AN IMPULSE propagating from the atrioventricular (A-V) node to ventricular muscle must traverse a length of conducting tissue consisting of the bundle of His, bundle branches, peripheral ramifications of the branches, and subendocardial Purkinje network. Electrophysiologic studies of the properties of these tissues have provided a body of information on the nature of normal and abnormal conduct...

Voltage-dependent K(+) channels can undergo a gating process known as C-type inactivation, which involves entry into a nonconducting state through conformational changes near the channel's selectivity filter. C-type inactivation may involve movements of transmembrane voltage sensor domains, although the mechanisms underlying this form of inactivation may be heterogeneous and are often unclear. ...

Respiratory and cardiac motion artefacts degrade image quality in positron emission tomography (PET) imaging and may significantly affect the qualitative and quantitative evaluation of images. At worst, misguided interpretation may lead to wrong diagnosis and inadequate or unnecessary treatment. The aim of this thesis was to study the feasibility of the bioimpedancebased measurement technique f...

electrode has been investigated as the electrode substrate for deposition of a thin membrane ion gating polymer called polypyrrole (PPy). The PPy membrane was successfully deposited and its surface morphology studied using scanning electron microscopy. Given the properties of the bucky gel electrode and its ability to conduct ions, this work establishes the first step towards a semi-solid ion-g...

The CFTR chloride channel is activated by phosphorylation of serine residues in the regulatory (R) domain and then gated by ATP binding and hydrolysis at the nucleotide binding domains (NBDs). Studies of the ATP-dependent gating process in excised inside-out patches are very often hampered by channel rundown partly caused by membrane-associated phosphatases. Since the severed DeltaR-CFTR, whose...

In order to reduce register file's peak temperature in an embedded processor we propose RELOCATE: an architectural solution which redistributes the access pattern to physical registers through a novel register allocation mechanism. RELOCATE regionalizes the register file such that even though accesses within a region are uniformly distributed, the activity levels are spread over the entire regi...