PURPOSE To examine the association of personal values, the built environment, and auto availability with walking for transportation. SETTING Participants were drawn from 11 U.S. metropolitan areas with good transit services. SUBJECTS 865 adults who had recently made or were contemplating making a residential move. MEASURES Respondents reported if walking was their primary mode for nine tr...

Systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) is a complex auto-immune disorder which involves various facets of the immune system. In addition to autoantibody production and immune complex deposition, emerging evidences suggest that cytokines may act as key players in the immunopathogenesis of SLE. These cytokines assume a critical role in the differentiation, maturation and activation of cells and also ...

Recent studies in the field of autoimmune thyroid diseases have largely focused on the delineation of B-cell auto-epitopes recognized by the main autoantigens to improve our understanding of how these molecules are seen by the immune system. Among these autoantigens which are targeted by autoantibodies during the development of autoimmune thyroid diseases, thyroid peroxidase is a major player. ...

We propose a new method for the delineation of precipitation using cloud properties derived from optical satellite data. This approach is not only sufficient for the detection of mainly convective precipitation by means of the commonly used connection between infrared cloud top temperature and rainfall probability but enables the detection of stratiform precipitation (e.g., in connection with m...

In this paper, we compare four field-of-view (FOV) metrics that, when applied to a low-resolution image of a microscope slide, are capable of both accurately delineating the specimen and selecting a subset of focus candidate FOVs required for construction of high-resolution focus map. The metrics evaluated are: threshold index (TI) that measures image intensity; normalised auto-correlation inde...

BACKGROUND Acute myocardial infarct (AMI) size depicted by late gadolinium enhancement cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) is increasingly used as an efficacy endpoint in randomized trials comparing AMI therapies. Infarct size is quantified using manual planimetry (MANUAL), visual scoring (VISUAL), or automated techniques using signal-intensity thresholding (AUTO). Although AUTO is consider...