PURPOSE This study aimed to investigate the clinical significance of serum alanine aminotransferase (ALT) levels in children with nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) and the effect of lifestyle intervention on NAFLD. METHODS The clinical data of 86 children diagnosed with NAFLD were reviewed retrospectively. Forty-six patients belonged to the elevated ALT group and 40 to the normal ALT g...

BACKGROUND Evidence suggests that the predictive value of serum alanine aminotransferase (ALT) levels for prognosis, measured by indices such as all-cause mortality and medical costs, may be modified by body mass index (BMI). However, the relationship between serum ALT and BMI has not been satisfactorily elucidated. METHODS Four thousand, five hundred and twenty-four community dwelling Japane...

We use unique panel data on the evolution of transparent budget procedures in the American states over the past three decades to explore the political and economic determinants of fiscal transparency. Our preliminary results suggest that more equal political competition and power sharing are associated with both greater levels of fiscal transparency and increases in fiscal transparency during t...

Recent surveys have shown that the majority of websites are not accessible. Despite legal obligations and the importance of the internet for disabled people, most websites fail to reach a basic level of accessibility, yet web developers are not short of accessibility guidelines and recommendations. This preliminary study consists of a meta-review of web accessibility studies in order to identif...

In this paper, we present recent developments in the AltErgo SMT-solver to e ciently discharge proof obligations (POs) generated by Atelier B. This includes a new plugin architecture to facilitate experiments with di erent SAT engines, new heuristics to handle quantied formulas, and important modi cations in its internal data structures to boost performances of core decision procedures. Experim...

This paper presents camera mouse system with additional feature: "CTRL ALT DEL" key. The previous gaze-based camera mouse systems are only considering how to obtain gaze and making selection. We proposed gaze-based camera mouse with "CTRL ALT DEL" key. Infrared camera is put on top of display while user looking ahead. User gaze is estimated based on eye gaze and head pose. Blinking and mouth de...

AC-completion efficiently handles equality modulo associative and commutative function symbols. When the input is ground, the procedure terminates and provides a decision algorithm for the word problem. In this paper, we present a modular extension of ground AC-completion for deciding formulas in the combination of the theory of equality with user-defined AC symbols, uninterpreted symbols and a...

The treatment of the axiomatic theory of floating-point numbers is out of reach of current SMT solvers, especially when it comes to automatic reasoning on approximation errors. In this paper, we describe a dedicated procedure for such a theory, which provides an interface akin to the instantiation mechanism of an SMT solver. This procedure is based on the approach of the Gappa tool: it performs...

BACKGROUND Current guidelines introduce periodic monitoring of serum alanine transaminase (ALT) as the first-line modality in follow-up patients, with a hepatitis B virus (HBV) inactive carrier state. OBJECTIVES This study aimed to determine the incidence rate and patterns of ALT fluctuations and prognostic values for the development of chronic HBV e antigen (HBeAg)-negative hepatitis B (CHB)...

BACKGROUND The efficacy of serum alanine aminotransferase (ALT) levels in predicting the severity of hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection is unclear. OBJECTIVE To compare histologic scoring of liver pathology in patients with chronic HCV infection with normal or elevated serum ALT. METHODS Liver biopsies were performed in patients with HCV infection and either normal (n=40) or elevated (n=76) ...