wavelengths assisted with a blin...

The protective immunogenicity of a hybrid peptide containing tandem copies of types 5 and 24 epitopes was investigated. Carboxy-terminal peptides of the cyanogen bromide-derived fragment 7 (CB7) of type 24 M protein were chemically synthesized, and then extended to include the first 20 residues of the amino-terminus of type 5 M protein. When emulsified in CFA and injected into rabbits without c...

Child-Robot Interaction (cHRI) is a promising point of entry into the rich challenge that social HRI is. Starting from three years of experiences gained in a cHRI research project, this paper offers a view on the opportunities offered by letting robots interact with children rather than with adults and having the interaction in real-world circumstances rather than lab settings. It identifies th...

Database administration routines involve manual or semi-automatic methods for monitoring the environment and solving problems that arise. In this work, we propose a novel alternative approach to this task, which unifies two Artificial Intelligence techniques: Case Based Reasoning and Intelligent Agents. Thus, DBSitter consists of a Multi-Agent system for automatic monitoring and fault correctin...

The appeals process is employed in many organizations, including administrative agencies, regulatory authorities, sports organizations, and private companies. This paper examines the dual role of the appeals process in correcting errors and inducing compliance in principal-agent relationships in the presence of imperfect performance evaluation. Some surprising results emerge. For example, appea...

OBJECTIVE Vitamin D deficiency is common and associated with dyslipidemia. However, it is unclear whether oral vitamin D supplementation improves the lipid profile. Therefore, we conducted a randomized, placebo-controlled trial to determine the short-term effects of vitamin D repletion on the lipid profile. METHODS AND RESULTS One hundred fifty-one vitamin D-deficient (25-hydroxyvitamin D <20...