Earth-based radar observations and results from the MESSENGER mission have provided strong evidence that permanently shadowed regions near Mercury's poles host deposits of water ice. MESSENGER's complete orbital image and topographic datasets enable Mercury's surface to be observed and modeled under an extensive range of illumination conditions. The shadowed regions of Mercury's north polar reg...

Adequate information about characteristics of asthmatic patients in large health maintenance organizations (HMOs) is still lacking. As part of an ongoing longitudinal study, baseline data were collected on 914 individuals aged 3 to 55 yr with physician-diagnosed asthma within a large HMO, Kaiser Permanente, NW Region. There were no significant differences between men and women in post-bronchodi...

OBJECTIVE Insulin pump therapy (continuous subcutaneous insulin infusion [CSII]) and multiple daily injections (MDIs) with insulin glargine as basal insulin and mealtime insulin lispro have not been prospectively compared in people naïve to either regimen in a multicenter study. We aimed to help close that deficiency. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS People with type 1 diabetes on NPH-based insuli...

Metered dose inhalers (MDIs) are the mainstay of inhaled steroid therapy for asthma. With the phasing out of traditional chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) propellants and their replacement with a new generation of CFC-free products, it is becoming clear that formulation and inhaler characteristics can markedly affect the drug delivery. It now seems necessary to compare inhalers not only on the basis of ...

Bottom-up saliency, an early stage of human visual attention, can be considered as a binary classification problem between centre and surround classes. Discriminant power of features for the classification is measured as mutual information between distributions of image features and corresponding classes . As the estimated discrepancy very much depends on considered scale level, multi-scale str...

BACKGROUND Successful treatment of diabetes includes patient self-management behaviors to prevent or delay complications and comorbid diseases. On the basis of findings from large clinical trials and professional guidelines, diabetes education programs and health providers prescribe daily regimens of glucose monitoring, healthy eating, stress management, medication adherence, and physical activ...

OBJECTIVES In some acute-care settings, practitioners are reluctant to institute bronchodilator therapy with metered-dose inhalers (MDIs) as standard management. Such therapy requires that personnel ensure optimal use of these devices. We prospectively evaluated the time required to teach patients correct inhaler use for the emergency treatment of asthma and COPD, and patient factors associated...

We have derived algorithms and techniques to precisely co-register laser altimeter profiles with gridded Digital Terrain Models (DTMs), typically derived from stereo images. The algorithm consists of an initial grid search followed by a least-squares matching and yields the translation parameters at sub-pixel level needed to align the DTM and the laser profiles in 3D space. This software tool w...

P rogressive hyperglycemia in type 2 diabetes results from a progressive b-cell failure together with a state of insulin resistance (1). Insulin deficiency worsens with the natural progression of type 2 diabetes, explaining the escape from oral antihyperglycemic agents and the need for exogenous insulin therapy (2). The use of external pumps in patients with type 2 diabetes is a recent practice...