BACKGROUND Prior studies of multilevel ProDisc-L (PD-L) implants (Synthes Spine, Inc., West Chester, Pennsylvania) using the standard US technique have used conventional radiography postoperatively. We found vertebral body-splitting fractures (VB-SFs) in interposed vertebral bodies after 5 sequential multilevel PD-L device implantations using the standard US technique. These were identified wit...

BACKGROUND We hypothesized that one reason for the heterogeneity in previously reported links between kidney stones and blood pressure (BP) was the differential effects of nephrolithiasis among subgroups of individuals. In particular, we hypothesized that the association between stone history and BP may vary with respect to sex and body size. METHODS Data from the Third National Health and Nu...

The assembly and mechanics of actomyosin stress fibers (SFs) depend on myosin regulatory light chain (RLC) phosphorylation, which is driven by myosin light chain kinase (MLCK) and Rho-associated kinase (ROCK). Although previous work suggests that MLCK and ROCK control distinct pools of cellular SFs, it remains unclear how these kinases differ in their regulation of RLC phosphorylation or how ph...

Vision is a dynamic process that refines the spatial scale of analysis over time, as evidenced by a progressive improvement in the ability to detect and discriminate finer details. To understand coarse-to-fine discrimination, we studied the dynamics of spatial frequency (SF) response using reverse correlation in the primary visual cortex (V1) of the primate. In a majority of V1 cells studied, p...

In today‟s world securing file data is very important. The proposed Secure File System (SFS) provides file data security using steganographic techniques in a transparent and convenient way. The proposed SFS pushes information hiding services into the Linux kernel space, mounting it between the Virtual File System layer and underlying file system. After SFS is integrated with the Linux operating...

Shape from shading (SfS) and stereo are two fundamentally different strategies for imagebased 3-D reconstruction. While approaches for SfS infer the depth solely from pixel intensities, methods for stereo are based on finding correspondences across images. In this paper we propose a joint variational method that combines the advantages of both strategies. By integrating recent stereo and SfS mo...

Abstract A hesitant fuzzy (HF) set is an extension of the sets and a T-spherical (T-SFS) generalization spherical (SFS). HF has significant role for modelling disagreements decision-makers over membership degree element. Also, T-SFS quite effective in uncertainty decision-making (DM) problems. In this paper, we define concept (HT-SF) (HT-SFS) by combining concepts T-SFS, present some set-theore...

BACKGROUND Current retrospective evidence suggests similar clinical and superior hemodynamic outcomes of the Sorin Freedom Solo stentless aortic valve (SFS) (LivaNova PLC, London, UK) compared to the Carpentier Edwards Perimount stented aortic valve (CEP) (Edwards Lifesciences Inc., Irvine, California, USA). To date, no reports exist describing case-matched long-term outcomes and analysis for t...

Rheumatoid arthritis is a destructive arthropathy characterized by chronic synovial inflammation that imposes a substantial socioeconomic burden. Under the influence of the proinflammatory milieu, synovial fibroblasts (SFs), the main effector cells in disease pathogenesis, become activated and hyperplastic, releasing proinflammatory factors and tissue-remodeling enzymes. This study shows that a...

Many different shape from shading (SFS) algorithms have emerged during the last three decades. Recently, we proposed [1] a unified framework that is capable of solving the SFS problem under various settings of imaging conditions representing the image irradiance equation of each setting as an explicit Partial Differential Equation (PDE). However, the result of any SFS algorithm is mainly affect...