OBJECTIVE We investigated the morphological characteristics of coronary arteries in patients with impaired glucose tolerance (IGT) using computer-assisted quantitative coronary angiography. IGT is an independent risk factor for cardiovascular disease. However, the morphological changes developing in the coronary arteries of patients with IGT remain unknown. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS A total...

Assume a desktop grid middleware or a deployed cloud infrastructure that are both based on a large number of volunteers for computanation-intensive applications or business applications. In this case, the Internet is the communication layer; hence, the communication graph is not regular. Scalability and fault tolerance issues are implicitly present on any platform. For instance, the overlay net...

We present a dynamic distributed hash table where peers may join and leave at any time. Our system tolerates a powerful adversary which has complete visibility of the entire state of the system and can continuously add and remove peers. Our system provides worstcase fault-tolerance, maintaining desirable properties such as a low peer degree and a low network diameter.

OBJECTIVE Stentless aortic valves are widely used due to their excellent hemodynamic properties. However, if the subcoronary implantation technique is used later dilatation of the sinotubular junction (STJ) can cause regurgitation. The aim of the study was to determine the dilatation tolerance of two commercially available stentless xenografts and fresh aortic and pulmonary roots against such d...

The relationship between tree height and diameter is fundamental in determining community and ecosystem structure as well as estimates of biomass and carbon storage. Yet our understanding of how tree allometry relates to climate and whole organismal function is limited. We used the Forest Inventory and Analysis National Program database to determine height-diameter allometries of 2,976,937 indi...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS Root cortical aerenchyma (RCA) increases water and nutrient acquisition by reducing the metabolic costs of soil exploration. In this study the hypothesis was tested that living cortical area (LCA; transversal root cortical area minus aerenchyma area and intercellular air space) is a better predictor of root respiration, soil exploration and, therefore, drought tolerance than...

We propose a new family of interconnection networks that are Cayley graphs with constant node degree 4. These graphs are regular, have logarithmic diameter and are maximally fault tolerant. We investigate different algebraic properties of these networks (including fault tolerance) and propose optimal routing algorithms. As far as we know, this is the first family of Cayley graphs of constant de...

ÐChordal rings have been proposed in the past as networks that combine the simple routing framework of rings with the lower diameter, wider bisection, and higher resilience of other architectures. Virtually all proposed chordal ring networks are nodesymmetric, i.e., all nodes have the same in/out degree and interconnection pattern. Unfortunately, such regular chordal rings are not scalable. In ...

background and objectives: cold stress is one of the most important limiting factor for growth and development of grasses in temperate regions. freezing tolerance is highly different between plant species and between regions. the importance of grasses is due to widespread application in lawn beautifying, animal feeding, and erosion control. there are many differences between grass species in re...