BACKGROUND Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), the fifth most common cancer type and the third highest cause of cancer death worldwide, develops in different types of liver injuries, and is mostly associated with cirrhosis. However, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease often causes HCC with less fibrosis, and the number of patients with this disease is rapidly increasing. The high mortality rate and t...

Autonomic nervous system plays a crucial role in maintaining and regulating vessel tension. Renal denervation (RDN) may induce renal artery vasodilation by damaging renal sympathetic fibers. We conducted this animal study to evaluate whether renal artery vasodilation could be a direct indicator of successful RDN. Twenty-eight Chinese Kunming dogs were randomly assigned into three groups and und...

The clinical relevance of the e antigen-antibody system was investigated in 61 people persistently positive for hepatitis-B surface antigen, including 22 healthy carriers. The e antigen was not detectable in any of the healthy carriers, whereas it was found in 15 out of 28 patients with chronic aggressive hepatitis and two out of 11 with chronic persistent hepatitis. Its presence therefore indi...

The tumor suppressor gene p53 encodes a nuclear phosphoprotein which is critical for cell cycle control and prevention of uncontrolled cell proliferation that can lead to cancer. Previous studies have shown that cells respond to DNA damage by increasing their levels of p53, which then acts to prevent replication of damaged DNA. This study examined the effects on p53 protein levels of several di...

to evaluate the quality of services in hospitals can rely on mortality rate and side effects rate. according to performed studies, side effects rate is a better indicator to evaluate the quality of hospital services, therefore decreasing of side effects is one of the main objectives in hospital management. a side effect of open-heart surgery is the skin damage. some of iranian patients who were...

Most traditional approaches to anaphora resolution rely heavily on linguistic and domain knowledge. One of the disadvantages of developing a knowledgebased system, however, is that it is a very labourintensive and time-consuming task. This paper presents a robust, knowledge-poor approach to resolving pronouns in technical manuals. This approach is a modification of the practical approach (Mitko...

In this paper, we present a knowledge discovery process applied to hydrological data. To achieve this objective, we combine successive methods to extract knowledge on data collected at stations located along several rivers. Firstly, data is pre processed in order to obtain different spatial proximities. Later, we apply two algorithms to extract spatiotemporal patterns and compare them. Such ele...

Process Improvement has been used for decades as a means to become better and more efficient. Whilst many organizations have used considerable resources for process improvement, investments in process improvement have not always led to changes and improvements expected. One most important aspects of management is to motivate the work force. However, management often fails to deliver. In fact, b...

Axonal damage is a critical indicator for traumatic effects of physical impact to the brain. However, the precise mechanisms of axonal damage are still unclear. Here, we establish a mechanistic and highly dynamic model of the axon to explore the evolution of damage in response to physical forces. Our axon model consists of a bundle of dynamically polymerizing and depolymerizing microtubules con...

The use of engineered nano-sized materials led to revolutionary developments in many industrial applications and in the medical field. These materials, however, also may cause cytotoxicity. In addition to size, surface properties and shape were identified as relevant parameters for cell damage. Cell damage may occur as disruption of membrane integrity, induction of apoptosis and by organelle da...