particularly difficult cases in whom standard treatment had failed. In three of them mexiletine alone controlled the arrhythmia, but only at the cost of intolerable adverse effects. Combined treatment with mexiletine and propranolol, which have different actions and different adverse effects, enables arrhythmia to be suppressed through co-operative antiarrhythmic action. Since adverse effects h...

The representations of assembly knowledge and assembly sequences are crucial in assembly planning, where the size of parts involved is a significant and often prohibitive difficulty. Zero-suppressed binary decision diagram (ZBDD) is an efficient form to represent and manipulate the sets of combination, and appears to give improved results for large-scale combinatorial optimization problems. In ...

Set sharing is an abstract domain in which each concrete object is represented by the set of local variables from which it might be reachable. It is a useful abstraction to detect parallelism opportunities, since it contains definite information about which variables do not share in memory, i.e., about when the memory regions reachable from those variables are disjoint. Set sharing is a more pr...

Constrained encoding has several applications in the synthesis of finite state machines (FSMs). E.g., it can be used to generate asynchronous FSM state assignment that guarantees a critical hazard-free implementation, or to generate synchronous FSM state assignment with minimum PLA implementation. This paper presents ZEDICHO, an original zero-suppressed binary decision diagram (ZBDD) based algo...

Schwann cells (SCs) have been reported as a possible source of neurotrophic support for spiral ganglion neurons (SGNs). This study was aimed to investigate whether S100A4 was contributed in the functional effects of SCs on SGNs. SCs were transfected with S100A4 vector or small interfering RNA (siRNA) against S100A4, and the transfection efficiency was verified by quantitative PCR (qPCR) and Wes...

The Janus kinases (Jaks) are hubs in the signaling process of more than 50 cytokine or hormone receptors. However, the function of Jak in bone metabolism remains to be elucidated. Here, we showed that the inhibition of Jak1 and/or Jak2 in osteoblast-lineage cells led to impaired osteoclastogenesis due to the reduced expression of receptor activator of nuclear factor-κB ligand (RANKL). Murine ca...

The contribution of plasminogen (Plg)/plasmin, which have claimed to be the main fibrinolytic regulators in the bone metabolism, remains unclear. This study evaluated how the absence of Plg affects the function of osteoblast (OB) and osteoclast (OC). There was a larger population of pre-OCs in bone marrow-derived cells from the Plg(-/-) mice than the population of that from the WT mice. In addi...

The objective of this study was to evaluate the effects of metal ions, which may be released from orthopedic or dental implants, on osteoblast metabolism and differentiation. ROS 17/2.8 cells were cultured in F-12 medium for 7 days. Then Al+3, Co+2, Cr+3, Ni+2, Ti+4, and V+3 were added at concentrations less than their cytotoxic concentrations. After 3 days, DNA synthesis, succinate dehydrogena...

Spin relaxation from a triplet excited state to a singlet ground state in a semiconductor quantum dot is studied by employing an electrical pump-and-probe method. Spin relaxation occurs via co-tunneling when the tunneling rate is relatively large, confirmed by a characteristic square dependence of the relaxation rate on the tunneling rate. When co-tunneling is suppressed by reducing the tunneli...

A zero-suppressed binary decision diagram (ZDD) is a graph representation suitable for handling sparse set families. Given a ZDD representing a set family, we present an efficient algorithm to discover a hidden structure, called a co-occurrence relation, on the ground set. This computation can be done in time complexity that is related not to the number of sets, but to some feature values of th...