Dibutylphthalate (DBP) can cause adverse effects on the developing male reproductive tract when administered late in gestation to pregnant rats. The objectives of this study were to evaluate the metabolism of DBP in female rats, and the pharmacokinetics of DBP in pregnant rats on gestational day (g.d.) 20. The identities of DBP metabolites in urine and in maternal and fetal plasma were confirme...

Eosinophil major basic protein (MBP) is an effective stimulus for neutrophil superoxide (O(2)(-)) production, degranulation, and IL-8 production. In this study we evaluated the participation of phosphoinositide 3-kinase (PI3K) and PI3K-associated signaling events in neutrophil activation by MBP. Inhibition of PI3K activity blocked MBP-stimulated O(2)(-) production, but not degranulation or IL-8...

A randomized comparative study was performed to evaluate the control of hypertension with use of home blood pressure measurement (HBPM) and casual blood pressure measurement, and analyze the white coat effect. Hypertensive patients in primary health care units were randomly divided into two groups: group I, participating of the educational activities and group II that followed the routine treat...

Multiple sequence alignment is usually considered as an optimization problem, which has a statistical and a structural component. It is known that in the problem of protein sequence alignment a processed sample is too small and not representative in the statistical sense though this information can be sufficient if an appropriate structural model is used. In order to utilize this information a ...

Scutellariae radix (SR), also known as Huangqin, is the dried root of Scutellaria baicalensis Georgi (Lamiaceae). It is listed in the Chinese Pharmacopoeia and is one of the most widely used Chinese herbal medicines against bacterial infection of the respiratory and the gastrointestinal tracts. The main components of SR (and of all Scutellaria species) are baicalein, baicalin, and wogonin. Rhin...

BACKGROUND Pediatric ADHD is associated with impairments in working memory, but these deficits often go undetected when using clinic-based tests such as digit span backward. AIMS The current study pilot-tested minor administration/scoring modifications to improve digit span backward's construct and predictive validities in a well-characterized sample of children with ADHD. METHODS AND PROCE...

Tree-trellis forward-backward algorithm has been widely used for N-best search in continuous speech recognition. In conventional approaches, the heuristic score used for the A* backward search is derived from the partial-path scores recorded during the forward pass. The inherently delayed use of language model in the lexical tree structure leads to inefficient pruning and the partial-path score...

Making speech recognition output readable is an important task. The first step here is automatic sentence end detection (SED). We introduce novel F0 derivative-based features and sentence end distance features for SED that yield significant improvements in slot error rate (SER) in a multi-pass framework. Three different SED approaches are compared on a spoken lecture task: hidden event language...

This paper presents a new search strategy for large vocabulary continuous Mandarin speech recognition considering the special structure of Chinese language. This strategy is composed of a forward and a backward passes, between which a high-quality syllable lattice is generated to bridge the syllable-level and word-level decoding processes. In the forward pass, considering the small number of sy...