Vitiligo is an autoimmune skin disease which is characterized by depigmented patches due to loss of pigment cells. Evidence suggests that cell-mediated immunity plays a role in melanocyte destruction while some patients have antibodies to melanocytes or melanocytic proteins. Vitiligo is strongly associated with a number of autoimmune disorders. Autoimmune thyroiditis is the most prevalent disea...

Rainforests are undergoing severe deforestation and fragmentation worldwide. A huge amount of small forest patches are being created, but their value in conserving biodiversity and forest structure is still controversial. Here, we demonstrate that in a species-rich and moderately-managed Mexican tropical landscape small rainforest patches (<100 ha) can be highly valuable for the conservation of...

We approximate a manifold triangulation in IR 3 using smooth implicit algebraic surface patches, which we call A-patches. Here each A-patch is a real iso-contour of a trivariate rational function deened within a tetrahedron. The rational trivari-ate function provides increased degrees of freedom so that the number of surface patches needed for free-form shape modeling is signiicantly reduced co...

this paper aims at finding the long term coupled effect of high temperature and constant high relative humidity on the corrosion rehabilitated patches of chloride contaminated steel reinforced concrete. this paper is an extension of previous research in which the authors experimentally corroborated re-corrosion in the repaired reinforced concrete (rc) patches in the form of macro-cells. in prev...

Sparse coding of images is traditionally done by cutting them into small patches and representing each patch individually over some dictionary given a pre-determined number of nonzero coefficients to use for each patch. In lack of a way to effectively distribute a total number (or global budget) of nonzero coefficients across all patches, current sparse recovery algorithms distribute the global...

lisinopril dihydrate (angiotensin converting enzyme inhibitor) is a lysine derivative of enalaprilat and does not require hydrolysis to exert pharmacological activity. it has an extensive hepatic first pass metabolism resulting in a bioavailabil-ity of 6-60%. to overcome the poor bioavailability of the drug, transdermal patches have been prepared. the present study also aims at optimization of ...