BACKGROUND Occult cystobiliary communication (CBC) presents with biliary leakage, if the cystobiliary opening cannot be detected and repaired at operation. We investigated the clinical signs associated with the risk of occult CBC in the preoperative period by studying patients who developed biliary leakage after hydatid liver surgery. METHODS We analyzed the records of 191 patients treated fo...

An ecological perspective to school readiness focuses on child and family readiness by enhancing the developmental contexts and relationships within which children reside (e.g., home environment, parent-child relationship, home-school relationships). The Getting Ready intervention is an ecological, relationally based, tiered intervention providing both universal and intensive services to childr...

Many truly human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) antibody-negative serum samples may be unnecessarily subjected to costly and time-consuming Western blots (immunoblots). An investigation was undertaken to evaluate the efficiency of using a recombinant protein-based enzyme immunosorbent assay (EIA; Cambridge BioScience [CBC] Recombigen HIV EIA) as an adjunct to whole viral lysate EIA. A total of 2,...

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the outcome prediction power of classical prognostic factors along with surrogate approximation of genetic signatures (AGS) subtypes in patients affected by localized breast cancer (BC) and treated with postoperative radiotherapy. We retrospectively analyzed 468 consecutive female patients affected by localized BC with complete immunohistochemical and p...

We study the problem of multivariate integration and the construction of good lattice rules in weighted Korobov spaces with general weights. These spaces are not necessarily tensor products of spaces of univariate functions. Sufficient conditions for tractability and strong tractability of multivariate integration in such weighted function spaces are found. These conditions are also necessary i...

A major determinant of flowering time in natural Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana) variants is FRIGIDA (FRI). FRI up-regulates expression of the floral repressor FLOWERING LOCUS C (FLC), thereby conferring a vernalization requirement and a winter annual habit. FRI encodes a novel nuclear protein with no conserved domains except for two coiled-coil regions. A mutation in the large subunit of th...

A language L over an alphabet A is said to have a neutral letter if there is a letter e ∈ A such that inserting or deleting e’s from any word in A∗ does not change its membership or non-membership in L. The presence of a neutral letter affects the definability of a language in firstorder logic. It was conjectured that it renders all numerical predicates apart from the order predicate useless, i...

Cannabis sativa L. (cannabis) extracts, vapor produced by the Volcano vaporizer and smoke made from burning cannabis joints were analyzed by GC-flame ionization detecter (FID), GC-MS and HPLC. Three different medicinal cannabis varieties were investigated Bedrocan, Bedrobinol and Bediol. Cannabinoids plus other components such as terpenoids and pyrolytic by-products were identified and quantifi...

BACKGROUND Fluoropyrimidine-based chemotherapy plus the anti-vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) antibody bevacizumab is standard first-line treatment for metastatic colorectal cancer. We studied the effect of adding the anti-epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) antibody cetuximab to a combination of capecitabine, oxaliplatin, and bevacizumab for metastatic colorectal cancer. METHODS...

BACKGROUND Complete blood count (CBC) reference intervals are important to diagnose diseases, screen blood donors, and assess overall health. However, current reference intervals established by older instruments and technologies and those from American and European populations are not suitable for Chinese samples due to ethnic, dietary, and lifestyle differences. The aim of this multicenter col...