Introduction The estimation of genetic risks to the offspring of consanguineous marriages, especially those of first cousins, has been exhaustively studied in the literature. Even so the subject still remains controversial, as shown by the results of a recent inquiry performed among medical geneticists and genetic counsellors in the United States by Bennett et al. (1999). In fact, analysing the...

More than half a century after the debut of CPM and PERT, we still lack a project scheduling system with calibrated and validated distributions and without requiring complex user input. Modern decision support systems (DSS) for project management are more sophisticated and comprehensive than PERT/CPM. Nonetheless, in terms of stochastic analysis, they show insufficient progress. PERT 21 offers ...

HBV is a noncytopathic hepadnavirus and major human pathogen that causes immune-mediated acute and chronic hepatitis. The immune response to HBV antigens is age dependent: viral clearance occurs in most adults, while neonates and children usually develop chronic infection and liver disease. Here, we characterize an animal model for HBV infection that recapitulates the key differences in viral c...

BACKGROUND Immunoassays are widely used in clinical laboratories for measurement of plasma/serum concentrations of steroid hormones such as cortisol and testosterone. Immunoassays can be performed on a variety of standard clinical chemistry analyzers, thus allowing even small clinical laboratories to do analysis on-site. One limitation of steroid hormone immunoassays is interference caused by c...

1Department of Ophthalmology, Valiaser Hospital; 2Nursing College, Birjand Medical University, Birjand, Islamic Republic of Iran. 3Department of Ophthalmology, Mashhad University of Medical Science, Mashhad, Islamic Republic of Iran. Received: 09/05/03; accepted: 20/10/03 ABSTRACT To investigate the possible relationship between hyperhomocysteinaemia and retinal vascular occlusion, we measured ...

New techniques for the prediction of tumour behaviour are needed since statistical analysis has low accuracy and is not applicable to the individual. Artificial intelligence (AI) may provide suitable methods. We have compared the predictive accuracies of neuro-fuzzy modelling (NFM), artificial neural networks (ANN) and traditional statistical methods for the prediction of bladder cancer. Experi...

Congenital Hepatic Fibrosis (CHF) is a rare disease that affects both the liver and kidneys.  Congenital hepatic fibrosis (CHF) is an autosomal recessive inherited malformation defined pathologically by a variable degree of periportal fibrosis and irregularly shaped proliferating bile ducts. Affected individuals also have impaired renal function, usually caused, in children and teenagers, by an...

Genotyping for 10 mutations in the CYP21 gene was performed in 88 families with congenital adrenal hyperplasia due to 21-hydroxylase deficiency. Southern blot analysis was used to detect CYP21 deletions or large gene conversions, and allele-specific hybridizations were performed with DNA amplified by the polymerase chain reaction to detect smaller mutations. Mutations were detected on 95% of ch...

This paper introduces a new class of oscillators that generate sinusoidal signals by formation of a circular standing wave on a ring (closed-loop) transmission line (t-line). A basic form of the circular standing wave oscillator (CSWO), schematically illustrated at the top left of Fig. 21.2.1, consists of a ring t-line and two pairs of cross-coupled inverters located at two opposite ports on th...