OBJECTIVE To assess the effect of tibolone treatment on the intima-media thickness (IMT) of the common carotid artery (CCA) and the resistive indices (RIs) of the CCA and internal (ICA) and external (ECA) carotid and the vertebral arteries (VAs) in postmenopausal women as sonographic markers of atherosclerosis. DESIGN A prospective study. SETTING University hospital. PATIENT(S) Twenty pos...

Transparent wood (TW), a biocomposite material demonstrating optical transparency in the visible range, has attracted much interest recent years due to great potential for ecofriendly applications, instance, construction industry and functionalized organic materials. Optical properties of TW, including haze, depend on particular structure cellulose‐based backbone compound, (mis‐)matching refrac...

background: the aim of this study was to estimate the conversion rate from radiologically isolated syndrome (ris) to definite multiple sclerosis (ms). methods: during a mean (standard deviation [sd]) follow-up period of 17.4 (5.4) (range 8-29) months, 25 subjects with ris and without neurological symptom aged 22-45 year from a single-center have been examined for the occurrence of definite ms. ...

Despite the definition of specific diagnostic criteria to identify radiologically isolated syndrome (RIS) suggestive of multiple sclerosis, its natural history remains incompletely understood. We retrospectively analyzed a Brazilian cohort of 12 patients to clarify their features and to emphasize the role of imaging predictors in clinical conversion. We demonstrated that, although some individu...

To prevent information leakage in multilevel secure data models, the concept of polyinstantiation was inevitably introduced. Unfortunately, when it comes to references through foreign key in multilevel relational data models, the polyinstantiation causes referential ambiguities. To resolve this problem, this paper proposes an extended referential integrity semantics for a multilevel relational ...

Diastolic dysfunction is important in the pathophysiology of heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF). Sympathetic nervous hyperactivity may contribute to the development of diastolic dysfunction. The aim of this study was to determine the relationship between myocardial sympathetic innervation quantified by 11C-hydroxyephedrine PET and diastolic dysfunction in HFpEF patients. Met...

The performance evaluation of the regional innovation system (RIS) based on the management entropy theory can dynamically describe its overall innovation level and its development trend. This article describes the content of management entropy theory and analyzes its function mechanism of the RIS. On the basis of above, this article establishes its own index evaluation system and entropy evalua...

The movement of fish in watersheds is frequently inhibited by human-made migration barriers such as dams or culverts. The resulting lack of connectivity of spatial subpopulations is often cited as a cause for observed population decline. We formulate a matrix model for a spatially distributed fish population in a watershed, and we investigate how location and other characteristics of a single m...

We present a Lisp system XS which is designed to control RCX blocks of the Lego MindStorms Robotics Invention System (RIS). Unlike previous Lisp/Scheme implementations for the MindStorms, the evaluator of XS runs autonomously on the RCX, with its own runtime stacks and garbage-collected heap. It communicates with the front-end subsystem on a PC, to provide an interactive programming environment...

Ross Ice Shelf (RIS) is known to experience transient thickness change due to changes in the flow of its tributary ice streams and glaciers and this may complicate identification of external, climateforced signals in contemporary observations of ice shelf thinning and thickening. Flux changes at the lateral boundaries produce both instantaneous and longer timescale adjustments in the coupled ve...