al-Adrenergic receptors mediate vasoconstriction in the pulmonary and systemic vasculature. In sheep the in vivo vasoconstrictor response to al-adrenergic stimulation is less in the pulmonary circulation compared with the systemic circulation of the fetus, the response increases in both vascular beds with fetal and postnatal development, and it decreases in the systemic vasculature with pregnan...

Acid-sensing ion channels (ASIC) are voltage-insensitive, cationic channels that have recently been identified in vascular smooth muscle (VSM). It is possible that ASIC contribute to vascular reactivity via Na(+) and Ca(2+) conductance; however, their function in VSM is largely unknown. In pulmonary VSM, store-operated Ca(2+) entry (SOCE) plays a significant role in vasoregulatory mechanisms su...

Metalloprotease Vsm is a major extracellular virulence factor of Vibrio splendidus. The toxicity of Vsm from V. splendidus strain JZ6 has been characterized, and production of this virulence factor proved to be temperature-regulated. The present study provides evidence that two forms (JZE1 and JZE2) of Vsm protein exist in extracellular products (ECPs) of strain JZ6, and a significant conversio...

A dedicated, efficient Monte Carlo (MC) accelerator head model for intensity modulated stereotactic radiosurgery treatment planning is needed to afford a highly accurate simulation of tiny IMRT fields. A virtual source model (VSM) of a mini multi-leaf collimator (MLC) (the Elekta Beam Modulator (EBM)) is presented, allowing efficient generation of particles even for small fields. The VSM of the...

Elevated blood pressure imposes increased mechanical stress on the vascular wall, and mechanical strain is a mitogenic stimulus for vascular smooth muscle (VSM) cells. The role of mechanical forces in regulating the production of noncellular material by VSM cells for VSM cells of human origin remains undefined. We thus investigated the effects of chronic cyclical mechanical strain on extracellu...

Figure 6: Strongly related (SSM based) functional sets and similarities between them, Case Study I. Nodes represent set of closely related methods; weight of the edge between two nodes represents the average value of SSM among the methods of the corresponding sets. Non trivial sets are represented by smaller circles and are merged with trivial sets (bigger circles) of the same color.. Figure 11...

Probabilistic assessment of voltage stability margin (VSM) with existence of correlated wind speeds is investigated. Nataf transformation is adopted to establish wind speed correlation (WSC) model. Based on the saddle-node bifurcation transversality condition equations and Monte Carlo simulation technique, probability distribution of VSM is determined. With correlation coefficients range low to...

CAPTCHAs exploit the gap in the ability between a human and a machine to understand the semantics of specific multimedia content, with vast applications in computer security. In this paper we compare two techniques in automated CAPTCHA solving for text-based CAPTCHA schemes, i.e., classification based on the Vector Space Model (VSM) versus a popular Optical Character Recognition (OCR) engine. F...

In the Vector Space Model (VSM) of Information Retrieval (IR), the documents and queries are conceived as vectors of weights belonging to the same linear space, and retrieval is based on similarity measures. This view yields paradoxes and problems as regards concepts of fundamental importance to IR (similarity, term independence, preference, linearity). In the present paper, a different view is...

The last 50 years have seen the development of methods for the digital storage of information. The current method for the storage of digital information is predominantly through the use of magnetic media. Increasing media storage density continues to be a very active area of research. Magnetic media may be divided into particulate and continuous media. Particulate media are comprised of small m...