background: interleukin-17 (il-17), as a potent proinflammatory cytokine, has a critical role in post liver transplant outcomes. however, there is not much information about the effects of il-17 cytokine on acute liver rejection. objective: to evaluate the role of il-17 in post-liver transplant acute rejection. methods: ninety seven adult liver transplant patients who enrolled in this cross sec...

purpose: to investigate the efficacy of topical cyclosporine a 2% in treating and preventing recurrent graft rejection episodes after penetrating keratoplasty (pkp) in patients with history of previous rejection episodes. methods: in this clinical trial, eligible pkp patients were randomly given topical cyclosporine a 2% or placebo in addition to a standard corticosteroid regimen for an episode...

We investigate the use of Robust Estimation in an application requiring the accurate location of the centres of circular objects in an image. A common approach used throughout computer vision for extracting shape information from a data set is to fit a feature model using the Least Squares method. The well known sensitivity of this method to outliers is traditionally accommodated by outlier rej...

Reverse osmosis (RO) is a compact process for the removal of ionic and organic pollutants from contaminated water. However, flux decline and rejection deterioration due to concentration polarization and membrane fouling hinders the application of RO technology. In this study, a rotating cylindrical RO membrane is theoretically investigated as a novel method to reduce polarization and fouling. A...

In this paper, two multirate repetitive controllers are proposed, namely, repetitive intersample disturbance rejection (RIDR) and repetitive perfect tracking control (RPTC). First, in order to develop RIDR, multirate intersample disturbance rejection algorithm is reviewed which was proposed by authors for general digital control systems with restricted sampling frequency. Second, RPTC method is...

Electric wheelchairs (EW) experience various terrain surfaces and slopes as well as occupants with diverse weights. This, in turn, imparts a substantial amount of perturbation to the EW dynamics. In this paper, we make use of a two-degree-of-freedom control architecture called disturbance observer (DOB) which reduces sensitivity to model uncertainties, while enhancing rejection of disturbances ...

Several methods for generating random variables with univariate and multivariate Wallenius' and Fisher's noncentral hypergeometric distributions are developed. Methods for the univariate distributions include: simulation of urn experiments, inversion by binary search, inversion by chop-down search from the mode, ratio-of-uniforms rejection method, and rejection by sampling in the t domain. Meth...

Several methods for generating random variables with univariate and multivariate Wallenius' and Fisher's noncentral hypergeometric distributions are developed. Methods for the univariate distributions include: simulation of urn experiments, inversion by binary search, inversion by chop-down search from the mode, ratio-of-uniforms rejection method, and rejection by sampling in the t domain. Meth...