With progressing age, large arteries diminish their longitudinal stretch, which in extreme cases results in tortuosity. Increased age is also associated with loss of vessel distensibility. We measured pressure-diameter curves from muscular porcine carotid arteries ex vivo at different longitudinal stretch ratios (lambda(z) = 1.4 and 1.8) and under different vascular smooth muscle (VSM) conditio...

The concentration of cyclic AMP within cells is regulated by the activities of adenylyl cyclases and phosphodiesterases (PDE) and the receptors and G proteins that modulate their activities. The extent to which cyclic AMP accumulates in a given cell and activates protein kinase A (PKA) is subject to tight transcriptional and post-transcriptional autoregulation (Table 1). For example, cyclic AMP...

INTRODUCTION Complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS) patients show impaired visuospatial perception in the dark, as compared to normal patients with acute nociceptive pain. The purpose of this study is 2-fold: (i) to ascertain whether this distorted visuospatial perception is related to the chronicity of pain, and (ii) to analyse visuospatial perception of CRPS in comparison with another neuropat...

The sympathetic nervous system (SNS) is an important modulator of vascular smooth muscle (VSM) growth and function. Several lines of evidence suggest that the SNS also promotes VSM differentiation. The present study tests this hypothesis. Expression of smooth muscle myosin (SM2) and alpha-actin were assessed by Western analysis as indexes of VSM differentiation. SM2 expression (normalized to al...

In this paper, a hybrid methodology with a vector space model (VSM) and process-oriented attributes for document management is proposed. The VSM is fine-tuned for classifying documents generated during R&D processes. The document correlation values are computed with the VSM for efficient retrieval. Only documents with high correlation values are presented to meet the specific retrieval purpose,...

The vector space model (VSM) of information retrieval suffers in two areas, it does not utilise term positions and it treats every term as being independent. We examine two information retrieval methods based on the simple vector space model. The first uses the query term position flow within the documents to calculate the document score, the second includes related terms in the query by making...

This is essentially an archival document that summarizes the results of several tests performed at the Draper Laboratory on extended-range straightness monitor systems during the GEM Muon Alignment R&D activity. Two systems are discussed; standard 3-point LED/Lens/Quad-cell Straight Line Monitors (SLM) with multi-LED blocks, and the Video Straightness Monitor (VSM). Included are measurements of...

Caveolae are becoming increasingly recognized as an important organizational structure for a variety of signal and energy-transducing systems in vascular smooth muscle (VSM). In this review, we discuss the emerging role of the caveolins in organizing and modulating the basic functions of smooth muscle: contraction, growth/proliferation, and the energetic support systems that support these funct...

Virtual system methodology (VSM) tries to extend system inquiring processes beyond the scope of soft systems methodology, and thus make it applicable to the whirling dynamics of social complexity. At the core of VSM is the process of virtual semiosis, the use of various signs and sign structures while making sense of the emergent behavior of a complex dynamic system as a whole. VSM applies virt...

Silicon samples sputtered with multiple magnetic layers can be characterized by using x-ray diffraction (XRD), vibrating sample magnetometry (VSM), and magneto-optical Kerr effect (MOKE) techniques. XRD identifies the crystallographic structures and chemical composition of the unknown layers. VSM measures the change in magnetic moment versus applied field, thus giving the information needed to ...