Indoor positioning has recently become an important field of interest because global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) are usually unavailable in indoor environments. Pedestrian dead reckoning (PDR) is a promising localization technique for indoor environments since it can be implemented on widely used smartphones equipped with low cost inertial sensors. However, the PDR localization severely...

Indoor localization systems using WiFi received signal strength (RSS) or pedestrian dead reckoning (PDR) both have their limitations, such as the RSS fluctuation and the accumulative error of PDR. To exploit their complementary strengths, most existing approaches fuse both systems by a particle filter. However, the particle filter is unsuitable for real time localization on resource-limited sma...

PURPOSE Chronic hyperglycemia and hypoxemia are believed to be causal factors in the development of proliferative diabetic retinopathy (PDR) among individuals with type 2 diabetes. It is hypothesized that formation of new blood vessels in the retina due to prolonged hypoxia is associated with increased expression of several growth factors and angiogenic cytokines. In the present study, we inves...

PURPOSE Formation of epiretinal membranes (ERMs) after proliferative diabetic retinopathy (PDR) and proliferative vitreoretinopathy (PVR) results in progressive deterioration of vision, but its pathogenic mechanisms are still unknown. This study was conducted to examine the role of nuclear factor kappa B (NF-kappaB) in the formation of ERMs after PDR and PVR. METHODS ERM samples were obtained...

AIM To evaluate the influence of oxidative stress on extrapituitary growth hormone (GH) secretion in the eye and to analyze the interdependence between eye and serum GH levels under normal and hypoxic conditions. METHODS Pars plana vitrectomy (PPV) was performed in 32 patients with developed proliferative diabetic retinopathy (PDR) and 49 non-diabetic controls, both of whom required this proc...

Recently, Bradley proposed the PDR/IC3 model checking algorithm for verifying safety properties, where forward and backward reachability analyses are intertwined, and guide each other. Many variants of Bradley’s original algorithm have been developed and successfully applied to both hardware and software verification. However, these algorithms have been presented in an operational manner, in di...

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the correlation of expression of phosphorylated methyl-CpG binding protein 2-Ser421 (MeCP2-S421) and VEGF in the membranes of patients with PDR. We examined the expression of phospho-MeCP2-S80, S421, VEGF and PEDF in surgically excised PDR membranes from 33 patients with diabetes, and idiopathic epiretinal membranes from 11 patients without diabetes, us...

PURPOSE Diabetes is accompanied by fundamental rearrangements in redox homeostasis. Hyperglycemia triggers the production of reactive oxygen and nitrogen species which contributes to tissue damage in various target organs. Proliferative diabetic retinopathy (PDR) is a common manifestation of diabetic complications but information on the possible role of reactive intermediates in this condition ...

PURPOSE To determine if the renin-angiotensin system (RAS) is involved in diabetic retinopathy, we measured the levels of angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) and angiotensin II in the vitreous of patients with proliferative diabetic retinopathy (PDR). We also investigated whether the genes of the RAS factors were expressed by cultured human Müller cells. METHODS Vitreous samples were collecte...

AS ELSEWHERE IN the world, demographic changes have been fundamental to the emergence of modernity in the Tibetan areas of western China. These areas hereafter are referred to as Tibet, which includes the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) and the Tibetan autonomous areas absorbed into Qinghai, Gansu, Sichuan, and Yunnan Provinces (see Figure 1). The demographic changes include the onset of the demo...