PURPOSE To compare refractive outcome, subepithelial haze, and pain after epithelial laser in situ keratomileusis (epi-LASIK) and photorefractive keratectomy (PRK). METHODS In this prospective, randomized study, 32 eyes of 16 patients were treated for myopia with epi-LASIK (epi-LASIK group) in one eye and PRK in the fellow eye (PRK group). All patients underwent ablation using the NIDEK EC-50...

BACKGROUND The mechanisms of muscle injury repair after EPI® technique, a treatment based on electrical stimulation, have not been described. This study determines whether EPI® therapy could improve muscle damage. METHODS Twenty-four rats were divided into a control group, Notexin group (7 and 14 days) and a Notexin + EPI group. To induce muscle injury, Notexin was injected in the quadriceps ...

The pluripotent epiblast (EPI) is the founder tissue of almost all somatic cells. EPI and primitive endoderm (PrE) progenitors arise from the inner cell mass (ICM) of the blastocyst-stage embryo. The EPI lineage is distinctly identified by its expression of pluripotency-associated factors. Many of these factors have been reported to exhibit dynamic fluctuations of expression in embryonic stem c...

Epinephrine (Epi) increases lymphocyte traffic to lung. We investigated whether Epi also modulates pulmonary cell-mediated immune responses in vivo. C57BL/6 mice were immunized with hen-egg lysozyme (HEL) on day 0, challenged with HEL intratracheally at day 12, and killed at day 15. Mice received Epi (0.5 mg/kg) subcutaneously during the sensitization phase, days 1-7 (Epi-SP), or the effector p...

The epinephrine (Epi)-induced effects on the sympathetic nervous system (SNS) and metabolic functions were studied in men before and during a decrease in SNS activity achieved through simulated microgravity. Epi was infused at 3 graded rates (0.01, 0.02, and 0. 03 microg. kg(-1). min(-1) for 40 min each) before and on the fifth day of head-down bed rest (HDBR). The effects of Epi on the SNS (as...

Aptamers, that exist naturally in living cells as functional elements and can switch nonfluorescent natural targets to fluorophores, are very useful in developing highly sensitive and selective biosensors and screening functional agents. This work demonstrates that human telomeric G-quadruplex (HTG) can serve as a potential fluorophore-switching aptamer (FSA) to target a natural isoquinoline al...

A new phase-shifted EPI pulse sequence is described that encodes EPI phase errors due to all off-resonance factors, including B(o) field inhomogeneity, eddy current effects, and gradient waveform imperfections. Combined with the previously proposed multichannel modulation postprocessing algorithm (Chen and Wyrwicz, MRM 1999;41:1206-1213), the encoded phase error information can be used to effec...

In this paper we have shown that electrode polarization impedance (EPI) can be separated from measured tissue impedance as long as the characteristic frequencies of EPI and tissue are not too close, so that the EPI is largely displayed as a separate dispersion. In 2-electrode measurements the EPI and sample are physically connected in series, and commonly modelled by equivalent components in se...

Light field (LF) is a 4-D function representing the light radiance in free space in terms of rays. A dense grid of cameras, parameterized by two planes, captures an LF: the sensor plane and the focal plane. Multi-camera images stack in volumes, and when sliced, form epipolar plane images (EPI). In EPI, lines with the same slope represent object points at the same scene depth. Thus, the synthesi...

High-resolution functional MRI (fMRI) offers unique possibilities for studying human functional neuroanatomy. Although high-resolution fMRI has proven its potential at 7 T, most fMRI studies are still performed at rather low spatial resolution at 3 T. We optimized and compared single-shot two-dimensional echo-planar imaging (EPI) and multishot three-dimensional EPI high-resolution fMRI protocol...