Cromolyn sodium, a mast cell stabilizing agent, provides an immediate protective effect against the exercise-induced bronchoconstriction while being used before the exercise. However, cromolyn is ineffective in reversing asthmatic bronchospasm; it is used as a maintenance therapy and has a prophylactic role in chronic asthma.    The purpose of this study was to determine the extent of change...

background: various variance reduction techniques such as forced detection (fd) have been implemented in monte carlo (mc) simulation of nuclear medicine in an effort to decrease the simulation time while keeping accuracy. however most of these techniques still result in very long mc simulation times for being implemented into routine use. materials and methods: convolution-based forced detectio...

The response of choked nozzles and supersonic diffusers to one-dimensional flow perturbations is investigated. Following previous arguments in the literature, small flow perturbations in a duct of spatially linear steady velocity distribution are determined by solution of a hyper-geometric differential equation. A set of boundary conditions is then developed that extends the existing work to a ...

In forced-choice questionnaires, respondents have to make choices between two or more items presented at the same time. Several IRT models have been developed to link respondent choices to underlying psychological attributes, including the recent MUPP (Stark et al. in Appl Psychol Meas 29:184-203, 2005) and Thurstonian IRT (Brown and Maydeu-Olivares in Educ Psychol Meas 71:460-502, 2011) models...

Wouter Bos, LMFA, Ecole Centrale de Lyon, UCBL, INSA, CNRS, France Timothy T. Clark, Tau Technologies, Albuquerque, NM USA Robert Rubinstein, NASA Langley Research Center, Hampton, VA USA Abstract The response of the small scales of isotropic turbulence to periodic large scale forcing is studied using two-point closures. The frequency response of the turbulent kinetic energy and dissipation rat...

Mistuning, imperfections in cyclical symmetry of bladed disks is an inevitable and perilous occurrence due to many factors ncluding manufacturing tolerances and in-service wear and tear. It can cause some unpredictable phenomena such as mode splitting, ode localization and dramatic difference in forced vibration response. In this paper first, a method is presented which calculates he forced vib...

OBJECTIVE To use the forced oscillation technique to evaluate asthma patients presenting positive bronchodilator responses (confirmed through spirometry) and compare the results with those obtained in healthy individuals. METHODS The study sample consisted of 53 non-smoking volunteers: 24 healthy subjects with no history of pulmonary disease and 29 asthmatics presenting positive bronchodilato...

A reduced-order model formulation is presented for examining the forced response of tuned and mistuned bladed disks. The technique developed uses modal information obtained from highly detailed finite element models to create, in a systematic manner, much simpler and computationally inexpensive models of bladed disks. The small size of the reduced-order model and associated computational saving...