BACKGROUND The "Unfinished Agenda" of infectious diseases is of great importance to policymakers and research funding agencies that require ongoing research evidence on their effective management. Journal publications help effectively share and disseminate research results to inform policy and practice. We assess research investments to United Kingdom institutions in HIV, tuberculosis and malar...

Discoveries concerning the important roles of glycoconjugates in a variety of biological processes have led to an increased demand for efficient synthetic methodologies adaptable for their large-scale production.1 Compared to chemical synthesis, an enzymatic approach utilizing glycosyltransferases has been proven more efficient in the production of complex carbohydrates.2 Despite the increasing...

A new combinatorial characterization of a gray-tone image called Euler Vector is proposed. Euler number of a binary image is a well-known topological feature, which remains invariant under translation, rotation, scaling, and rubber-sheet transformation of the image. Euler vector comprises of a 4-tuple, where each element is an integer representing the Euler number of the partial binary image fo...

Median filters and rank-order filters are generally considered to be more time consuming than, e.g., averaging filters. With the new algorithm presented in this report the opposite turns out to be true. The median (or any other rank-order value) is obtained by examining the bits of the arguments columnwise starting with the most significant bits. Hardware implementations suitable for parallel p...

Background Brazil is a country of Portuguese colonization with massive numbers of immigrants and Portuguese descendants (25 millions). At least half of all Brazilian Y chromosomes are from Portuguese origin. Nevertheless, this population suffered miscegenation with native Indians and African descendants. African descendants Brazilians have 48% of non-African genes, probably from Portuguese asce...

BACKGROUND Treatment of bronchiectasis includes drugs, oxygen therapy, and bronchial-clearance maneuvers. OBJECTIVE To assess the safety and efficacy of intrapulmonary percussive ventilation (IPV) compared to traditional standard chest physical therapy in patients with bronchiectasis and productive cough. METHODS In a randomized crossover study, 22 patients underwent, on consecutive days, I...