The objective of this study is to retrospectively evaluate factors significantly contributing to a failed stone extraction (SE) in patients with difficult to extract bile duct stones (BDS). Patients and Methods. During a 10-year period 1390 patients with BDS underwent successfully endoscopic sphincterotomy. Endoscopic SE was graded as easy; relatively easy; difficult; and failed. Difficult SE w...

Continuous-time birth-death-shift (BDS) processes are frequently used in stochastic modeling, with many applications in ecology and epidemiology. In particular, such processes can model evolutionary dynamics of transposable elements-important genetic markers in molecular epidemiology. Estimation of the effects of individual covariates on the birth, death, and shift rates of the process can be a...

Invasive fungal infections cause significant morbidity and mortality among immunocompromised individuals, posing an urgent need for new antifungal therapeutic strategies. Here we investigate a chromatin-interacting module, the bromodomain (BD) from the BET family of proteins, as a potential antifungal target in Candida albicans, a major human fungal pathogen. We show that the BET protein Bdf1 i...

Poly lactic acid (PLA) is widely used for the manufacture of biodegradable stents (BDSs). It was observed and investigated that tensile loads can significantly affect the degradation rate of PLA in our previous study. Additionally, non-uniform degradation can arise from complicated stress distributions in implanted stents under long-term and pulsatile tensile loading. The objective of this work...

Linear advection of a scalar quantity by a specified velocity field arises in a number of different applications. Of particular interest here is the transport of species and energy in low Mach number models for combustion, atmospheric flows, and astrophysics, as well as contaminant transport in Darcy models of saturated subsurface flow. An important characteristic of these problems is that the ...

Abstract Since the first pair of BeiDou satellites was deployed in 2000, China has made continuous efforts to establish its own independent Navigation Satellite System (BDS) provide regional radio determination satellite service as well and global navigation services, which rely on high quality orbit clock products. This article summarizes achievements precise (POD) BDS past decade with focus o...

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is one of the most common diseases of the central nervous system and usually occurs at the age when people would be expected to be in the prime of their sexual lives. In everyday practice, sexual dysfunction is underestimated because clinicians mostly concentrate on the classic neurologic deficits and often overlook symptoms that can seriously affect the quality of life....

Introductíon: Ballet dancers (BDs) have a negative energy balance related to physical training that results in alterations in body composition, sexual development, and adipokine secretion. Our aims were to study anthropometric parameters, body composition, and their relationship with adipokines throughout pubertal development. Subjects and methods: We carried out a prospective foliow-up study o...

The BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS) features a heterogeneous constellation so that it is difficult to mitigate the multipath in coordinate-domain. Therefore, mitigating observation-domain becomes more important. Sidereal filtering commonly used for mitigation, which needs calculate orbit repeat time of each satellite. However, poses computational challenge and damages integrity at end ...