PURPOSE To determine whether the distance from skin to stone, as measured by computed tomography (CT) scans, could affect the stone-free rate achieved via extracorporeal shock wave lithotripsy (ESWL) in renal stone patients. MATERIALS AND METHODS We retrospectively reviewed the records 573 patients who had undergone ESWL at our institution between January 2006 and January 2010 for urinary sto...

Adeno-associated virus type 2 (AAV), a single-stranded, DNA-containing, nonpathogenic human parvovirus, has gained attention as a potentially useful vector for human gene therapy. However, the transduction efficiency of AAV vectors varies greatly in different cells and tissues in vitro and in vivo. We have recently documented that a cellular tyrosine phosphoprotein, designated the single-strand...

This paper presents a model of NAND flash SSD utilization and write amplification when the ATA/ATAPI SSD Trim command is incorporated into object-based storage under a variety of user workloads, including a uniform random workload with objects of fixed size and a uniform random workload with objects of varying sizes. We first summarize the existing models for write amplification in SSDs for wor...

Solid-state disks are promising high access speed at low energy consumption. While the basic technology for SSDs – flash memory – is well established, new product models are constantly emerging. With each new SSD generation, their behavior pattern changes significantly and it is therefore difficult to make out characteristics for SSDs in general. In this paper, we accomplish empirical, database...

Sexual size dimorphism (SSD) in mammals reveals the extent of sexual selection, which may in turn explain why males are often more infected by parasites than females and that parasites may contribute to the association between SSD and male-biased mortality. Here, we investigated the relationship between SSD in small mammals of Central Europe and the differences in sex infection by fleas. A comp...

Males and females of almost all organisms exhibit sexual differences in body size, a phenomenon called sexual size dimorphism (SSD). How the sexes evolve to be different sizes, despite sharing the same genes that control growth and development, and hence a common genetic architecture, has remained elusive. Here, we show that the genetic architecture (heritabilities and genetic correlations) of ...

A quantitative lateral-flow immunoassay using gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) conjugated with a monoclonal antibody (MAb) against saikosaponin d (SSd) was developed for the analysis of SSd. The AuNPs were prepared in our laboratory. The AuNPs were polyhedral, with an average diameter of approximately 18 nm. We used the conjugation between AuNPs and MAbs against SSd to prepare immunochromatographic s...

Vehicular Ad hoc Network (VANET) is a special class of Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) where vehicles are considered as MANET nodes with wireless links. The key difference of VANET and MANET is the special mobility pattern and rapidly changeable topology. There has been significant interest in improving safety and traffic efficiency using VANET. The design of routing protocols in VANET is importa...

We present Griffin, a hybrid storage device that uses a hard disk drive (HDD) as a write cache for a Solid State Device (SSD). Griffin is motivated by two observations: First, HDDs can match the sequential write bandwidth of mid-range SSDs. Second, both server and desktop workloads contain a significant fraction of block overwrites. By maintaining a log-structured HDD cache and migrating cached...

INTRODUCTION The goal of signal detection in pharmacovigilance (PV) is to detect unknown causal associations between medicines and unexpected events. Statistical methods serve to detect signals and supplement traditional PV methods. Statistical signal detection (SSD) requires decisions about various settings that influence the quality and efficiency of SSD, as shown in several studies. To our k...